Looking for Printer Recommendation for B&W Prints

Much as the title suggests, I am looking for a high quality ink jet
printer that can use monochrome inks to produce black&white prints.
Any suggestions or websites that provide this type of information
would be much appreciated. TIA

Dale

 

Epson 1160 and Piezography <www.piezography.com>.

Or, for considerably less money and more trouble, something like the
MIS quadtone inkset (probably best used in a continuous inkfeed
system, much cheaper in cartridges if the level of use is at all high)
feeding that printer.

Warning: Doing quadtones on your own (as opposed to through the
Piezography package, which by all accounts is very easy to use) gets
you into developing your own profile curves manually, or else
importing actions and curves that you don't understand and hoping they
work right for you.

You can use more recent printers like a 1280, but 6 inks is a waste of
time for B&W. On the other hand, people have done some interesting
things mixing pigmented color inks with the MIS quadtone set and
getting a B&W printing solution that allows image toning as well. A
key figure here is Paul Roark. Of course, mixing inks this way puts
you into the zone of having no idea, really, what the archival
permanence will really be. Window tests don't tell you much of
anything really.

 

The new Epson 4000 is getting good reviews using colour inks to do B/W. This
has the advantage that you can "Tone" prints too. There are a couple quad
tone black systems but they tend to be very expensive and everyone I know
who has tried them said that it took more work to calibrate than it was
worth.

--
http://www.chapelhillnoir.com
home of The Camera-ist's Manifesto
The Improved Links Pages are at
http://www.chapelhillnoir.com/links/mlinks00.html
A sample chapter from my novel "Haight-Ashbury" is at
http://www.chapelhillnoir.com/writ/hait/hatitl.html

 

The HP 7960 is considered pretty good for B&W printing. They have a gray
ink cartridge that helps. I don't have it, but the reviews are pretty
good. It's not at all bad for color either.

I use the Epson R800. It's pretty good for B&W. Good enough for this old
B&W wet darkroom guy. It's has gotten rid of the bronzing that affected
a lot of B&W printing. It also has almost no color shifting in different
lighting. (You have to look VERY hard, but basically none.)

Then again, I do "tone" my B&W digital prints. I guess that comes from
my film days. I just like toned B&W pictures. So, I convert the
grayscale to Duotone in PS. The second color is usually a brown tone,
but blue is pretty common too. The beauty of doing this digitally is
that I can fine tune the tone to fit the mood of the image.

If you do have a print that changes colors in different light, then the
Duotone tends to mask that. The other big advantage is that your printer
is using more inks than just Black. That tends to give a much smoother
B&W print.

Clyde