black and white printing services

[Greg Lockrey]

Lenny would be a good choice for your custom B&W printing. He has the "passion" for it for sure. This is an area not usually profitable for normal color printing houses and very critical B&W clients. There is just too much set up and not enough work to make it viable for everybody in the printing business. Yes, you could go to a K3 printer and get acceptable results, but if you want those images to "pop" you need to go to someone that's set up for it.

[Donald Miller]

OMG please don't look at my website, it's a work in progress, just like my photography I should be working on updating the site right now, a lot of it is old 135 stuff and I have a lot of nice large format work to add.

I must admit that I have learned a lot and have a lot more learning to do. I do like snow and I am fascinated by running water so I am working on controlling my highlights through exposure and development. And then there is the next step, the print. I like the thought of a dedicated B&W printer that makes use of the inks developed by Paul Roark and sold by MIS (I have a R220 and do BO prints with the MIS inks but I'm limited to 8x10s and the prints are kind of coarse) or the Cone system inkset. I would rather have someone else do the prints since there is a learning curve there as well. It would be ideal to have control from the beginning of the process to end and I do want to do that eventually. Now, I'm trying to focus on composition, development, scanning and ps work along with keeping at my website. Making prints myself is the next big step.

Scott

I have one of my printers set up to do B W with the inkset that you mention. The other printer is used for color only. I like the results that I get by splitting the output in this way.

[ignatiusjk]

Your digital file should print in B&W the same as color.If I make a color photo just for further info I printed an b&w by turning of the color and the result was fantastic. Try telling your lab to shut off the color on their printer and see what happens.

[Lenny Eiger]

Your digital file should print in B&W the same as color.If I make a color photo just for further info I printed an b&w by turning of the color and the result was fantastic. Try telling your lab to shut off the color on their printer and see what happens.

What printer are you talking about?

Lenny

[Joanna Carter]

I would respectfully disagree. There is a huge difference between color prints made by color inks and those made with black and white. I check Scott's site and he has lots of pictures made in the snow. If he wants to hold clean values with detail in the highlights, I would find someone with 6 or 7 dilutions of black and white inks....

If the Epson R2400 used colour inks to produce B&W prints, then I would agree that you would not get a good quality and what I can gather, Scott uses an old Epson R220 printer which only has one black cartridge, thus he would benefit from a dedicated multi-tone cartridge set.

However, the Epson R2400 has three black inks (K (black), LK (light black) and LLK (light light black). The result gradations simply have to be seen to be believed. You have the choice of printing a neutral B&W image, or you can control tinting with a very sophisticated advanced B&W setting panel.

I have had dedicated darkroom printers compliment my prints as being the match, if not better, to some of the prints they have turned out.

[Tyler Boley]

I'm sorry Joanna, but my experience does not reflect yours with regard to the 2400 and K3 inks. Unless you are using QTR with a curve probably called "warm", there are always color inks present in the mix. Also, that particular setup with only the 3 blacks gives yellowish hue some do not like. If you use the ABW mode in the OEM driiver, there will definitely be color inks present, no questions about it. It's been tested and proven many times. I have attached a 4000ppi scan of 9800 ABW output to show.
I can assure you that high quality quad, K6 or K7 prints will exceed that print quality easily.
I don't mean to suggest that 2400 OEM B&W prints are not good, and sufficient for many workers. I'm glad you are happy with your results.
But there are superior system for those who choose to take things a bit farther.

Tyler
http://www.custom-digital.com/

[Tyler Boley]

Just as a conversational reference, here is a scan made exactly the same way, from a K7 2880 print from the same file.
Clearly the Epson driver has to throw out photographic information to make a cmyk dot cluster to present a gray. Also, fine gradations are far less convincing, it's dottier, less smooth, less paper coverage, etc.
I happen to have all this handy right now as prep for an article and thought it might be of interest.
Tyler

[JohnnyV]

Hi Tyler,

Very convincing evidence showing the advantages of the K7 inks over Epson's K3 ABW.

Here's another convincing comparison.

With that written... I print with an Epson 4800. Since I've downsized I don't have enough room for a second printer...it pains me seeing the above comparison. But I'm fairly pleased with the 4800 ABW B+W output.

John V.

[Tyler Boley]

Hi John, hope you are good. I've seen many very very nice ABW prints. No way to I want to denigrate them or those printing this way. I just wanted to clarify the information about the presence of C, M, and Y inks (without getting into the pros and cons of that issue) and keep it common knowledge that some workers have very valid reasons for moving into more advanced and dedicated systems. It's no myth. Clearly the OEM solutions have evolved a lot, but the dedicated systems continue to evolve as well.
Things are pretty exciting these days.
Tyler

[Greg Lockrey]

Your digital file should print in B&W the same as color.If I make a color photo just for further info I printed an b&w by turning of the color and the result was fantastic. Try telling your lab to shut off the color on their printer and see what happens.

HUH???