Digital BW, The Print

My question is why do my Black Only prints look as good as my
hextones? (1280, FSN-E inks, Woolf workflow and curves) Both prints
and 21 step wedges show smooth transitions and very small dots either
BO or hex.

I've seen enough quadtone and hextone prints to determine that my hex
are not bad. Of course, I've seen better than mine, but not really in
the dot size or transitions. It's just that my BO look as good. 

99% of you out there say that Black Only doesn't work for you. But it
does for me. I'm seriously baffled and open to thought and
suggestions. A few of you out there have seen my Black Only prints, so
speak up. Even if it's only to say that hextone prints must be crappy
if they don't look any better than my BO. 

BTW, I know nothing about Canon printers, just Epson 1280 with the
Epson driver at 1440 dpi. 

Bob Michaels
 --- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "Charles Bandes
<byronbulb@y...>" <byronbulb@y...> wrote:
> You may not be doing very much wrong at all. Printing with black ink
> only is not a very good way to get grey tones - you are essentially
> halftoning _everything_ so there's going to be a point where there are
> so few black dots in your grey area that it looks pretty much white.
> 
> Quadtone prints were basically invented in order to fix this problem -
> so you can have real grey tones instead of halftones. Don't count on
> black ink only giving you great prints - maybe "Good enough" maybe
> "Fine" and maybe "I like it" but they aren't going to look as good as
> your quadtones. (IMHO of course)
> 
> --- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "jeades947
> <jeades1@s...>" <jeades1@s...> wrote:
> > I have tried to get the hang of black only printing as described by 
> > Clayton Jones so well.But, when I try this with my Canon S750 
> > printer; I fail to get any values above Zone 7 to have any body in 
> > them. They are all blank white. I have tried increasing the 
> > intensity of the black ink from within the printer properties 
> > without success at all. I even went to transfer setting and adjusted 
> > the curve in the direction I thought would give me the desired 
> > results, without any avail. I indicated to the printer it was to 
> > print in grayscale mode and had assigned Dot Gain 30% with 
> > Photoshop.I was using Quadtone printing very well till I read about 
> > this which would seem to save a bundle of cash from not having to 
> > buy color cartridges every two weeks. That will break a rich man 
> > soon. What am I obviously doing wrong????? Back to Best Buy tomorrow 
> > for more ink to experiment with. I must have made 30 prints today 
> > trying to get it right.