Printing onto black paper?

[dreed]

All of the printing that I've seen is about putting various colours of ink on to white paper ... but there's a little voice inside my head saying that if I'm going to print an image of a mostly dark image (night, fog, street lights) then isn't it better to start with a dark paper so that less ink is used? Does that even make any sense? Or is it just impossible because everything print related is designed to work with adding colours on top of white paper?

[Czornyj]

It makes sense - but only if you have white ink, the less transparent the better.

[hugowolf]

It makes some sense, like using dark paper for drawing with pastels and chalk, but it will not work without a white ink to relace the black inks, and most printers rely on the white paper surface for paper detection (width, skew, etc). If you try to load balck paper, the printer will reject it.

Brian A

[Scott Martin]

It's a nice idea but harder than it sounds! First of all there aren't ink black inkjet papers, and few inksets have white inks. Nearly all printing is designed to be subtractive (adding colors on white paper). UV curable machines that contain white inks can print on anything, including black styrene or black dibond but we're talking about a tiny niche of people that do this type of thing well at fine art quality.

[BobShaw]

Have you ever tried to paint over black? You would use a lot more ink anyway I think.

[petermfiore]

I would assume all the inks would need to be opaque, no? That makes swapping inks a very costly change.

Peter