Digital BW, The Print

That is exactly right. With the Vivera inks you are not using color
inks in the print driver to fill in the tonal gaps and to cool off the
 black inks. With the Z you are only using their dilutions of pigment
blacks which are primarily carbon and created cooler than Epsons. Some
will say oh, mixing color inks into the content of the ink manufacture
(carbon is warm) or adding it in the printing process through the
driver or rip is exactly the same thing. It isn't and I totally
disagree with that kind of reasoning. It is different and there is far
less chance of color casts showing up in unwanted areas with various
papers in less than perfectly calibrated workflows when all the inks
are the same hue. I've learned this big time with the Piezography K7
neutral inks, in both netural and sepia forms, and it is a lot more
significant that I had initially thought. It just makes common sense
that if you are laying down dots of the same hue in all tonal areas,
as apposed to laying down varried color dots across the spectrum
(highights vs shadows vs midtones) you are going to have more
consistent hues in all tonal areas. They should all fade at the same
rate as well since they are created from the same color ink,
preventing any color shifts in the future between differnt tonal
zones. These are significant variables to not have to be thinking about.  

The best use of the Z's quad black approach would be with a good
monochrome rip to control each channel's inkload, working out of
grayscale mode. 

Having said all that, the Epson 3800 with K3 is the biggest bang for
the buck for universally good output if you have to do color and black
and white with one desktop printer. At least for now. Personally I
wouldn't use color inks for monochrome unless forced to for certain
print color effects, but that is a subjective decision arrived at for
my purposes.

john

  
> This is not the same solution as the R2400 or the other K3 printers.
> With the K3 printers, when printing a neutral B&W image thru the RGB
> driver, all 8 inks are used, including C, M, LC, LM, and Y. When
> printing in ABW mode, C and M aren't used, but bits of LC, LM, and
> even Y are used. In contrast, the Z series printers only use the
> blacks. I bring this up since Clayton mentioned this as a concern of
his.
>