Digital BW, The Print

I've had an S9000 for almost 2 years and have not found a way to do black 
only printing with it (I run Windows XP.)  Epson printers have a box to 
select black only, but 900/9000 Canons don't, and neither does the i560 I 
just bought for my daughter to take to college.  As you've no doubt 
discovered, checking the grayscale box produces a print in which gray is 
made from color inks, not just black, with obvious color casts.

Even if you can work out a tone balance in the print that appears to be 
neutral gray, you may find that over a relatively short period of time the 
color inks will fade at sufficiently different rates to bring an obvious 
color cast to parts of your print.  My experience was that this happened in 
less than a year after I printed what I thought were nice black and white 
prints on Ilford Smooth Gloss paper using Canon OEM color inks.

The only way I've made satisfactory monochrome prints with the S9000 is to 
use a dedicated monochrome ink set.  I use Lyson Quad Black inks, and get 
very nice B&W prints.  If you want more control over the tone of the print 
you can use the Lyson Small Gamut inks.  I bought a separate S900 printer 
to do color printing.  (I save enough refilling ink cartridges to more than 
pay for another printer with the first set of 4 ounce bulk ink bottles.)

As you know, at least some Epson printers have a black-only box in their 
driver screen, and apparently that does print using only the black 
ink.  I've played around with this on a couple of Epson printers that I've 
owned and must admit it's a pretty neat way to get monochrome output 
quickly and easily.  But then I remember how easy it is to remove the Canon 
print head to rinse out the occasional really stubborn clog (as compared to 
the sometimes-two-day exercise I've gone through a couple of times with 
Epson printers), and I just smile and keep refilling those Canon cartridges.

Cheers,
Kip

At 6/30/2004 01:06 AM +0000, Zachary wrote:
>i would love to try the a bo print from my s9000 but i don't see anything 
>in the print
>dialog box for black only, just grayscale.  anyone know how to do 
>this?  i'm running os
>10.3 and using canon driver v1.93.  thanks.