Digital BW, The Print

First off, I just downloaded QTR for my Epson 9600's and it works great, 
but it is not available for the HP :(

I have an HP5000ps and have been trying for years get a good B+W out of it.

I would reccomend buying profiling software as it's going to give you 
the best results. I am just really beginning to profile my media with 
this printer and it is working great so far for color images , and what 
little I have printed in B+W seems pretty good, although they are still 
on the warm side.

I am using the built in PS RIP so there are still limitations ... one of 
these days I will have a real RIP and may be able to get further along. 
Until then the profiling will have to do.

I have tried, like you, to print with just the black head, but the image 
quality is terrible (not far from a dot matrix printer to be honest), 
the HP black ink is also very warm on its own.

My most success has been to print a grayscale tiff from within Quark, 
tinting the tiff in Quark with a process color, which seems to give me a 
bit more control over the final tint than using curves on an rgb file in 
photoshop.