Professional Black-And-White Printers

Tag : pigment printed

Black-and-white printing has been in a state of flux from the daysof film to the early stages of digital inkjet printing. The problemwith film was that color photos were the most difficult toreproduce in the darkroom due to the difficult silver-halideworkflow. Today the paradigm has shifted, making black-and-whiteprinting one of the most difficult areas to master in a now digitalworld.

As the standards of black-and-white have always been demanding,today’s inkjet-printer technology doesn’t rear aso-called “digital print” any longer. Moreover, with thetechnology in today’s high-end models, a faithfulblack-and-white replication is becoming easier and more efficient.With superior inks that last centuries, and printheads that makethe minutest of details in the midtones and shadows,black-and-white prints are becoming more than just the digitalprint of a few years ago.

The big three of professional inkjet printermanufacturers—Canon, Epson and HP—all have theirproprietary technology for printing black-and-whites. It could bethe ink, the paper or the advanced algorithms present in thedrivers that make these black-and-white prints better than ever,but it usually takes a combination of these elements.

Going Monochrome
The amount of ink printed onto a substrate is one of the mostintegral parts in a modern black-and-white photograph. Ink setshave changed how monochrome printing has been carried out, withmore D-max (blacks) and a variety of grays being used, separatefrom other colors used in the print. The variety of blacks andgrays, coupled with the manufacturers’ technology, produce awider color gamut, better density to create more accurate hues andbetter transitions between tones.

Epson incorporates its Advanced Black-and-White mode and the K3UltraChrome ink set to achieve advanced black-and-white prints. TheAdvanced Black-and-White technology works to replicate darkroomblack-and-white prints from grayscale or monochrome images.

Dan Steinhardt, marketing manager for Epson, comments on the K3UltraChrome inkjet printers, “These printers contain threelevels of black—Photo Black, Light Black and Light LightBlack. Epson also was the first to develop a separate black ink formatte paper, which we call MK. Other inkjet printer manufacturershave followed this same path as a way to increase D-max on theirmatte-based papers, but Epson has gone a step further to put outincredible black-and-white as well as color photography. Ourprinters contain an Advanced Black-and-White mode in the printerdriver, which uses a powerful algorithm that yields incredibleblack-and-white output. Photographers can simply print a color fileusing the Advanced Black-and-White mode to make a monochromeconversion, or do their own black-and-white conversions manuallyand still print through the Advanced Black-and-White mode.”

Canon uses the LUCIA ink system in its PIXMA Pro series ofprofessional inkjets. The LUCIA ink system uses three levels formonochrome prints: Gray, Photo Black and Matte Black. This system,like the Epson inks mentioned, prints your black-and-whites withoutusing other colors that create bad tonal gradations, and withoutmetamerism (color shifting due to different lighting conditions).

Justin Joseph of the consumer imaging group at Canon describes thePIXMA inkjet line as “utilizing the pigment-based LUCIA inksystem with Photo Black, Matte Black and Gray tanks. Theavailability of gray ink in addition to two blacks results inbetter grayscale reproduction. Black-and-white images are renderedwith smooth, natural gradations, excellent tonal detail and reducedgraininess. Also, Photo Black and Matte Black are loaded at alltimes, and there’s automatic switching between the two, so youdon’t have to swap out one ink tank for another.”

HP’s Designjet series of professional inkjet printers has anarray of technology to increase the optimal output ofblack-and-white photos. HP Designjets use their Vivera inks,including the Quad-Black ink set that provides neutral grays anddeeper blacks for more control.