Digital BW, The Print

The 9000 is mechanically exactly the same as the 9500 unless it has 
original heads which were updated somewhere along the 9500 production 
line. If you know what you are doing you can make some wonderful 
prints with the 9000/9500, but it takes work. I have no doubts that 
you can make fantastic prints with a custom 3KCMY inkset and the 
correct RIP. I mothballed my printer before I tried this new feature 
of the Evolution RIP from Digifab, but seeing what I could do with 
the 6 ink set, I have no doubts that I could get extremely fine 3K 
monochrome prints, as well as decent color prints. You will need to 
be willing to sheel out for things like good profile creation 
software that will make fully controllable CMYK profiles, a good 
supported spectrophotometer (supported by the RIP) like the i1 or 
Pulse, possibly a tool like Colorthink Pro or ColorshopX, and a lot 
of paper and ink.

My suggestion would be to use full black, light light black, and 
dilute the l l black so that it reaches about 25% normal print 
density. Mix those into the single black channel in the RIP, profile 
in CMYK and create a profile with a very steep GCR, maybe even linear 
from 100% to 0%. The hard work and lots of paper will be in getting 
the black channel mixed properly so that you get fine graduation from 
white to black, with no dots. It will not be a simple overlap between 
25% to 50%, and 50% to 100%, the 25% will need to be mixed back into 
the full black at some point. This is of course the part that I 
haven't worked out yet.

Adding more inks will make the black transitions better, and you 
could certainly make a gloss and matte inkset if you wanted to run 4 
or more black inks, or just go with eboni6 for matte prints. Or buy 
whatever Cone is producing in the K6/K7 line.

So in summary, I have no doubts that this dinosaur of a printer (back 
to 1998 or 1999) will still produce the level of print that will make 
youhappy, if yo are willing to invest the time and money for the 
tools you will need. Those tools and that knowledge will carry you 
along to much better things in the future.

Since upgrading the firmware on a 9000 is probably going to be next 
to impossible, I would suggest that you look for a 9500. They changed 
the dithers, and the way the heads are driven between the two 
printers (change from dye ink in the 9000 to pigment ink in the 
9500). Once upon a time you could get your 9000 upgraded to a 9500, 
and the printer that I own was one of these upgrades. I know how to 
do it, but the flash memory cards needed have pretty much dried up.