Digital BW, The Print

"johngeyles " wrote:

> What is BO printing ?  I know it means "black only", but what exactly
> does that mean ?  

It means you are printing with ONLY the black ink, and are not using any
of the color, or other gray inks.

At first I thought it mean checking the "Black"
> box in the Epson printer driver, ignoring the "Suitable only for
> text" warning, and manually setting the DPI to 1440 or 2880.

That is what it means. Check the Black ink box.
 
> It's clear from reading here "BO" also includes use of the after-
> market inksets from places like MIS, which apparently use a small
> number of inks of various shades of black.

Yes, but just use the BLACK POSITION INK for black only printing.

> The first method ("BO1") I have used on my Epson 2200, and the prints
> look pretty nice, but I can imagine the fill is a little "rougher"
> in the highlight areas; these must be the "dots".  (Yes, I am very
> far-sighted).  I still prefer the prints to those made using all 7
> inks; the latter look fine under artificial light, but kinda a
> gun-metal blue under daylight; I assume this is "metamerism".

Yes.

 
> The simple BO1 method on the 2200 only uses one ink cartridge, so it's
> easy to see why it has "dots".  What I don't understand is why
> one of the after-market inksets (like MIS) should be any more prone
> to dots than a print that uses all 7 colors on the 2200, since they
> have 4 or 6 cartridges with various shades of grey (as I understand).

They only have dots when you use BLACK ONLY ink

> Finally, given that I want to stick with the 2200 (since I want to
> do some color too, and I don't want to buy another printer right
> now), what course is best for me ?  How much worse are the dots
> using the "BO1" mode than when using the more broad definition of
> BO printing ?  

The dots are quite fine and small. Only seen from a few inches from the
print. Have you tried printing at 2880 DPI?  The dots are nearly
invisible then.

Should I try to do the Gray balancer thing ?
> Or hope MIS comes out with their inkset for the 2200 soon ?

Yes, very soon.

Jerry