An Uckfield firm has announced new ink technology allowing users to produce fine-art black and white photographs directly from their desktop inkjet printer.

The breakthrough will be marketed by Marrutt Digital.

Reaction to the news within the UK professional photographic community has been positive.

Barrie Thomas, chairman of the Royal Photographic Society Digital Imaging Group, said: "The decision to replace colours with graded shades of grey is such a simple solution that it seems to have escaped everyone else!"

Creating black and white digital inkjet prints using a normal colour inkset causes the introduction of faint but unacceptable colour casts within the image.

Longevity has also been an issue as conventional black ink fades eight times faster than traditional silver halide photographs.

John Read, managing director of Marrutt Digital, said colour prints would last for 30 years and black and white versions for 100 years with the new system.

The technology simply relies on cleaning all traces of coloured ink from the printer heads with a special cleaning cartridge.

It then replaces the standard multi-colour and black ink cartridges in an ordinary Epson colour printer with a 'Quad-Black' or Hex-Black inkset.

The new cartridges contain graduated densities of archival quality black ink that correspond to the unsaturated values of the CMYK colour range.

This means that instead of printing cyan, magenta, yellow or green, the printer delivers an equivalent value in shades of black ink.

The end result is an archival fine-art black and white digital photographic print of exceptionally wide tonal range with both shadow and highlight detail reproduced with clarity and no colour casts.

Mr Read said: "This gives you a print you can sell with confidence."

The new inksets are manufactured by Lyson of Stockport and prices are similar to normal colour ink cartridges.

They are available for most Epson desktop inkjet printers.

Marrutt Digital can be contacted on 01825 764 057.

www.marrutt.com