Digital BW, The Print

I owe some feedback to the group.

As previuosly mentioned, I had some initial disappointing results 
with my Canon i965 + Lyson's Quad Black inks. The first prints all 
looked faint, with an horrible magenta hue on Lyson's 170gsm Matt 
InkJet paper. I tried any possible combination of profile, none 
yielding the desired results.

The kind guys from Lyson suggested not to use any profile, but just 
to print black and white images in RGB mode with minimal histogram 
adjustment. They also sent me a sample print done with their inks on 
their media, that appeared much better than my digital prints.

Just to rimind you, the Canon i965 is an A4 6 inks channels printer 
with maximum resolution of 4800 x 1200 dpi, supposed to produce 2 
picoliter ink droplets. Although not being a professional model, it 
should give pleasant and acceptable results up to A4 enlargments 
using monochrome inks such as Lyson's.

I then had precious suggestions from Howard on this forum: adding +3 
to the black, cyan, magenta and cyan sliders in the i965 driver 
finally gave richer prints, both on matte (Lyson) and glossy (Lyson, 
Canon and Ilford) papers. This solution correlates well with the 
fact that when the "photo-cyan" and "photo-magenta" tanks finished, 
the other four tanks (black, cyan, magenta and cyan) were almost 
full. Needles to say, a noozle check revealed no problem. After 
applying Howard's suggestions, the other tanks begun to be used.

I do not know if all this makes any sense. The problem is that I am 
still far from a true WYSIWYG working situation. When I change the 
cyan, magenta, yellow and black sliders in the printer's driver, 
there is no way to see the effects in the image. How can I know what 
shade of gray is managed by the cyan channel or by the photo magenta 
channel, etc? Is digital black and white printing still a guesswork 
job?

One more question I would like to ask the forum: Are there any 
alternatives to the Lyson inks (either pigment or dyes) to be used 
with my Canon i965? I am tempted to follow Paul Roark's advice and 
get an Epson C86 together with EZ inks!

Bard 960