B9180 Pink Sheen on B/W Gloss Paper

[John R Smith]

Folks

has anyone found a fix or workaround for this problem? I spent an afternoon yesterday testing a B9180 with every intention of purchasing it, but both the retailer and I found it impossible to get a satisfactory B/W print on gloss paper. We tried a variety of media, including HP Advanced glossy, Ilford Smooth Gloss, and Crane Museo Silver Rag. All of them produced a print with a horrible pink sheen when held against the light, and in fact the HP paper was the worst. I have not seen this problem mentioned in any of the reviews I have read. B/W prints on matt paper looked absolutely fine.

I print only B/W, not colour, and this issue is a very serious one. Any advice you may have would be much appreciated.

John

[Eduardo]

Hello,

strange issue...

My B/W prints always are fine, maybe you should try the setting "use gray ink only" in printer driver. With this setting no colors are used, and therefore you will see no sheen...

[bez]

This sounds like ‘bronzing’ so called because it’s usually a yellow-brown colour, rather than pink. It occurs only on gloss media and is directly related to the ink, although may vary slightly on different brands of glossy paper. A closely related problem is 'gloss differential', between printed and unprinted areas of the paper.

Avoiding certain colours will probably not make any difference as the amount of bronzing is dependent on how much ink is on the paper, not the actual colours. Also you would not be able to produce ‘toned’ prints using greys only.

Bronzing was a much greater problem several years ago, but has been almost eliminated with current ink sets from all the major manufacturers. So far as I know the 9180 is no more prone to this problem than any other current printer.

It should be pointed out that almost any printed item (including books and magazines etc) displays some bronzing and gloss differential – the only photographic reproduction not to show them is a traditional silver print.
Also bronzing and g.d. is only visible with reflected light at certain angles, when you can’t see the image properly anyway. It will largely disappear under glass, if you intend to frame the prints.

[John R Smith]

As far as we could see the "grey ink only" option was only available for matt papers. Test prints from an Epson R2400 did not display this problem.

[bez]

If you look very carefully the 2400 (and my replacement 3800, using the same K3 inkset) does display both very slight bronzing and gloss differential, but I never find it bad enough to ever be a problem.
As I said it’s slightly variable depending on the brand of gloss paper chosen - Innova 300gsm Fibre gloss (not a ‘high’ gloss) is a really nice paper with the traditional appearance of an air-dried darkroom print.

If you mainly want to print b&w (as I do) I would definitely recommend the 2400 as this is one of its great strengths, with black and two grey inks. The only drawback compared to the 9180 is the black swapping from gloss to matt, but if you plan your print runs carefully you can minimise this problem.

If you have any high-key images not requiring a really good deep black, you can even use the gloss ink on matt paper with very reasonable results.