Canon Pro-100s colorcast & questions

[peter D]

I guess you guys know heaps about these bulk ink printers but I'm ignorant about the composition of the Canon "bulk" inks for their Pixma ink tank range. When I used the link The Hat provided to the Black ink i.e. https://store.canon.ie/canon-gi-51pgbk-ink-bottle-black/4529C001/ I also went to the review section which indicated that the black ink was a pigment ink and that the colours are dye inks.
I assume this is to give some additional fade resistance to B&W document printing as the Canon representative when answering a question about whether the cyan G5I-51C faded, advised in response:" We do not have an exact figure for this ink's permanence, as it does not support Chromalife 100/100+".

Can you guys bring me up to speed on the composition of the inks for this range of printers as I was considering purchasing one for home office printing.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

A range of Canon and Epson printers run with a pigment black ink which has two benefits over black dye inks - a better longevity and a better/sharper look of prints - letters, pigments don't migrate so much into the surface of fibrous/uncoated papers - typically copy paper used for correspondence. But such pigment black cannot be used for photo prints on glossy papers.

What type of printer are you looking for - universal - photos - which format - which expected print volume and other criteria are relevant for you?

 

[peter D]

Thanks Ink Stained Fingers for your prompt reply. Great to hear from you again.
My requirements for this printer are just office printing as my Canon Pro100 is still going strong and I have a spare print head in stock just in case although it looks from this forum that the dreaded error code 5B00 or 5B01 (ink absorber full ) is likely to occur before long although the advance warning error code 1700 hasn't appeared yet.
I'm also looking for a trusted download source of the correct service software to deal with the issue - v5204 apparently, according to an answer entry by PeterBJ in November 2020.
I'm still using the Mainland China sourced Baoding swellable paper for photo printing that you and I discussed years ago as my low humidity storage system for it is still working fine and the fade performance of Precision Colors inks is not a problem when used with this tyype of paper.

My requirements for an office printer were quite simple, reasonably good fade resistance for B&W business documents on copy paper with moderate fade resistsnce when printing the same in color. One of the older Epsons seemed to have a simillar error code system to disable the printer as mentioned above so I started looking at the simplest Canon models and the G2520 looked at first glance to be a possible answer. Your thoughts on this and similar models would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

Hello @peter D ,
yes, I remember our activities and tests with the swelleable paper, it was quite interesting how good this type of coating is protecting the inks against fading.

You are looking for the G2520, that should be o.k. if it meets your requirements - features etc, it comes with a replaceable waste ink tank, and printheads are listed as spares as well. It runs with 4 inks - 1 pigment black and CMY dye. There is only one caveat - the dye inks for this product range - GI51 in Europe - have a pretty poor fading performance - actually really bad. I need to search for a test report by Wilhelm Research with the details. But you
have a very good alternative - you should get the CMY bottled inks for the G550 instead and swap them over into the bottles for the G2520 inks.

Here is the report

http://www.wilhelm-research.com/hp/WIR_Ink_Tank_Printer_Comparison.pdf

The Canon inks - look to the 75 years of HP inks against 5.4 years for Canon, the exact numbers are less relevant
but the ratio of 5.4 years/75 years - less than 10% - tells the story of these inks. (And Epson inks are not much better for a similar model range)

The GI-53 inks for the G550 perform similar to the HP inks and are the widely used Chromalife100 inks.

 

[peter D]

Correction to my earlier post, I meant to say "the G1520 looked at first glance to be a possible answer".
The G2520 is a multi function (3 in one) printer.

 

[peter D]

Gosh the HP inks are a clear winner.
I'll have to have another look at their range of ink tank office printers, although my fist impression was that they were all MFP types sold here in NZ

Your other suggestion regards swapping the inks might be the ticket if I can pick up a good used older model Canon Pixma ink tank type like the G2520.

Do these combined pigment and dye office printers have two heads or is it combined in the one ? A silly question I know but the specification sheet I found was suggestive of two.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

Yes, these G1520 - G2520.....model series uses 2 printheads - quite unusual for Canon in comparison to all other desktop printers.
Please be aware that the photo print quality is limited with these 4 color printers - the same applies to most other printers with this configuration - black is mixed from CMY when printing on glossy paper leaving a color cast.
And I don't know if these modes support borderless printing, or only on some formats or other driver settings. I just know that Epson is playing games in this respect with their Ecotank models - some support the borderless option, some don't or only for 4x6' glossy paper or not for plain paper

 

[peter D]

For a start on the problem from a New Zealand perspective I checked whether the Canon G550 and GI-53 CMY inks are available in New Zealand and found that they weren't. My next move was to ask Canon NZ whether I could get the I-53 inks for a G550 printer (or equivalent) from them. Their answer was interesting :
"Inks are region-coded and will only work with printers from particular region or country. If the printer was bought from overseas, you wouldn’t be able to use inks and cartridges sold in New Zealand and Australia due to regional coding on them. The same applies if the printer was purchased in New Zealand and Australia, you cannot use inks sold in other countries or regions."
When I pressed their buttons on the issue of their ink tank office printer colour dye inks fading problem they replied with an explanation of the merits of pigment inks over dye inks in that regard and even under what circumstances dye inks might actually migrate off the paper i.e. they completely avoided answering the question.

It seems that nothing has changed much in the world of making and marketing printers.

 

[911]

Took a step back from all this but here is the update. I did indeed receive the BK from octopus office. Yes the black is much better!!!!

Somehow the black and white print does still have a green tint, even when I select the black and white print option (I thought the printer then only uses the LGY, GY, BK but I could be mistaken). Red is still bad because of the yellow most likely.

I do still have to replace the other colors. My thought process at the moment is, since I own now from octopus office GY,LGY,BK,M, and I'm missing now PM,C,PC,Y I would buy the PM and PC from octopus office and the C and Y from canon (GI51), it might be worth a try. What are you thoughts on this? Get the GI51 or octopus office?

Here the Update as you can see the blacks are much better but middle grey image has still a green tint and the yellow is not great either.

Reporting back with an update when I have some time.

 

[peter D]

I've used Precision Colors inks for the Canon Pro100 for some years now with good results for colour fidelity using the Canon supplied printing software (Print Studio Pro) and Precision Colors generic profiles for the ink set. They also have an even more accurate set (Signature Edition) for the Pro 100 that is higher priced for getting that bit extra for an exhibition print but I've haven't tried them yet.
To get fade resistance I switched to the older HP swellable papers but the supply of them dried up so I imported the Baoding swellable photo papers (both Luster and Gloss) from China which unfortunately are thinner than even the standard Canon photo print papers but at least they prevent the fading issue of using non OEM dye inks to a large extent.
You can probably look back to when I posted the fading resistance results of using swellable paper and Precision Colors inks on this forum some years ago if you are interested. but the killer caveat that comes with swellable paper especially the Baoding brand is it's intolerance of high humidity environments before it has ink applied to it. The humidity needs to be kept down to less than the low to middle 20 % range. Once it's printed there's no problem but the print's water resistance is non existant.