New and hoping for some advice please

[PeterBJ]

I was too quick to say the Canon pigment ink doesn't smear. This is after a few minutes. Maybe this is caused by adding cyan and magenta dye ink to get a more perfect/neutral black. I'll do more testing to find out what's going on. B/W copying might be a solution.

Here is the smear test using five drops of "pharmacist's cleaning fluid" applied in the centre spot:

Edit: the printer does add colour dye ink to the print, see this 50 X magnification of dots from the lady's dress:

Making a B/W copy of the print using a Canon MP800 with plain paper setting results in a print with only pigment black, no dye ink added:

This might also work with your printer. You could try printing the image on cheap plain paper and then make a B/W copy on the expensive watercolour paper. Maybe the smooth watercolour paper will not smear when dye ink is not present?

 

[The Hat]

Edit: the printer does add colour dye ink to the print,

It doesn’t matter what you do, the printer will always use dye/pigment ink to print any JPEG, even in “Word”..

The only way to get around that problem would be to save the image as a EPS and use a printer that can handle PostScript images, and I know of no inkjet printer that can do that, only colour lasers..
P.S. A PDF can handle EPS files and print them but will the printer allow this..

 

[Artur5]

I'm not sure that printing a JPEG forces the printer to use dye ink. The driver doesn't knows if the data sent by the program is text or picture. At least for Canon machines, I believe that printing on plain paper anything consisting of pure black and white ( text, graphics or images ) uses only pigment black ink.
By pure black and white I mean what Photoshop calls 'bitmap mode' that is, the information for each pixel is a single bit: 0 for black and 1 for white, as it's usually for text. While grey scale can be 8 bits per pixel (256 grey levels ) or 16 bits (65536 levels).

I recall that during the time I owned Canon Pixmas, drawings and comics in black and white converted to bitmap were printed only with pigment black. On plain paper, no smear at all with water and also the deep of the pigment black is quite different from dye black.
Nowadays I have no dye printers so I can't prove my hyphotesis. but maybe one of you folks can do it. Just be sure that what you print is a bitmap image, not 8/16 bits greyscale.

PS: Might this be another case of agreed disagreement with @The Hat. ?

 

[Emt]

Thanks for all the replies, wow I really didn’t think it would be this technical would I be better off just getting a laser printer??

 

[Emt]

I was too quick to say the Canon pigment ink doesn't smear. This is after a few minutes. Maybe this is caused by adding cyan and magenta dye ink to get a more perfect/neutral black. I'll do more testing to find out what's going on. B/W copying might be a solution.

Here is the smear test using five drops of "pharmacist's cleaning fluid" applied in the centre spot:

Thank you for taking the time to carry out such detailed tests! we tried making a copy of the image and then printing in black and white on normal paper setting but still had the same problem

View attachment 12117

Edit: the printer does add colour dye ink to the print, see this 50 X magnification of dots from the lady's dress:

View attachment 12119

Making a B/W copy of the print using a Canon MP800 with plain paper setting results in a print with only pigment black, no dye ink added:

View attachment 12120

This might also work with your printer. You could try printing the image on cheap plain paper and then make a B/W copy on the expensive watercolour paper. Maybe the smooth watercolour paper will not smear when dye ink is not present?

 

[maximilian59]

Hi,
do you use OEM ink or thirdparty?

 

[Emt]

Hi, It’s the ink that came with the printer from new

 

[PeterBJ]

I tried dripping pharmacist's cleaning fluid onto the B/W photocopy with only PGBK ink. As expected this print doesn't smear. The darker areas are caused by buckling of the paper after drying, the red dots are not present in the print, they are scanner artefacts.:

Here is a post with more about B/W plain paper printing and the use of both pigment and dye ink. And here is a post by @Ink stained Fingers with the simple solution to get only PGBK on paper: Use greyscale AND plain paper settings.

I tried using these settings with a Canon iP4300 printing the uploaded jpeg image and it works, you don't have to make a B/W copy to get a print using only PGBK ink. Here is a 50X magnification of the print. No coloured dye dots are present:

Maybe this is the solution? I think it is worth trying. Or maybe the PGBK ink will still smear on the smooth watercolour paper? If so maybe another paper will be more suitable?

Laser toner is not affected by water, but A3 laserprinters are expensive and maybe they cannot handle the watercolour paper?

 

[Emt]

I think I’ve tried every option now and just can’t get it to not smear, think I’m just going to have to get a laser printer. I’m looking at a couple of second hand ones so maybe I’ll ask over in the laser dept
Thanks for everyone’s suggestions

 

[Emt]

Managed to pick up a Lexmark c746 laser printer yesterday for £40 have no idea if that was a good price or not but after sorting constant “paper jam” alerts it’s doing the job