Mixing Epson pigment with Epson Claria dye ink to tint?

[W. Fisher]

Been mixing up a batch for seven carts in a 3880 using the Claria Black, as well as Claria Magenta and Yellow for tint, as a base and cutting the rest with clear. Sort of a K7 B&W mix with dye.

Problem is the Claria Black dye has a sort of greenish-black cast when diluted on the paper. So I tinted with a bit of magenta and still not happy as it moved to a yellowish cast now with the middle black carts.

So I was thinking of using an Epson Blue #54 as a tint to cool off the yellow/green tint, but I think the Epson #54 is a pigment ink. Amount to tint would be small, maybe even cut 1:3 with the clear base and just drops added to the tanks in percentages, but don't know if the pigment ink (If Epson #54 Blue is a pigment?) would cause problems with the majority of the Claria dye ink.

Tia.

W.F.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

It all depends how much of a neutral gray under different lighting conditions you want to acheive and not using the original K7 inkset or comparable specialties. You are right that the thinned Claria black gets such cast, and other dye inks as well.
I would not mix dye and pigment inks, not even small amounts of pigment inks, you'll see those with a bronzing effect on glossy papers directly if that's your paper of choice.
I rather would create a small gamut inkset - mixing CMY with lots of a gray mix with similar lightness , as well for the LC and LM colors and create an icm-profile which should give you a correct gray axis, and you even have the possibility to tint your images slightly - to brown or blue to your liking. This way to let all the color tuning to gray been done by the icm-profile. And depending on the profiling software you could have the option to adjust the profile to a particular viewing light condition or color temperature.

 

[W. Fisher]

Thanks.

I somewhere read on here about maybe making a blue ink with the magenta and cyan? I think it was 60% magenta and 40% cyan?

That green black looks awful to me and why I used the old Selenium Toner by Kodak in the darkroom days which made it cooler into a bluish black tint and got rid of that sickly bromide green tint. I tried just using magenta ink to knock down the Claria green, but it veered off into a new puke yellow color. The large Noritsu/Fuji printers that use the Claria Black ink must use a combination of that black and other inks to make a neutral black. Isn't easy to mix a batch and try and get the 3880 lines all clear with the new ink even by printing 15 sheets of whatever color tank has the new mix in it, seems it also needs a couple of wasteful power clean cycles as well. I'm only mixing about 30ml at a time so far.

Another problem is the optical blue brighteners in the paper seem to make the tint variable with the ink density in each tank. Can't use the same ink and cut and expect to see the neutral black across all the different tanks even in tint. Some go from the green-black to a magenta in mids to a blue in the lighter shades. Ain't easy!

W.F.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

Testing inks with various mixing ratios may be easier with smaller volumes on a smaller Epson printer with refill cartridges such as those 6 color photo printers, the R265, 285, P50, 1400, 1500W and similar all take pigment inks instead of dye inks without problem. You print half a page solid color of every ink channel, and all the flushing is done.
It's a question of the viewing/lighting conditions to which degree optical brighteners get excited and visible , and you have the effect that the paper white point of any paper, as well those w/o OB's don't show a neutral white at all.
I'm mixing blue for my R800 with 2x cyan and 1x magenta, and red with 1x magenta and 1x yellow, and do my own profiles.
Printing with a profile would help you as well at the dark end , testing the impact of the black point compensation function - with rel. color rendering. Otherwise you may loose some of the darker details in your image.

Ain't easy!

I'm not specifically into B/W printing, but when I see how much effort other people have already spent on that subject I only can agree with you.