By Steve Terlizzi

Printing B&W photos to a standard color printer may not be as easy as pushing Print.  Many consumers use their four color printers to make B&W prints with marginal success.

What are we looking for in a good black and white photo? It depends on the purpose of the photo...a simple family photo in a frame – not a big deal…but a fine-art black and white print for the wall – big issues.  

The issue is the accuracy of the black, whites, and grays.  Unfortunately, most black inks in consumer printer are more dark brown than black.  In order to compensate, consumer printers mix small amounts of color to create the desire tones in the photo.  Depending on the quality of a CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) ink printer, the black and white photograph may have a slight color-cast to it.

A 4-cartridge CMYK printer has one black. A professional-level inkjet printer, like an Epson Stylus Pro 9900, may have 11-cartridges, of which three are different levels of black. The price tag on professional printers are in the $5,000 range, so one better be selling fine-art B&W prints at a good price. Each ink cartridge starts at $90 for 150ml tank, a whopping $1,000 for a full set.

My trusty old Epson 2200 has 7 cartridges with two blacks inks.  I could purchase a grayscale ink set from a third-party vendor, but it’s a rather steep learning curve to improve the black and white output. I usually depend on the standard cartridge setup with the standard printer driver for casual black and white outputs.  If I need something special, it’s simpler to send it to a professional printing house that specializes in black and white or color printing.

For those who have a simply 4-cartridge CMYK printer, I recommend sending it out to a professional print shop.  One could have a lot of prints made for the $1,000 it costs for ink alone, on the Epson 9900.