Black and White Printing with an Epson 3880

I've owned a variety of printers including an Epson 2200 and several Canon 9000 series printers but haven't done a lot of black and white printing. I recently got an Epson 3880 and love it for color. I have a couple of images that are color but nearly monochromatic. I have converted them to black and white using the Lightroom 4.6 black and white conversion as well as using the desaturation option. In both cases when I print on lustre paper the images turn out excellent. When I print them on two different matte papers they appear to be washed out over the entire image and the very dark areas come out somewhat blue. I've downloaded the paper profiles for all of the papers and select the proper profiles in the Lightroom print option. I also turn off all printer color management and let Lightroom manage the colors. I've also tried to print the images using both the black and white and color options in the printer dialogue box. I am stumped. It looks like the printer isn't putting out enough black ink to create the image density that is does on the lustre paper. I know the 3880 printer uses different cartridges for matte and semi-gloss or glossy images. The ink seems to change black ink correctly and color images come out very well on matte paper.  All of my cartridges are new and more than half full. I appreciate any help. I have used Epson Velvet Fine Art Paper, Espon Premium Lustre Paper, and Inkpress Duo Matte paper.

You may need to have a custom profile made for your printer. You also should soft proof and then make some adjustments. Matte paper has a very low Dmax compared to coated papers and super low compared to your monitor so it is never going to give you the dynamic range that you see on your monitor or on glossy or sem-gloss papers. Most people interpret that as looking washed out. But, by properly soft proofing, and the making final print specific adjustments, you should be able to maximize the look on the paper and get as close to true blacks as possible.

Everything EJ says plus paper quality is also important. For best black and white prints on matt paper you may want to look at Museo or Hahnemühle papers, they have pretty good Dmax.

As goofy as it sounds, make sure you're printing on the correct side of matte media. Sometimes it's hard to tell which side is which, but in most cases they are not the same since only one side is treated. Printing on the back side of a single-sided matte sheet will produce absolute crap results... I've done it a few times.

For the rest, E.J. is right. Matte media naturally has a lower contrast ratio than glossier media, largely because the shadow tones can't hit nearly the same density of black (Dmax). There's nothing you can do about this except select the best paper you can and then prepare your image to look its best on that paper. Typically this means some combination of soft- and hard-proofing, and adjusting the image black & white points and midtone contrast to make the most of what a specific media is capable of.

Blue or purple shifts are not too uncommon with canned profiles downloaded from the web. If you're sure you've got everything else right and your source B&W images are dead neutral grey but come out printed with a color shift, then it's probably a substandard ICC profile. Generic printer profiles are often not optimized for best accuracy in color reproduction for color prints; anything even a little bit off in the profile will be shown without mercy when printing neutral B&W work. A custom profile should produce better results in such a case. You could send out for one, or make your own with something like the ColorMunki Photo device, which is what I do for the most part.

Thanks guys! I'll try some additional paper and play some more. Royce, thanks for your paper suggestions. I'll check it as well. You guys are the greatest!

Bill,
Good advice above. I have found Canson Baryta to be an excellent B&W paper. A bit warmer than an Epson Luster. The canned profile for the 3880 is pretty decent, as well.

Also, since you are looking toward a matte paper for B&W. I've been getting some good results with Breathing Color Pura Smooth on the 3880 - a very bright white matte fine art paper with no OBAs. Still can't match the Dmax of the Baryta or Luster papers, though.