Digital BW, The Print

Simon Whitehead wrote:

> My s9000 allows greyscale printing only.  The setting is buried in the
> 'Quality and Media settings box - Mac OSX
> I would imagine there is an equivalent for the i950...

Oh, there's a check-box for greyscale printing alright.  Unfortunately, 
it doesn't do what you want it to.  As far as I can tell, the Canon 
printer driver still uses all six inks (certainly a minimum of black, 
photo cyan, and photo magenta) to achieve a greyscale output.  This is 
judging from ink usage and visual inspection of the prints.

The result is metamerism, bronzing, and colour casts.  The best results 
I've managed to get is printing on Epson Heavyweight Matte (*not* 
Archival Matte) using the settings for "plain paper, and having the 
greyscale box checked.  However, this still results in prints which are 
*very* cool toned -- not quite the overall cyan cast I'd get on Canon's 
Photo Paper Pro (glossy), but definately not neutral.  And tonal 
transitions show magenta bronzing, especially if the image has lots of 
mid and high tones.

The other big problem is metamerism.  These prints can look neutral 
under tungsten lighting, but under a 5000K lamp, or mid-morning 
daylight, they have a cyan cast.  At other times, in daylight, they 
look almost green.

I'm very happy with this printer in terms of resolution, lack of dots, 
and for colour on glossy paper, but I've discovered (the hard way) that 
I was terribly naïve in thinking that photographic inkjet printers were 
good for making B&W prints of any acceptible quality.

The joke is that I'm not attempting to produce archival quality, museum 
prints either.  I just wanted an inkjet printer so I could close the 
photographic loop, keep a small portfolio, and send the odd print to 
friends.  I've seen black-only prints from an old Epson 700 at 8x10" 
and while it does have the "dots" in the highlights, I actually prefer 
the look of that to what I'm getting and since I'm shooting on 35mm 
film, I don't mind a "grainy" look that much.

I'm not sure what the solution is.  Canon printers are not supported by 
anyone who makes quadtone or hextone inks yet (although Cone is 
supposedly releasing inks in June; MIS customer info told me they have 
no such plans for Canon printers).  Epson printers are rumoured to have 
bad OS X support.  And I think I've only heard bad things about HP 
inkjet printers.

I've been thinking that maybe what I should do is print enlarged 
negative images on 8x10" transparencies and then contact print in a 
chemical darkroom...

M.