Digital BW, The Print

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "sanfo2003" 
<SandyCornelius@c...> wrote:
> >I'm wondering if this is true BO and the black ink is that cool, 
or 
> >whether some color ink is mixed in...can you tell with a loupe?
> 
> As far as I can tell there are no colors being used in monochrome 
> printing. The only loupe I can find around here is a 5X (can't find 
> my 8X, where the heck did I put it?) and I couldn't see any other 
> color with that. Also stopped a small print half way thru printing 
to 
> check out the ink gradient as it was being laid down and saw no 
other 
> colors.

Sandy,
Recently I did a little study of the ink-laydown used by my 
Epson C80's driver when printing a 21-step grayscale wedge. One thing 
that turned up MAY be relevant to your finding out whether the R800 
uses only black ink with the settings you mentioned:
 
With the C80 driver, when "Black Ink" is selected, only black ink is 
used. No matter if I stopped the printing at the beginning, at the 
middle, or at the end, only black ink was visible. However, 
when "Color" was selected, the ink-laydown method was unexpectedly 
complex. At the beginning, in the 100, 95 & 90% steps, only black was 
used; from 85% on down, there was only cyan. When I aborted the print 
at the middle, I could the tracks of magenta and yellow coming in on 
top of the cyan -- to this point, nothing surprising had happened. 
When I interrupted the printing very near the end, though, I saw that 
the black ink in the 100, 95, and 90 steps had been overlaid by some 
cyan (and so had the steps farther down -- for them this was a second 
coating of cyan). So the question I'd raise in regard to the R800 
(which, I gather, has no explicit "Black Ink" setting) is whether  
the ink-laydown for a line includes adding cyan at the very end. 
Given that the prints you get under the "Monochrome" setting have a
bluish tone, is it possible that something like what I found with the 
C80 is going on?

John