Only works with Epson printers, but I was sort of astounded in a black and white that I dragged onto its (Very crude!) Windows GUI and it fired up the printer and did its thing.  Never have gotten that sort of a B&W tonal range, even with profiling out of the x-rite i1 Photo Pro 2 making an ICM to use within the Epson driver.

Seems to work somehow without the Epson 3880 driver nor does it need a ICC/ICM profile either if you set it up right.  Might need an i1 reading device or similar densitometer to set up the 21 patch your print off it once you get the ink levels tuned.

The "WOW!" part is that I see tones in the blacks and can dial the black inks even darker than going through the profile route with the Epson printer driver.  The later seems to block up the blacks quite a bit and not as many steps can be discerned in their included test targets.  You can see the included 51-step tone B&W quite well too to verify you did it right.  It would make Ansel Adams envious.

I didn't get as good a tonal range, and some colorations added, by allowing it to make a ICM profile from the read 21-step data for some reason.  The "Drag the image onto the GUI window" (And "crude GUI window" is an understatement over QU too!) made the best B&W one and clean of colorations.  As this is shareware with sundry authors, might be something different there too as to why certain things work better.

I've attached a curve generated that shows the 3 dark gray inks in the Epson 3880, and the slight Magenta/Cyan that neutralized the warm B&W mid-tonal range form whatever ink issues was going on (I'm using Jon Cone's 'Dye' ink in it and not OEM pigment ink.).  The "Lite Black" starts the tonal process at the white end, ends with the "Photo (Dark) Black," and uses the "Lite Lite Black" as a fill between them.  Or that's how I understand it.  Paper was Inkpress Glossy as it has a high dMax, imho.

If you need a B&W with a nice tonal range, might be worth checking into.  Not as easy to figure out though, almost Windows DOS at times.  I believe it is $50 for the shareware if you want to use it and it suits you.  I still need to do some playing around with it and see if I can fix the ICM curve part somehow.


Mack