Black and White In Color

By David Em

April 3, 2006

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It's generally acknowledged that color digital photography's come of age. Affordable high-quality cameras and printers coupled with Adobe's Photoshop add up to a digital darkroom that far surpasses the expensive and finicky wet chemistry systems of yore. Except when it comes to black-and-white photography.

Producing a satisfying monochrome digital print turns out to be surprisingly difficult. Epson , Hewlett-Packard, and Canon have taken up the black-and-white printing challenge with a vengeance.

Who Needs It?"

With all the good cheap color printers on the market, who needs black and white in the first place? The answer is nearly everybody. Besides the marvelous inherent aesthetic of black-and-white film, many professional and amateur photographers have developed a deep affinity for it because, unlike color film, they can develop it in their own darkrooms.

In fact, so many people love black and white that Kodak developed a new black-and-white film to satisfy the market at a time when most film development's come to a grinding halt.

Another constituency is memberd of the scientific and medical communities, who require extremely fine monochromatic tonal ranges Eizo makes a stunning ultrasharp LCD for this crowd). And then there's a couple billion people who want to scan, retouch, and archivally reprint prized photographs of their great-great grandparents.

A Little Off-Color

For several years, printer manufacturers have been selling inexpensive color inkjet printers that produce remarkably good results using dye-based inks. Unfortunately, most dye-based inks don't last terribly long when exposed to light, making them less than ideal for exhibiting pictures on a wall or handing them down to your children (by contrast, all those old prints of great-grandma and pa in the old country have held up remarkably well).

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