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Black and White (only) printing Epson 3880

Posted: Mon Mar 08, 2021 12:40 am
by robbrown99
Hi, I'm new to turbo print. I am interested in purchasing for my 3380. In the Epson driver (mac/pc) there's an option to only print with black inkset. Does this option appear anywhere in TurboPrint?

Thanks

Re: Black and White (only) printing Epson 3380

Posted: Mon Mar 08, 2021 10:58 am
by zedonet
Hello,

if your printer is the Epson Stylus Pro 3880:

TurboPrint has a special mode for black & white photos.

If you select "Color mode"="Gray photo" in the driver settings, photos are printed almost only with black & gray inks.
A little bit of color ink added to maintain neutral gray. The gray balance can be adjusted using the gray balance sliders.

Re: Black and White (only) printing Epson 3380

Posted: Mon Mar 08, 2021 11:45 am
by robbrown99
Ok thank you

Some more questions:

1. Does this mode mimick the Epson ABW mode (my understanding is that this is managed in the hw as opposed to driver). Is the turboprint driver able to 'call' this abe mode in the printer, or is the driver performing the task in its own way/ as a best effort?

2. Does the grayscale option leverage the black, light black, and light light black ink at same time?

Re: Black and White (only) printing Epson 3380

Posted: Sat Mar 20, 2021 8:59 pm
by robbrown99
zedonet wrote: Mon Mar 08, 2021 10:58 am Hello,

if your printer is the Epson Stylus Pro 3880:

TurboPrint has a special mode for black & white photos.

If you select "Color mode"="Gray photo" in the driver settings, photos are printed almost only with black & gray inks.
A little bit of color ink added to maintain neutral gray. The gray balance can be adjusted using the gray balance sliders.
Hi, if I print with Gray Photo, there's a noticable blueish cast. Is if possible to turn off the color ink in the driver (e.g. control panel) to allow this printer to ONLY print with the photo black, light black and light light black inks?

Re: Black and White (only) printing Epson 3880

Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2021 9:46 am
by zedonet
It does not work to use only black and grey inks as the individual grey inks of the printer have different color casts (black is a little bit blueish, the gray inks are yellowish) - thus the driver always adds a small part of color inks. Note that you can remove your blueish cast with the color/grey balance controls.

Re: Black and White (only) printing Epson 3880

Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2021 12:32 pm
by robbrown99
zedonet wrote: Mon Mar 22, 2021 9:46 am It does not work to use only black and grey inks as the individual grey inks of the printer have different color casts (black is a little bit blueish, the gray inks are yellowish) - thus the driver always adds a small part of color inks. Note that you can remove your blueish cast with the color/grey balance controls.
Ok thank you. A few more question before I buy this driver:
1. The epson stylus pro printers have not only photo black (or Matt), but also light black (LK) and light light black (LLK). Is the driver using these LK and LLK inks?

2. Turboprint offers a profiling service. Does that also include an option for black and white?

3. The control panel has one pane where there is (what appears to be) individual control over each ink in the correction tab, and ink Ctrl tab. However for the stylus pro (3880) it doesn't reflect that there are 8 inks total
- there are only sliders for black, cyan, magenta, yellow
- but this printer has black, light black, light light black, cyan, light cyan, magenta, light magenta, yellow

Is this an omission in the UI? If I wanted to control say the cyan output, does the driver behind the scenes control cyan AND light cyan (for example), or when I change black slider does it control all three black inks? Or does it only control (eg) cyan and light cyan does not adjust. The UI and manual are not clear on this.

Thanks

Re: Black and White (only) printing Epson 3880

Posted: Wed Mar 31, 2021 3:20 pm
by zedonet
Hello and please excuse the delay.

1) Yes, the driver uses LK and LLK inks

2) When printing the color profile chart in the TurboPrint Control app, dialog "profiles", you can select a "Black & white profile" chart. As explained earlier, this chart will also contain fields with a bit of color (C, M, Y, LC, LM) to allow an adjustment of the grey balance when printing with the profile later.

3) The "individual color adjustments" in the user interface looks the same for all printers and only has C, M, Y and K sliders. As you guessed, the Cyan slider affects C and LC and the Magenta slider affects M and LM inks etc.

Re: Black and White (only) printing Epson 3880

Posted: Thu Apr 01, 2021 10:38 am
by robbrown99
Ok, thank you for answering my questions.

A member of pixls.us was following this thread also and advised me to use the gray color balance wheel on one of the tabs. I tried a minor adjustment to get rid of the yellow cast and the print now looks like a perfectly balanced black and white!

One suggestion for your team: I found that the black and white wasn't laying down enough black. I adjusted the amount using a slider, but it only adjusts in units of 10%. When I added +10 then indeed the print looked punched with deeper black, but it was too much! My suggestion is to modify the GUI in the control panel to allow single digit modifications to values (perhaps below the slideras a text box ).

One other issue is that when I hover over the slider, and try to click, the slider doesn't respond. I have to hover over the slider and not move the cursor for a few seconds, and then I can finally adjust. I am on Linux Mint (cinnamon desktop).

I will go ahead and buy the driver, I am finding the results very satisfactory, and generally easy to use. This is coming from a very picky photographer with a high end wide format photo printer. The results I'm seeing for color prints are as far as I can tell a perfect match for the gem driver. The bw mode could do with some work to allow user to fine tune (ok results, not exceptional).

The plugin for gimp is quite nicely built too, there's room for improvement, but I quite enjoy the image preview when printing an image within a larger piece of paper.

Thanks for your help

Re: Black and White (only) printing Epson 3880

Posted: Fri Apr 09, 2021 1:23 pm
by ramestica
I have the same question about the apparently coarse control of some sliders (e.g. Color/Grey Tone wheel sliders +-5).

Could it be that the color profiles have not enough resolution to make more fine grained control meaningful? Could that be improved somehow? Well, maybe not. I just wonder why the sliders are discrete in the amounts they are.