Digital BW, The Print

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "luisvcool" 
<lvictoria@t...> wrote:
> Well?  Pardon the ignorance.
> 
> Thank you.

It sure seems to leave one around here whenever we discuss it.<P>

B.O. stands for "Black Only", and it's one of the settings in the 
printer driver for Epson printers.   It tells the printer to ONLY 
use its black ink.

Making black and white prints with an inkjet printer is very tricky 
because most inkjet printers have 6 or 7 inks and render shades of 
gray by combining them.  Unfortunately getting them all to stay in 
balance across all tonal ranges, and to have the same tonal 
characteristics in all different kinds of light is like trying to 
TRAIN CATS TO MARCH IN FORMATION.

A variety of alternatives exist - - -  Using special third party 
inksets that ONLY have shades of gray (hextone or quadtone); using 
Raster Image Processors (RIPS) that have their own drivers and don't 
use all the different inks, in order to simplfy the problem; or 
outputting black and white digital files to conventional 
photographic paper via Lambda or Frontier technology, and B.O. 
printing.

B.O. printing is the poor-man's way of making neutral black and 
white prints with an inkjet printer.   The printer makes grayscales 
by printing black dots in various ratios to the underlying white 
paper.   Here's a greatly enlarged sample: http://studio-
nelson.com/inkjet/ijimages/edbo1a.jpg of a 5% black section of a 
wedge.

Because the dots have to be spaced at quite a distance to achieve 
light grays they are quite visible and tend to create a noticable 
texturing in skin tones, light sky tones and other places on the 
print where a hextone print would be smooth.   Some people don't 
find them objectionable, and some people even LIKE it, but most 
people switch to one of the alternatives as soon as they can afford 
it.