Printing B&W with PaintShopPro

[joggerman]

I recently purchased PaintShopPro PhotoX2 and I am generally happy with it.
However, I have tried to print in grayscale using just the black ink cartridge, but it insists on printing B&W using RGB.
I don't want to use up the colour cartridge when I actually want a pure black ink effect.

I have done all the oblvious like setting the printer to grayscale etc.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

[BillDrew]

Why not convert the image (copy of!) to grayscale? There are a bunch of different techniques for doing that and just about any of them will do better than the method you are trying.

[joggerman]

Originally Posted by BillDrew

Why not convert the image (copy of!) to grayscale? There are a bunch of different techniques for doing that and just about any of them will do better than the method you are trying.

I have converted it to greyscale in PSP X2, but although it says it;'s in greyscale it still uses RGB to print the B&W image. I need it to only use the black ink cartridge.

[JimC]

Check all of your printer driver settings carefully (including any "advanced" tabs). Some printer drivers (like the drivers for my HP) will let you check a box in the driver settings to use the black cartridge only.

[slipe]

Utility printers with large black cartridges use pigmented ink in the black cart. It makes good text, but because of the pigmented ink the resolution is very low.
My old HP printers had a “black only” sub-heading under grayscale. With black only selected it used only the black cartridge. Photos and most graphics printed in that mode were poor – about the quality of a fax.

If the printer mixes colors to get black it gets much higher resolution. As an example the inexpensive Canon iP4600 will give 9600 X 2400 DPI resolution mixing the colors to make black. The pigmented black cartridge is limited to 600 DPI, which is standard for most utility printers. I don’t think that printer even gives you the option to print photos with only the black cartridge. But if it did the results would be poor. Many utility printers won’t even try to print a photo with only the black cartridge for that reason. Maybe HP will still do that, but other brands usually won’t.

There are photo printers that carry two black cartridges just for printing photos at high resolution. But if your printer has a large black cartridge it isn’t one of those. The problem has nothing to do with PSP – X2 is supposed to be excellent for B&W.

[VTphotog]

Originally Posted by slipe

Utility printers with large black cartridges use pigmented ink in the black cart. It makes good text, but because of the pigmented ink the resolution is very low. .

Bummer! I guess I'll have to scrap my Epson R1800 now, as it uses pigment inks.

Seriously, though, the reason for the lower resolution is that you would be using just one part of the print head for greyscale instead of three (or four, actually, since most printers will use black if the brightness level is low enough in an area)

brian

[dwig]

Originally Posted by VTphotog

Bummer! I guess I'll have to scrap my Epson R1800 now, as it uses pigment inks.
...

You may want to stay with pigment inks. With current technology, pigment inks give the best print permanance.

The more basic printers often use a blank ink for text printing on conventional paper and use only RGB for color photo printing on photo paper. The more elaborate printers often have more than one black ink (my HP 9180 has 3 blacks, if you count the Grey as "Light Black", in its set of 8 pigment inks). The two different "dark blacks" are each used on different paper types.

[slipe]

Bummer! I guess I'll have to scrap my Epson R1800 now, as it uses pigment inks.
Seriously, though, the reason for the lower resolution is that you would be using just one part of the print head for greyscale instead of three (or four, actually, since most printers will use black if the brightness level is low enough in an area)

Try refilling one of your black cartridges with regular pigmented ink made for a utility printer. It is a completely different kind of pigmented ink and will clog the heads almost instantly.

Epson was the first to formulate pigmented inks that would go through small nozzles. And they have had to reformulate as they have reduce droplet size.

The old carbon black pigmented ink has been around since the beginning of inkjets. The reason for the poor resolution is the large droplet size needed for the large pigment particles. Since the droplet size is large there are fewer nozzles. It hasn’t changed much over the years for utility printers because the large droplets and heavy pigment allow very fast and dark text pages.

Most utility printers avoid using the large black ink tank for photo quality even in large dark areas where resolution isn’t important. It leaves a purplish haze on glossy photo paper. Pure photo printers with pigmented ink have a different kind of black ink – often two or three of differing intensities.