Digital BW, The Print

Hi
I'm new to this group and am interested in printing B&W prints with 
my Canon S9000. I've had pretty good luck using the color inks to get 
a B&W print in greyscale, but wondering if the Lyson Quad Blacks 
would be that much better (aleviate the color casts). Can anyone 
offer some actual experince with these inks and printer? Also, I have 
yet to find a source in this country for the quad blacks for the 
printer. Also, which paper works best with this ink/printer combo. 
I'll appreciate any help anyone can give me. 
Sonja

Sonja,

I just started using Lyson Quad Black for the Canon S9000 and am 
pretty impressed. There are probably better BW systems out there for 
Epson printers, but the prints I've been getting are completely 
neutral, with no color cast (obviously, since there are no colors). 
They tonal gradations seem pretty smooth and I'm not seeing any major 
problem with visible dots so far. These inks also seem to work very 
well with glossy photo paper. (I've been using JetPrint Professional.)

The one "problem" I've had so far is that the blacks aren't as dense 
as I'd like on matte paper, but I'm hoping to correct that with some 
profiles I just got.

I'm completely new to BW printing, so I don't really have anything to 
compare this with, except for trying to get decent BW prints using 
standard color inks. This is really a vast improvement.

Be warned, though, the carts are very expensive. I got my first set 
from a company called Photofile in Il, and they were $13.19 each. I 
believe Inkjet Mall also carries them at $13.95.

Some better news is that I found a company in the UK (called marrutt-
just www.marrutt.com) that carries these inks in both 125ml and 1 
litre sizes. A complete set of 125ml bottles is just under $200, 
shipping included. This works out to around 1/4 the price of 
individual carts. You get an even better break on the 1 litre 
bottles, but I was not ready to spend $800 just yet.

I just ordered a set of the 125ml bottles and was told I'd have them 
in around 5 business days, which is pretty darn good since they're 
coming from England. Lyson has some profiles for their inks and 
papers on their website (www.lyson.com), including some for Canon 
printers and inks.

I've actually been using the inks in an old S900 I got before I 
bought my S9000, so I have a dedicated BW printer and don't have to 
keep cleaning the printhead.

A cheaper alternative to two printers is to simply buy an extra 
printhead for the S9000 (it's the same one as for the S900). You 
could put the BW carts in the spare printhead and all you'd have to 
do is swap printheads when you want to print monochrome. The 
printhead comes out very easily, and you don't have to remove the 
carts.

Hope this helps,

-Michael


--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "cheshfen2001" 
<cheshfen@t...> wrote:
> Hi
> I'm new to this group and am interested in printing B&W prints with 
> my Canon S9000. I've had pretty good luck using the color inks to 
get 
> a B&W print in greyscale, but wondering if the Lyson Quad Blacks 
> would be that much better (aleviate the color casts). Can anyone 
> offer some actual experince with these inks and printer? Also, I 
have 

> yet to find a source in this country for the quad blacks for the 
> printer. Also, which paper works best with this ink/printer combo. 
> I'll appreciate any help anyone can give me. 
> Sonja

I'll contribute a bit to this thread, too.  I've used the Lyson Quad Blacks 
in cartridges in my S9000 a few times over the past few months (swapped 
them for the color carts a couple of times since I don't have a spare print 
head or a separate dedicated color printer (except an old Epson 860 which 
takes >10 minutes to do an 8x10, so I avoid using it when I can.))  I'm on 
my second "set" of cartridges, and they are indeed very expensive things, 
but I just got a full set of the bulk inks (6 bottles) from Marrutt 
in  England last week - ordered Tuesday on line, and the box arrived in the 
mail on Saturday in the middle of the US.  Actual charge to my VISA was 
$161 (shipping is included in the price of the inks.)  This makes for some 
very reasonably priced ink per print, delivered very quickly.  I now have a 
set of filled virgin carts just waiting for the "commercial" models to run dry.

My observations are that in daylight, Quad Black prints on Ilford Classic 
Gloss are dead neutral, while in incandescent they have a slightly magenta 
cast, which varies somewhat with the particular light bulb illuminating 
them.  However, the change is not particularly unpleasant (to me, at least) 
and are certainly no worse that the shift I see in the B&W prints I did 
last Christmas using OEM color inks (those prints look more neutral under 
tungsten, for which I tried to balance them, but they have a somewhat 
greenish tone in daylight, but not uniformly so - some but not all of them 
are starting to show a shift in tone in some areas of the print.)  I have 
had absolutely no ink clogging issues with the Lyson - never anything but a 
perfect nozzle check, although these were always with Lyson brand 
cartridges, and it remains to be seen whether my refills are as reliable.

I've decided to use the Ilford Classic Gloss paper for my volume production 
(I do 800-1000 prints at Christmas, that get bound into 9 different books 
for different relatives - have done this for decades with chemical prints, 
last year did half and half chemical/digital, and this year will be all 
digital).  It is reasonably priced, and made even more so by being 
available in 250 sheet boxes.  Lyson papers are supposedly going to be 
available in large boxes as well, but I haven't seen any prices yet, and 
frankly I like the look of the ink on the Ilford paper better than on the 
Lyson Pro Gloss paper.  I have not yet seen a Quad Black print on the Lyson 
Monochrome Gloss paper, as I haven't been able to find any of that in the 
US yet.  The Ilford paper does take some time to dry - I just hang a print 
up by the corner with a clothes pin on a wire in my darkroom, just like I 
used to do with RC chemical prints.

Those are my thoughts and experience for now.

Cheers,
Kip