Digital BW, The Print

David B. Brooks wrote:


> I agree with you about the Epson R-800. However, from my tests I don\ufffdt think
> the Light Black ink is in play when Black only is selected in the driver to
> print grayscale images. In fact the Light Black ink is a very warm black ink
> if you paint some of the ink on a paper sample. But it is an interesting
> possibility if a very fine droplet size and enough nozzles with variable
> droplet technology were applied to making a B&W printer. The \ufffdsimple
> elegance\ufffd of such a solution could be revolutionary \ufffd why not have just one
> ink for black and white printing?????


Black Only doesn't use the grey ink in Epson drivers.  I don't 
think it would be better either to add only grey to the black but 
adapting the color mode to black and white printing in a third 
choice of the driver could deliver better B&W prints than what is 
possible now. Using slight addition of color to get the 
neutrality and/or "toning" of the B&W print like QTR and 
ImagePrint do today.

Few conventional printing techniques could deliver the density, 
detail and smoothness with just one ink tone. Photogravure and 
collotype comes to mind as giving the best results but not all of 
it. More often an offset (or even collotype) duotone was used to 
get closer to the ideal. I agree that BO has an appeal but the 
smaller droplet size also introduces a less consistent dotgain, 
the Epson pro printers relied on a bigger but more consistent 
droplet formation. Humidity and temperature have an effect on 
dotgain that is less controllable with finer droplets.  To 
control that is not an easy task. However I advocated the use of 
more heads = nozzles for BO printing while reducing the ink load 
per head. The 4000 has the 10000 head technology with 180 nozzles 
per color, I don't think the smaller printers come near. The 180 
nozzles are however used for speed instead of quality but in the 
8 pass mode of the 10000 (and 4000 ?).

The Epson 950 had a dual black head. Where they both used in BO 
and was the quality better ?

Ernst