has the 3880 got a B&W mode with various grey inks?
I see now from your screen shot you are using The Advanced B&W mode but why is "Custom" set? I don't know much about your driver but with B&W mode set I would think "automatic" would be needed? Hopefully someone else with this printer will comment.
Also, how is QU set for colour management; again I would think, let driver manage colour was appropriate.
You mentioned using a colour profile, is this relevant when set to the B&W mode?
Terry
Thanks for all of the feedback. I have it on custom mode because I set the color correction in the driver to darker. I typically like how that looks. Darker is magnifying the problem in this case. Setting back to automatic almost takes care of the magenta cast, but there is still a tiny bit there. I'll just use this as a learning opportunity and figure out what's going on. By the way, I though once I started inkjet printing that I would be printing less than I do in the darkroom, not the case. I think I use more paper with inkjet than I ever did in the darkroom.
Cheers
Fwiw, that's what I was doing by trying to get a blacker black, i.e. move the printer driver to a darker percentage within the Epson printer software. Only problem is that is messes up profiles badly for some reason doing that. Shadows get very blocked up too and you lose a lot of detail in there too.
Yeah, the black goes much darker and richer, but so do the shadows and colors within them too. Bad crossover from a yellow highlights to a burple appearing around step 8-10 of the 21 step chart, and on up to around step 18 where I saw it still purple until I got to the maximum black (or L value in the x-rite devices). On one brand of paper, it didn't go burple, but a chocolate brown in the shadows.
I wrote to x-rite since I use their profile tools and they said much the same, "You can't get a decent profile by setting the control to a darker percentage." The only way you can is to mess with the curves like I do and get a linear profile curve applied after you hit your best black using the color percentage density. You have to be able to measure your 21 steps though with something (ColorMunki Photo or i1 Photo spectrometer head) to see how it works in the spreadsheet linearization curve tool though.
Once you get it linear (Shadows holding detail, and the whites not being darker up with the more ink applied.), you can apply a bit of corrective color within the step range where you see the burple cast using the Curve tab in Qimage to negate it. Nice rich blacks and whatever neutral or color tone you want. You can apply maybe 20-30% Darker in the Epson driver prior to going through it all though to maximize the blacks.
It works, just a big pain to go through it all for each printer and paper. Sort of a take-off on the QTR RIP software if you work through it a few times, just that that software is too soft for me in sharpness, and it throws out a lot of Error codes both.
Mack