Digital BW, The Print

> I followed your recipe for using black only on my 2100
> I'm not familiar with the 2100, can you tell me something about it?

It's the european version of the 2200, same thing, different name. 
(I'm from Norway).

> >After fiddling around for a while I got the bright idea of
> >switching off all adjustments in the gray balancer and 
> >suddenly the prints looked perfect!
> What is the gray balancer?  I can't find anything called by this
> name...

The gray balancer is a tool that Epson includes with the 2100 for 
making adjustments to create neutral grays. You basically print 
several swatches of grays in various tonalities and use the a printed 
reference chart to select the most neutral grays. After selections 
you can save an adjustment file which will then be applied to all 
your prints.

I find the tool moderately useful as I can at least eliminate major 
color shifts like the strong magenta cast I get when printing 
directly from the driver without adjustments. However, making a 
prefectly neutral gray is still really difficult, and it requiree a 
lot of patience and lots of prints to get good results. I find I can 
get pretty close but there's always some small tonal area which 
shifts in one direction or the other, and the metamerism is always 
there anyway, so even if a print looks good in one place, changing 
lights might ruin everything.

As far as I can tell this tool is the only difference between the 
2100 and the 2200 as for some reason Epson US chose not to include it 
with the 2200. 

> >it sure was nice to finally see a perfectly 
> >neutral print from my printer. Thanks!
> "finally"?  Does that mean you were having trouble before?  I'd like
> to hear more about what you've been using...  Also, do you see a
> difference in the luminance compared to your other method?  That's 
one
> of my favorite things about it.

I'm comparing a couple of prints now, and the BO print is very warm 
compared to the cool gray I got using one of my Gray Balancer 
adjustment files. I tend to like cool grays, so I don't think I like 
the look of the BO print after all, but at least it has the same 
tonality across the whole range of grays. There is no difference in 
luminance. Also, it seems like the BO setting only works with the 
Matte Black cartridge. With Photo Black the driver insists on using 
all colors regardless of what I specify. This makes it less useful to 
me since I usually prefer Photo Black with Premium Semigloss paper.

The more I experiment with these things the more Imageprint seems 
like an attractive solution, but I'm a little bit reluctant about the 
price.