B&W Printing on Epson 1400 using UT-14 Inkset

[Boatman]

I have been wrestling with using the MIS UT-14 black and white ink set on the Epson 1400 Claria printer. Paul Roark has developed a set of instructions for using this combination, which are good but over my head in a number of areas. In particular, glossy prints are difficult to do as you need a custom ICC and I've not worked out the process for developing these. I found the following settings to work quite well and would like to share them with others as well as get additional feedback from others who are venturing down the same road.

Printer: Epson Stylus Photo 1400
Inks: B&W - MIS UT-14, Color - MIS standard color inks
Paper: Red River Arctic Polar Gloss and Polar Matte

Settings:
Polar Matte Paper: Use all six black cartridges from the UT-14 set. Set the printer to:
- Presentation Paper Matte
- Color Management - Color Controls, Gamma 2.2, Color Mode Epson Vivid
This prints a good tone range, but rather dark. Since I was working on getting the gloss prints right, I didn't dive into the fix, but I think it would be about the same as with the gloss prints; read on.

Arctic Polar Gloss: Use only five of the UT-14 ink-set. Remove the Ebony black and use the black from the color ink set. Set the printer to:
- Presentation Paper Matte (Important! Do NOT use gloss paper settings.)
- Color Managment - ICM, OFF, no color adjustment
- Color Handling - Photoshop Manages Color
- Printer Profile - Since I was unable to create an ICC profile, I used an Epson glossy paper profile; CCK3-1400-EPptoPaperG. This seems to work well and is available at http://www.conecolor.com/icc/index.html.

These settings will generate a very dark print. To correct for this, when your image is perfected on your screen, add another layer, which I label 'printer levels correction'. Go into Image-Adjustments-Levels and change the input levels from 0-1-255 to 0-1.5-255. This will keep the white and black points the same but lighten the mid ranges. You may want to experiment with this but 1.25 to 1.5 in the middle setting seems to work best.

The results of this are quite good, if not outstanding. If you've worked with black and white on an inkjet printer, then you all ready know that there is quite a bit too this. I'm just scratching the surface.

Comments and feedback are welcomed.

[MiniChris]

I use the Jon Cone CIS though on the 1400, only the matte inks work. I use the 2880 for my satin finishes. I also use the Quad Tone Rip printer dialogue but wish they had it for CS5...hate to go from printer to printer. I love the Cone inks because of their lightfastness and stunning depth of color range.

This sure beats buying individual small cartridges by a few hundred miles.

[Boatman]

How do you like the Cone color inks? I've been using MIS inks for about two years without any issues. (Other than issues with the Canon S9000 printer I used to have. Now I have an Epson 1400.) The Cone inks are 2x the price for MIS ink in 4oz bottles, but that cost is miniscule compared to Epson carts. Cone claims very vivid color do you notice a difference between Cone and other inks?

BTW, I broke down and bought a scanner. Cheap, too. I haven't had time to complete the quad-tone RIP process to generate ICCs for the paper I'm using, but I'm getting there.