Canon S9000 help - black & white prints

[JEMS]

Hello, sorry for putting up an old but still valid Question! Let me explain,

I used to be an avid darkroom worker a few years back or should that be a long time back! Anyway I was totally in to black and white printing. All that chemistry and jiggery porker wonderful stuff.

Unfortunately I never made the transition over to digital printing, predictably I lost my way with producing B&W prints at home. It just took me a long long to get anything near a good looking wet print. Not wishing to be labelled an old f~~t, I now wish to re-ignite my printing interests again so I need some help.

I`ve have had a good digital set-up at home for some time and I’m comfortable on Photoshop. The Printer is a Canon S9000 although getting old is capable of good quality colour prints but it fails miserably at producing B&W prints when I am using it. Any help on archiving better results from my set up would be most gratefully received. Oh yes ! before someone says change the printer moneys not that free while the canon still going fine.

Regards J

[Geoff F]

I'm not sure which printer you have. I had a Canon Pixima 9000 A3 but I assume you mean a much older printer.

Anyhow, from my experience with general home printing, I would say you have to experiment with paper (makes and qualities) until you get something that suits you. But it has to be really top notch paper for B&W.

Choose the best printer setting; at least 1440 dpi. And make sure you don't have any clogged, or partially clogged nozzels.

When printing B&W with colour printers you sometimes get a slight colour cast so you may have to do a little manual tweaking of the colours. Also on this point, is your monitor colour calibrated and what printer profiles are you using for your paper? You may print colour OK but have problems with B&W due to a printing profile not matching exactly.

It all starts to get a bit complicated now, so I will leave detailed explanations to the real experts.

And how are you producing your B&W conversions from colour prints with photoshop? There are quite a few options here and the 'cleverer' methods produce significantly different results from simple desaturation.

It is possible to 'almost' match specific B&W film types depending on the Photoshop method used. I normally prefer the Channel Mixer method; but other people will have their favourite methods.

[Colin Southern]

The Printer is a Canon S9000 although getting old is capable of good quality colour prints but it fails miserably at producing B&W prints when I am using it.

Hi there, and welcome to the forums.

I guess the first question from me must be "what is it about the greyscale prints that your S9000 produces that you don't like"?

[Bill44]

I know the feeling about lack of funds, but if you wish to really get into good B&W work you may want to look at some of the newer Canon printers that use the Chromalife 100 inks.

My canon MP980, only an A4 printer, uses these inks, and incorporates a Grey ink tank so that better B&W prints can be made. It is also used extensively in colour printing too. Being a 1 picolitre printer, as opposed to the more common 2 picolitre type, it gives a very high quality result. If you have a good Canon dealer nearby I suggest you ask for an intensive demonstration.

Beware that some of the lesser Canon models are 2 picolitre printers.

[JEMS]

HI Colin, the overall problem is colour cast, it predominantly prints out a mergenta cast no matter what i do.

[Geoff F]

I found a magenta cast with Kodak paper, but it is better with some other makes. So I just went into the printer manual control settings and reduced the magenta strength slightly; but I don't know if you have that option with your printer.