Why Cheap, Good, and Simple Black-and-White Prints Don't Exist

Ask any printer to be cheap, good at black and white, and simple to use, and you're chasing something that doesn't exist. Anyone who has tried to pull a truly neutral monochrome print off an inkjet knows the frustration of watching subtle color casts creep into what should be clean gray.

That gap sits at the center of a video from Keith Cooper, who answers a reader's question about where the affordable, easy black-and-white printers are hiding. His response is blunt: pick two. Cooper walks through a lineup of printers he has reviewed, from pigment-based machines down to four-ink budget models, showing what each can and can't do. He also pushes back on a common belief, that a printer with a gray ink must be good for black and white. The gray is there to build up unsaturated colors, not to serve monochrome performance.

At the higher end, Cooper points to pigment-ink models like the Epson P700 and the Canon Pro-310, both handling up to 13-inch prints. These print excellent black and white through a dedicated black-and-white mode, no profiles required, using Canon's PPL software or Epson Print Layout. He notes the tradeoff sits in running costs, with the Pro-310 relying on small cartridges. As an aside, he says he'd choose the Epson P900 over the P700 for its larger cartridges and bigger prints. The catch is straightforward: these deliver good black and white and stay simple, but they're not the cheap option.

Move to cheaper-to-run territory and the Epson ET-8550 becomes Cooper's standout. Its ink set is unusual, carrying both a pigment black and a dye black, and on matte papers it uses both blacks plus gray together. Paired with ICC profiles, which Cooper reminds viewers work for monochrome and not only color, the results on matte paper get very good. The six refillable ink tanks keep the cost per print down, and he suggests watching for deals since the 8550 outsells the smaller ET-8500 and often drops in price. You can lean on the black-and-white print mode here, though he found profiles pull ahead. Cooper deliberately avoids quoting prices in any of his reviews, since they swing between regions and over time.

There's a useful principle buried in how Cooper judges these prints, and it's one worth carrying into your own work: black and white was never a single, fixed look. He starts by hunting for pure neutral gray, then tints from there. Old darkroom papers carried subtle tints baked into the emulsion and the way they were processed, which is why prints from that era rarely read as clinically neutral. If you come from a monochrome darkroom background, that history explains why your eye expects something a modern budget inkjet fights to produce. Knowing what neutral actually looks like, and having a reliable target to compare against, turns vague dissatisfaction into something you can measure and fix.

Further down the range, Cooper tests the Canon G550 and G650 tank printers, which carry gray, black, and red among their six inks. Getting decent monochrome out of them runs into a wall on Mac, where Canon doesn't supply proper drivers, forcing you toward a third-party driver or a PC. He's produced profiles that give tolerable results, but "tolerable" is the honest ceiling. Cheaper still, the four-ink Epson EcoTank 2850 mixes cyan, magenta, and yellow with its pigment black to build lighter grays, and that mixing is exactly where neutral tones start to slip. 

His closing point lands hard: below the middle range, expect tolerable color and forget clean neutral black and white. Inkjet monochrome has improved enormously over the years, yet it still trails color performance, and Cooper says the day a genuinely cheap, easy, good black-and-white printer arrives, he'll cover it relentlessly. It hasn't arrived yet.

Watch the full breakdown in the video above to see Cooper's test prints side by side and hear where each printer lands.