Printer not printing true black & white

Technology
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Our photo club has a fancy Canon iP8700 A3+ printer which we use for members’ photos for our exhibitions.
We are helping out another commune who are holding a photo competition and we will be printing their winners’ photos for them for an exhibition.
In preparation I’ve done a couple of test prints and come up against the problem that the printer is not printing true black and white.
I have played around with obvious stuff - checked all cartridges working ok, greyscale printing, setting my printer software to a couple of different black & white settings - to no avail. The best I can get is either a slight brown cast or a slight magenta.
The paper I’m using is Epson Premium semi-gloss.
I’ve looked at a couple of forums and I realise this can be an issue for colour printers.
Before I start trying to find a solution, I wondered if anyone has any thoughts here please?
I wonder whether it’s Canon I need to speak to or Epson? Or both?
As always, grateful for any thougts/suggestions.

By the way, my computer is not calibrated to the printer as this is the first time I’m using the printer at home with my technology.

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Are the cartridges original Canon?

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Have you done a “nozzle check”?

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Sounds like a print head issue, possible blockage of the tiny jets. Mine used to print blacks for photos by mixing inks only blacks for black text used the black cartridge.

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Perhaps you need either a colour profile for the image (https://www.theprintspace.co.uk/help/knowledge-base/guide-to-using-print-profiles-in-adobe-lightroom/) or the image(s) have been output in one colourspace while the exif data indicates another colourspace.

I had problems getting images printed correctly a few years back, where the images were exported from lightroom into another app that used a 16 bit colourspace, but when returned to lightroom and then exported for printing were not converted to sRGB, even though the exif claimed they were. Caused weird colours and was quite a challenge to track down.

Good luck finding a fix.

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Assuming that there is no problem with print heads etc I would agree - some discussion of the 8750 in this video

Prior to applying a custom profile it is clear that the presenters think the cheaper Canon has a noticeable colour cast.

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I too have a Canon IP (Pixma) inkjet printer - an IP8750. Yes it will do proper black and white!!

I think your problem is 99% down to using Epson paper in a Canon printer.

In my experience you get the best results with either Canon’s own paper, or third-party paper that has been formulated to work well with a wide variety of printers or specifically with Canons.

Epson paper is great in Epson printers, not so much elsewhere! Kodak paper similarly does not work at all well in Canons - it gives the kind of “off” tint to black and white prints that you describe.

I use Canon’s own Glossy Photo paper (GP-501) for regular colour printing.

If I want to print something special I use PermaJet paper, specifically Gloss 271 and Matt Plus 240 in the A3+ size for the biggest prints that printer can produce.

Black and whites on Matt Plus 240 look fantastic.

PermaJet make a big range of papers including some that are fancier (and more expensive) than the ones I have mentioned, but these two work very nicely I find.

A leaflet inside the box tells you which Canon paper profile to use with them, which is another key factor in getting a good print.

Also, make sure you are not “double profiling” when you print - i.e. applying a paper profile in your photo program’s print dialog box as well as in the OS’s printer settings - it should be one or the other.

And finally, make sure that your images are tagged with the colour space in which they were saved - i.e. when saving in Photoshop or exporting from Lightroom they should have the appropriate colour space profile embedded in the image file - sRGB or Adobe RGB, for example, so the program you print from knows how to interpret them.

(Pro tip - if in doubt export in sRGB - only very saturated images will need the wider colour gamut of Adobe RGB).

MMF Pro in Paris are listed as a distributor for PermaJet paper (or buy Canon paper, but give that Epson stuff away to someone who owns an Epson).

https://www.mmf-pro.com/brand/46-permajet

Other third-party brands of paper will work too, as long as they have a Canon printer profile available, or are designed to emulate a specified Canon paper stock. But Permajet I can say works, from years of using it!

ETA: Canson which is a French paper mill also make paper for inkjet printers so they could be worth a try if they are more easily available locally or online.

https://www.canson-infinity.com/en

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Yes

Yes and thanks for the video

No

Yes, that’s a problem with colour printers

Thanks

Thanks for the long reply Chris. I wish it were as simple as paper but I’ve got a small Canon Pixma and I used Ilford semi-gloss paper in it to check whether the file itself is b&w. Using the Ilford paper in the small Canon I again got a magenta cast. I too love matt papers. Unfortunately the people I’m doing the work for do not and wanted gloss, so the semi-gloss is a compromise and looks great. However, I do have some Lumijet matt paper so I’ll try that as well. I’ll work my way steadily through your points and see if I can find a solution.

Thanks everyone for your contributions.

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Thats what it was with mine, actually the printed circuit board had heat damage, took it back to cannon and the print head was replaced (£42 ) all was good again.

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Did you use a print profile or the gneric print settings recommended by Ilford?

https://ilford.com/printer-profiles-paper-settings/

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Thanks Chris. I need to take this all more seriously. I’ve been getting away with it in the past. I will report back.

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The people in the video that I linked talked about doing free custom printer profiles.

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According to this link, it is a problem with the printer drivers, whereby they seem to have removed some of the media management options. That discussion thread relates to macOS, but the problem might well likely be the same on Windows.

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Just to say thank you to everyone here for your thoughts and suggestions. I have spent today going up a very steep learning curve, never having bothered with profiles before and I’m pleased to say I’ve been successful.

In an ideal world perhaps I would have given the Epson paper away and bought Canon’s but the price is double Epson’s and the people we are doing it for are doing all of this on a shoestring. So I wanted if at all possible to use the paper I’d already bought. As everyone has said: Canon does not like Epson and vice versa.

For anyone who finds themselves in a similar scenario - unlikely I know, but you never know …

I found a very useful video which set me off on the right track:

And that led me to a lovely website where they are offering the opportunity to download paper profiles for free: Precision Colors C5B

Which gave me five different profiles for Epson semi-gloss paper.

That was the easy bit! Sorting my way through all the steps to then get the right profile speaking to my printer software was fun (not!). It involved 14 different steps to get the profile in the right place to get my software speaking to the printer. And I had to do that twice as my first choice wasn’t quite right. And I tried it first in A4 on my own little cheap and cheerful Canon printer before a final test on the paper we will be using A3+ on the big Canon.

Anyway - I got there and probably would still be panicking about it but for SF - so again, thanks everyone.

Oh and by the way, the profile works for my Ilford semi-gloss paper as well. :slight_smile:

PS: (edited) I think Keith in the video above was so gentle and reassuring I thought “I can do this!” If ever they make a film of him he could be played by Toby Jones. :slight_smile: So much better than the loud shouty techie people one gets, who mean well but just terrify me.

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I’ve got an A3 and A4 Canon printer (dye inks) and if printing B&W photos, they do use the yellow/magenta/cyan colours too, and so it usually bends towards a warm or cool tone, not neutral. If I really need a neutral photo from one of these printers, I go to print settings then ‘color/intensity’ set to manual, and then play with the amount of magenta, cyan and yellow, printing small test versions of what I want, on the same type of paper, until I arrive at settings that give the best neutral appearance. Bit of a bugbear, but it does work.

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Thanks Gareth but I’ve been trying to find a solution that does not require using lots of paper and loads of ink while I try out various possibilities - this exercise is costing more than enough as it is as I feel we cannot charge the village for paper and ink I’m using to get our own club printer to work properly. Hopefully what I now know means that we can fix it whatever paper we are using in the future. Fingers crossed.

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I shrink the image I want down to about 7 or 8cm, this way I only need one sheet. I print it in the top left corner, and then I print the next test alongside it, and I can fit many on a single page if need be. Usually by the 3rd or 4th tiny print I have ascertained the good balance of cyan/magenta/yellow only sacrificing one sheet and not much ink. As I say, not the best of solutions, but it something that can work.

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We’ve only got a b/w laser printer, because I decided many years ago that it was simpler to get photos; usually my A3 photos of source material for my wife’s painings printed by a local graphics studio at €1 a time. We also use them for A3 exhibition posters, whereas for anything serious and larger, I use a studio in the Netherlands. However, only today we were having a clear out and I found a framed A2 work of mine from 1990 that had been printed on what was available then (rubbish by today’s standards) but the colours hadn’t faded.

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You both have my deepest sympathies. :smiley:

Exposure to sunlight is what fades photographic prints - the blue-greens fade most leaving an almost monochrome magenta-looking print. Dye-based inkjet prints suffer similarly; it’s only the (more expensive) pigment-based inkjet printers that produce “archival” prints (and when printed on archival quality paper as well of course). So if your old print was stored away from daylight that’s why it didn’t fade.

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Fugitive colour has been a conscious concern for many artists at least since the Renaissance because some of the most beautiful artists’ pigments were highly fugitive. Many where replaced in the late C18th/early C19th by new pigments created by industrial chemists. By contrast, archival quality paper and other supports only became a concern much more recently when paper made from cotton linters was generally supplanted by paper made from acidic wood pulp. As a fine art printmaking student in the early Seventies, one quickly became very nerdy about this sort of thing, whereas it only became a concern for photographers when photographs started to be seriously collected.

In the early 1990s I was fortunate to access a very expensive IRIS printer and that was a game changer - the only drawback was in those days, they couldn’t handle JPEGs and I’d only get one A2 image on a 100MB Zip disc! A few years later I discovered Quad Black pigment printing on 30"x40"sheets of Arches paper, and for me that remains the most beautiful digital output medium, it’s almost as rich as a mezzotint.