The folks behind the wildly successful Piezography inksets for black and white photography have finally come out with an inkset for the Epson 2200.

Why is this a good thing? Believe it or not, but B&W is not color. I know, it seems obvious.

But all consumer digital darkroom printers use some combination of colored ink (plus a small number of “black” inks) to represent every tone in the print. That means that for B&W prints, each gray tone is actually a collection of tiny colored dots. Rarely is this done well enough to produce a truly neutral print, and frequently the mixed inks yield an unpleasant color cast when viewed under certain lights (this kind of metamerism is bad). continued…

When I first got my Epson Stylus Photo 2200, I went through several weeks worth of iterations to get neutral prints from my pure grayscale images. I fiddled with the Epson driver settings, the Photoshop printing settings, and various color management settings in and out of photoshop. I tried printing with black only, which produced grainy images with a very warm black. I even used a couple trial versions of ImagePrint and QTR. These third-party raster image processors, or RIPs, provide alternate ways to lay down the ink on the page and promised better results, but I couldn’t get them to work easily.

So I moved on to different inksets. Epson does everything it can to “persuade” people to use the one inkset they manufacture for each printer. But the truth is that several inksets exist for professional photo printers, including some “black and white” inksets. After doing a lot of research, I wanted to go with the Piezography inks from Cone Editions, but at the time they weren’t available for the 2200. But the UltraTone UT7 inks sounded good, too, and I liked the idea of being able to get sepia toned images from the same inkset.

It’s only possible to use one kind of inkset in a printer at a time. Either you use the standard Epson seven-color inkset and make beautiful color prints. Or you replace the seven cartridges with the seven “black” inks. It’s prohibitively expensive and difficult to swap all of the cartridges out repeatedly. There was only one thing to do: get a second 2200 — used, of course — and fill it up with the UT7 inks. That works quite nicely for both neutral and sepia-toned prints, but I never was able to figure out how to get “warm” and “cool” prints.

My biggest gripe — and it’s significant — is that I can’t do any proofing in advance. The workflow for using the UT7 inks is (1) create a great looking grayscale image, (2) covert it to RGB, (3) apply a Photoshop curve from Paul Roark, and (4) print the new image. The result is a very funky looking image that when sent to Epson’s RIP tricks the printer into laying down the right amounts of the various black inks. It’s impossible to see what the print will look like.

The new Piezography Neutral K7 inkset uses the Quadtone RIP (QTR) which has a GUI that might making proofing — if not printing — easier. The inkset has seven black “dilutions” to produce a tremendous grayscale range with magnificent subtlety (but no sepia, cool, or warm toning as far as I can tell). I might have to give it a try.