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From my own experience with six ink printers there can be a problem trying to achieve a totally neutral grey tone, the prints can take on a slight cyan or magenta cast. This cast is as a result of using a combination of the inks to produce the grey tones, i.e. equally quantities of ink should produce a grey (Red 128, Green 128, Blue 128 will produce a midtone grey), if the ink mixture is not correct then the printer can produce prints which display a shift in colour. The obvious solution is to use grey inks only and cut out the colour inks, both HP and Epson have taken this route - as has Canon with their Pro 9500. The other method is to create a very accurate profile and this seems to be the option that Canon have taken with the Pro 9000.
There are a number of ways to produce a B/W print with the Pixma Pro 9000, a selection of samples printed on Photo Paper Pro are published below together with brief explanations. The first two prints were made via the normal printer driver, not the Easy-PhotoPrint Pro plug-in.
The first print above is a Greyscale photograph printed using the default printer settings and there is a magenta cast on the grey tones, not an ideal setting. This 6x4 image took 31 seconds to print.
The second print was made using the same settings, but this time I selected the Grayscale Printing option. This slowed the actual printing time down to a crawl (15 minutes for an A4 print) but has produced neutral grey tones in the print. This is probably the best quality I have seen from a printer which hasn't got a dedicated grey ink and it easily equals prints made with printers using extra grey inks. This 6x4 image took 9 minutes 18 seconds to print
The image has now been printed in the Easy-PhotoPrint Pro Photoshop plug-in, using the Grayscale Printing option. There doesn't seem to any difference between this and printing via the normal Canon printer properties dialog panel. (With Grayscale selected)
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Using the Photo Color setting |
Using the Linear Tone setting |
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Grayscale setting with Cool Tone |
Grayscale with Warm Tone |
The Easy-PhotoPrint Pro plug in will not allow a Grayscale or CMYK image in for printing, it has to be a RGB file. Printing an RGB greyscale image using the Photo Color setting, in the colour management section, produced a similar magenta cast as the first image on this page. Using Linear Tone produced a better print, but not perfect. There are two other options, Cool Tone and Warm Tone. The cool tone produced a very good print, but I felt it needed a touch more warmth, this could be added if you use the custom setting.
In conclusion, Canon have sorted out most colour cast problems for B/W printing. The selection of prints I have in front of me look very, very good - I am truly impressed. However, the Easy-PhotoPrint Pro plug-in needs a lot more attention to make it into a useful professional option. I am sure there will be updates to follow.
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