Black& White Printing solutions:
1. Small Gamut inks from Lyson in an Epson 1160 or 1290 + using a high-end custom profile. Very good saturation and black point since it seems to be a dye-based ink. Problem: prints do shift slightly under various viewing conditions. Relatively strong metamerism.
2. Custom profiling the Epson pigment printers: 2100/2400/7600/9600/7800/9800 using either the genuine Epson ink or one of the third party inks we can find on the market. (Lyson, Permajet and mediaSteert do give us all very good results) (Please contact me for more details). Sometimes we need to edit the profile slightly in order to make the greyscale neutral. These prints do shift slightly as well under various viewing conditions, but not as much as the Small gamut ink.
3. Colorbyte ImagePrint Rip gives us the best Black & White straight out of the box. One of the best Black & White inkjet printing solutions on the market. Prints made with a special B&W printing feature within this rip will hardly shift at all under various viewing conditions. The most neutral prints we have ever seen. Downside: This feature only works properly using genuine Epson ink, unless Colorbyte software would have made these so called grey-scale profiles for a third party ink.
4. Shiraz: This rip has the advantage that we can build custom CMYK profiles which gives us control over the balance between the black channels and the colour channels. For that reason we are able to minimize metamerism as well. (In other words: an unusually strong shifting under various viewing conditions). We have definitely been able to achieve extremely good Black & White prints using the Shiraz Rip as well with optimised CMYK profiles.
Conclusion:
With solution 2,3 and 4 we are able to turn one printer into a colour – and black & white printer using the same paper and ink!
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