Digital BW, The Print

I finally clarified various issues relating to Simulate Black Ink in Epson's
ICC profiles yesterday.  The profiles installed when one installs an Epson
driver do not have the ability to simulate black ink.  For each intent,
including relative colormetric, Epson has built some form of black point
compensation into their profiles so that the black point extends to perfect
black.  Thus when you do a soft proof, PS sees perfect black and greys out
simulate ink black.

The Epson USA website provides another set of profiles for download - in
addition to those installed by the driver installation.  These profiles have
been made not by Epson (and are not supported by Epson) but by X-Rite.
Clearly it is a way for X-Rite to be seen by many Epson users.  These
profiles behave in the "conventional" manner with respect to Simulate Black
Ink.

I can only think that the reason why Epson has built black point
compensation directly into their profiles is because either (a) they don't
want to highlight how bad the black point can be, (2) they don't believe
that simulating black ink is useful, (3) they don't like the way Adobe PS
does black point compensation and prefer their own algorithm, or (4) some
mix of these.  It's also interesting to note the difference in a soft proof
using a GM i1 profile between perceptual (which has built-in BPC) and
relative colormetric which does not.  In a B&W world, one would generally
expect these two to be the same.  The only explanation that I can see is
that GM uses a different BPC algorithm to Adobe PS.