B & W printing at home?

[ellie mac]

Hi everyone,

I was thinking of setting up a couple of photo walls in my house, one for colour & one for black & white where I would display photos in probably a 4x6 or maybe 5x7 size and just add/change/subtract as I like. I have a Canon Pixma iP1200 printer, which admittedly was an extremely cheap printer I bought for printing out drafts of my thesis. I find it does a reasonable job on colour prints for this purpose but the black & white are coming out really rather sepia.

So my question is whether there is anything I can do to enhance the prints from my printer, or whether investing in a better printer will get a better b&w print or should I just take them somewhere to get printed instead?
(which detracts a little from spontaneous changes to the wall LOL!)

I guess the other question would be whether it is something in my conversion that is causing the brown tones, but I don't think so - I'm pretty much a beginner with photoshop so have been following tutorials rather than experimenting. I'll post one of the images for you to have a look at & see what you think. I'm using a laptop so the monitor is a bit difficult to match to the printer, however I've found the monitor tends to have a blue cast, could this be my problem?

Any CC on the image or b/w conversion also most welcome!

[smc1377]

It very well could just be your printer/ink/paper combination. There are some printers that will print blacks with a brown/bronze tint. I haven't witnessed this myself being that I don't print B&W much, but I believe this is what they call "bronzing".

Printers/inks will also bronze on certain paper. Here's a link to a printer that printed just fine on certain paper with no bronzing effect, but on other papers, noticeable bronzing occurred.

http://grandwebsite.com/HP-B9180-Review.htm

When I was researching wide format printers for work, HP's latest 44" Z3100 printer added a "gloss enhancer" that effectively got rid of all bronzing no matter what the media is. But this comes at a price tag of over $5000.

Point is, I'd also look at your printer/ink/paper combo.

[ellie mac]

Thanks smc1377, I don't know why but it never occurred to me that the paper could also be a factor.

I played around with a couple of the other papers I have here and got quite varied results so I guess it could be a matter of experimenting with a few different ones to get the result I am happiest with and then sticking with one for consistency.

Thanks also for letting me know the technical term for my problem - might see if I can find anything relating specifically to my printer and this should help me find answers a little bit more easily.

[ELAY]

First off, I don't think it is likely to be a monitor calibration issue. Any of the usual BW conversions will give you a monochrome print, so regardless of what your monitor is doing, you should be sending monochrome output to your printer (unless you are tinting after conversion, which given your post I doubt).

The usual problem with printing BW on consumer-oriented inkjet printers is that these generally print your BW print using your coloured ink along with the black in order to create all the subtle grey shades. In the process, a bit of a colour cast can develop --mine is a bit blue, another printer we had was a touch magenta, and I have seen green too. This is just a problem using inkjets, unless you have ink cartridges designed for BW (not sure if your printer supports this option). There are some very complicated looking fixes out there for the problem (see here for example -- note that a software download is required, but seems to be free), but I don't know how far they go in actually fixing it (I just live with my slight blue tinge).

If switching paper doesn't help, then think about whether you want to try the complicated looking printer correction exercises proposed at the site above and elsewhere.

EL

[ellie mac]

Thanks ELAY for that link, it's very informative - will give the software a go if I can't easily find a paper that works for me. It may be a more satifactory result in the long run to spend a couple of afternoons trying to sort it out that way than spending lots of money on various papers that may or may not suit.

As you say, I'm not tinting after conversion so the output should be monotone - that's what I thought but it's good to have it confirmed by someone more knowledgeable than myself.

[ELAY]

I hear you on not wanting to run around buying every paper out there, but it might not be a bad idea to at least try a higher end Canon inkjet paper, if you haven't already.

Let us know if the horrendously complex-looking software fix works. I saw another site that purports to do it without software, here. I can't vouch for any of it -- too lazy to tackle anything that complicated-seeming.

EL