B&W Prints

[Smile]

Mikling,

your idea sounds fantastic. Actually I want to get rid of the green and red cartridges in my Canon i9950 printer and have them replaced with grey and photogrey cartridges and then profiling until these inks until I get true neutral B/W printouts.

I would like to do so too because I can't outsource quality Red or Green inks because InkTec no longer makes them. I tried to contact Inktec to no avail. Do they respond to email? I've never had problem with their inks, but support seems very bad.

 

[pharmacist]

Smile,

Did you try mixing magenta + yellow to red and cyan + yellow to green inks ? Or maybe you can order Hobbicolors UW-8 or Image Specialists red en green inks.

 

[Smile]

Smile,

Did you try mixing magenta + yellow to red and cyan + yellow to green inks ? Or maybe you can order Hobbicolors UW-8 or Image Specialists red en green inks.

No I did not try to mix them. I taught that they should be special otherwise how can printer produce better gamut if it is just possible to mix them? I also was thinking to request a shipping quote for Hobbicolors UW-8 or Image Specialists red en green inks. Do you know any shop in Europe that sells those and accepts mastercard?

 

[pharmacist]

In fact the red ink is more orange. The reason of mixing the inks together is that on paper the ink drops are more placed together to give you the illusion that the ink is mixed. When you mixed them, you will get a true solution, giving you the colour you wish.

Any shops in Europe are unknown to me who might sell Hobbicolors ink. But if you want I can sell you some red and green inks for testing, because I have 2 small unopened bottles of red and green Hobbicolors UW-8 inks. If interested, you can send me a PM.

 

[mikling]

Here's the final prints in hurrying to get this out and changing carts back and forth I;m getting a nozzle missing, but that's alright. It'll clear in a bit.

Scanned with a non calibrated scanner from an AIO. All four images scanned in one pass.

So do you guys think the iP4200 can do B&W now?

If I turn down the brightness, essentially the ICC and non ICC is the same. So for the sake of simplicity my vote is forget about the ICC and KISS.

 

[pharmacist]

Mikling,

nice works, however since your scanner is not calibrated I get the impression the left images looks greenish/yellowish and the right ones purplish, even the ones printed in "advanced B/W mode". I presume the pictures look better in real life. As you have pointed out, the one in B/W mode without ICC is the best I can see within the limits of the non-calibrated scanner.

 

[Smile]

Don't forget about workspace profiles, the photos needs to be scanned using profiled scanner and attached a sRGB or RGB profiles. Then a compatible browser such as Safari or Firefox 3 used because they support ICC.

Your document has no profiles attached "no color management". When I attach sRGB ir looks better otherwise the right images has a red cast and the left ones yellow cast.

 

[mikling]

Yes, that is why I qualified the scanning issue. The gray inks on the right look a lot better in real life and just like some old B&W photos I have. The photos on the left can easily be seen as printing with color inks as the tint shifts within the tonal range of the shadows as we would expect in most cases.

The results are interesting is that it removes the complexity of B&W printing. Just pop in the gray cartridges and continue printing with the color settings. My suspicion is that this is what HP contemplated and it seems to work. Now because caertain shades for the CLI-8 range are darker than that of the BCI-6 series, and the BCI-6 series colors are closer to HP's CMYPk, I would estimate that the output with for example an iP4000 would be closer to that of the ICC in brightness as it would output more ink and thus be a little darker. It might be more accurate and linear as well with the BCI-6 CMYK printers.

 

[Smile]

I was thinking and reading some info about changing red and green inks for ip9000 pro and similar printers. Without a RIP this is impossible I think. RIP means that you must buy it because the free ones are crap besides they are for linux only.

Turboprint is not so bad, but image quality compared to qimage is bad, especially since it's a RIP it should be the other way around.

The problem is that when you fill gray and dark gray or gray and light gray combo to your cartridges instead of usual red and green inks the printer driver does not know this. The printer will be instructed that green and red inks now gray inks should be printed for red and green colors on the photo.

The outcome would be a mess IMHO.
Profiling the thing would not help much as you still would print the test target using printer driver and all colors would be messed up.

I'm not 100% sure this is exactly what would happen as I don’t have any gray inks to test with, but it seems you only would pull this off if you had a RIP with individual channel control. You would then instruct your RIP to print 0% to 100% patches in steps for every color cartridge (channel).

Then take ProfileMaker and make a multicolor profile by actually reading 100% (the solid ones) patches RIP gave you. This would create a CMYK + Gray + another Gray ICC profile. The profile would be more like "extended" CMYK not RGB.

So this would be very hard and expensive to do.
And like I said before even if you print true BW photo your paper could still be “the problem” because it contains brighteners that seems like cyan cast on daylight and red cast on incandescent. Most papers confuse spectrophotometers like spyder 3 print because it does not have UV filter. That is why profiles created do not compensate fully the color cast the photo has.

 

[mikling]

While Spyder3Print might not be lab level, these new products are becoming gamechangers since they allow hobbyists, amateurs and even pros to affordably accomplish things that they were never able to do before. A fraction of the cost of lab equipment, it fulfills the needs of a significant proportion of the users it is intended for and then some. That's technology for you, just like the desktop inkjet printer that can produce superior output to lab processing. Amazing.

Similar things happened when PCs were introduced, they did not replace minis, mainframes. Laughed at, snickered at but eventually look at what they did to the world and what users could do with them. I think products like the Spyders are having the same effect.

The spyder series has slowly been refined and improved where they must be taken seriously now unlike some their earlier products
http://www.on-sight.com/2008/12/08/updated-review-of-colorimeters-and-display-calibration-packages/