I’ve got a colour cast problem when printing in black and white, which is giving my photos a blue tinge. I’ve tried setting the printer (an Epsom PX710w) to gray-scale, but there’s no difference. I’m not sure if this is a problem with my printer itself, the printer settings, or the camera (Canon 550d). I’ve tried taking the photos in black and white, and in colour and then changing them to b&w, but again there’s no difference. Someone has suggested taking them in raw format and then changing them – would this help? Or any other suggestions please?

have you tried cleaning the print heads?
it could still be trying to print grey scale with colour?

or your black may be running out,
have you tried putting a reddish cast in it to see if it prints correctly?

If the files are in B&W they’re B&W. The camera’s fine and whoever suggested raw would make a difference is plain wrong.

It’s the printer or the ink, I would suspect the latter since the printer should detect greyscale images and only use the black ink. Do you have good quality ink and paper? I wouldn’t be surprised if non-expensive ‘black’ ink isn’t entirely black (see Father Ted’s conversation about Habit Hat).

My suggestion would be get them done on photographic paper, I hate ink prints personally, YMMV.

Email one to a friend to print. If it’s blue there you know it’s your printer. I think you covered this but in the print menu have you picked black and White? I think that’s what you ment in your OP that you tried. I expect as someone said it’s cheap ink, it’s never quite black.

Ditto above, its printer related.

Firstly make sure you have the most up to date drivers for the printer, then check the colour profile for the paper, some especially those that rely on clays / baryta with whitening agents don’t react well with certain ink sets esp under default settings.

Go to the paper manufactures site, instal the correct profile for your printer. It may resolve or it may simply be an incompatible mix in which case … try a different paper combo.

Agree with bez – the black may just not be true black

Have you tried searching the net? I did a quick search and found that the blue tint is most likely due to the printer using colour ink to create the black and white image. You could set the printer to use the black cartridge only but you’d lose print quality.

Epson created something called Advanced Black & White mode apparently which is available on all ‘Epson UltraChrome K3 supporting printers’.

Take a look at Linky

another alternative, depending on the inks in the printer is to make the file you are printing either a rgb or cmyk file & see how the printer handles that.