Several newer Epson printers offer a special Advanced Black and White printing mode (ABW) to help you get the finest quality black and white images from your printer.  You can achieve even better quality if you also use a custom printer profile that has been specially created to enhance your black and white printing experience.

The Epson printers that currently have this Advanced Black & White mode include The Stylus Photo® 2400 and several of the Stylus Pro® models -- 3800, 4880, 7880, 7900, 9880, 9900, and 11880.  Furthermore, several other Epson printers (including the 1280, 2200, R800, R1800, R1900 and many others) possess a special "Black Ink Only" setting. When this setting is used, these printers can also be coaxed to print outstanding black and white images using an ABW profile.  (Other manufacturers -- like HP, Canon, Konica Minolta -- may also offer a similar "Black Ink Only" or "Grayscale" setting.  Check your printer's documentation for this functionality.)

When you use a specially created ABW profile -- either with Epson's ABW printing mode, or with any other printer that supports "Black Ink Only" printing -- the range of grayscale colors available is MUCH smaller than when you print with color -- just 256 basic grayscale shades, as opposed to more than 16 million colors.   An Advanced Black and White printer profile consists of only 51 individually measured grayscale reference points -- just a small fraction of what is required for an RGB Color profile -- and yet this much smaller profile will fully cover nearly 1 out of every 5 individual grayscale shades -- offering you precise grayscale accuracy and linearity that yields an unmatched range of highlight and shadow detail.