Very few canvas printers in Australia are able to generate high quality, completely neutral B/W prints. This is because they are using printers designed for colour printing.

Traditional colour canvas printing machines contain between 4 and 7 different coloured inks. These are usually either

• Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black
• Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, Light Cyan, Light Magenta
• Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, Light Cyan, Light Magenta, Light Black

When printing neutral B/W prints, a very large range of grey shades is required. The greater the number of shades that the printer can create, the smoother the printed image will appear.

To create these shades, colour printers mix black ink dots with yellow, magenta and cyan ink dots. The problem with this technique is that the print tends to display a colour cast, which changes when moved between different light sources. The print may look fantastic in studio lighting, but may appear green or magenta when hung at home. This is part of a phenomenon known as metamerism.

Some companies will tell you that their new Epson K3 inkset printers can generate perfectly neutral black and white prints. This is simply not true. A high resolution scan of images printed shows a mixture of black and coloured dots. The K3 inkset contains 3 channels of black ink. This does not compare to the 6 channels employed by our dedicated B/W printer.

If you want completely neutral B/W prints with incredibly smooth tonal transitions, then why settle for anything less than a dedicated B/W printer? BrilliantPrints is unique in that we have invested in a dedicated printer containing 6 channels of black ink of varying densities. These inks are carbon-based, which is far more lightfast than pure pigment colour inks. Absolutely no coloured ink is used, allowing us to create completely neutral B/W prints that are lightfast to 200+ years. The carbon based ink also generates much darker blacks.

This is why so many professional photographers have switched to Brilliantprints for their B&W canvas printing