Printing in Black - Inkjet Printers
PC Magazine writes: ‘In the item “Printing in Black”, we mentioned that most ink jets can’t use their black ink on glossy paper. One reader insisted that no printer he has seen has to mix colors to print black, except for three-color printers that don’t have black ink. We thought it would be useful to look at this issue in just a little more depth.
First, note that we referred to most ink jets. If you think your printer actually prints with black ink on glossy paper, you may have one of the exceptions. More likely, however, you haven’t compared the output with a truly neutral version of the same image, and you haven’t looked at the output with a high enough magnification to see the individual dots. Take a look at the screenshot that shows a section of a gray-scale image printed with an Epson Stylus C66, both life size and at 60X magnification (inset). The unmagnified version looks like a suitably neutral gray and black. But the magnified version clearly shows different color dots….’
Read more at Printing in Black, Revisited