Pigment Ink for Epson XP-950

[kcgoatboy]

I wouldn't like to discourage you to make a test , with these cartridges in this printer with pigment inks and let us know. I try this and that as well, and not everything works out fine.
My concern with these foamfilled cartridges is with the foam stuff, it might filter pigments over time, it may work shortterm, but pigments collect slowly and reduce the flow at the end. I have seen quite some variance with the fibrous foam stuff at the time using Canon printers, different 3rd party inks were absorbing a different amount of ink - measured with a scale.

So if I understand your first post and the above post your concerns are more with the actual cartridge failing over time and not as much with the printhead/machine having problems using pigment inks.

Too me replacing the cartridges every 2-3 refills seems like a reasonable cost to cover considering how expensive Claria Ink is.

If I was planning to switch to pigment inks I would set my NAS server to automatically print a test pattern once a week to help prevent clogging. Would once a week be enough or should I increase the frequency?

If no one thinks that running a couple of cartridges worth of pigment ink through and switching back to dye if it doesn't work out wouldn't realistically damage the printer then I would give it a try. I know there's always a chance of something happening i'm just worried about it being a high probability.

I'm sorry for asking the below 2 question as i'm sure they have been asked many times before. Since there isn't really information about pigment inks on the xp-950 I don't know what would apply the best.

1) Which source for refillable cartridges for the xp-950 would be the highest quality and might work the best for pigment inks?

2) What pigment ink should I use that gives the best results for the price and also would give the best chances for working with the xp-950. Cost is a little bit of a factor. If replacing carts ever 2-3 times plus bulk ink does in the end come out cheap then OEM ink then there's not much reason for me to switch. I am trying to get away from Epson OEM prices but recoup some of the quick fade resistance of non claria inks.

 

[te36]

I like your direction. I may want to try the same , so i am also interested in good photo pigment ink to try.

I have for now decided to only keep the XP-900 (3 colors) instead of the XP-960 (5 colors). Alas, the ARC chip cartridges i bought for 960 did reset after ca 5.5 ml == normal size, not XL size == ca. 40% ink waste, with XL reset (11 ml) it's only ca. 20% ink waste. Given how the quality difference XP-900/960 on photos was marginal and the ARC chips for XP-900 that i bought are XL size, i went for XP-900.

Aka: If you have/want XP-950 the main challenge IMHO would be to source XL ARC chips for the cartridges. Even better might be to invest into one XL claria cartridge set and then use external resetter on those cartridges and refill them. That gets you down to 4% ink waste. The OCP webpage has good instructions for refilling original cartridges. Or else put the original resetted chips into fill-in cartridges and use external resetter. The main quality factor in the fill-in cartridges to me is a large connection between reservoir and sponge area so ink flow will work well.

What NAS do you use so that you can print from it ? Linux with open source print driver for epson XP ?

As i said in before, i can not see how pigment ink can hurt the printer given how the same print head is in the XP-9[56]0 and XP-900 and in the XP-900 two slots are run with pigment ink. You should be prepared to profile the ink though, else its likely that the colors will be off.

ISF was sugesting to use cartriges with cleaning fluid to clean the printer, that sounded like a good idea and also likely sufficient to switch between pigment and dye.

Finally you should be prepared understanding how to deal with the waste ink . External connection or cleaning it, etc. pp.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I'm reading that your main concern is the fading of 3rd party dye inks. As mentioned already you may look to the Fujifilm DL/SolutionsCL/Fotonic XG inks first, they make a big difference already. And there is another element influencing the fading - the paper you are using, best performing are glossy RC (resin coated) papers, those with a plasticy back and feel like a print from a lab, and not those papers with a paperlike/fibrous back. And matte papers accelerate the fading as well. You would be on the safe side by using such dye inks. But as always with non-OEM consumables you would need specific icm-color profiles to get the best out of it.
I'm not aware that anybody has tested and compared different refill cartridges of this type, they all are probably coming from Far East.
Pigment inks - there are several reputable suppliers , you may look to the offerings of precisioncolors.com.
If you switch to pigment inks you may find some visual effects like bronzing and gloss differences between printed and unprinted areas and between different colors, these effects very much depend on the ink/paper combination, it may irritate you or you don't see it, the only fix for that is an overprint with a gloss optimizer which you don't have available in your printer.
I have switched a lot between pigment and dye inks on several printers, Epson printheads are taking it, and when you look to their product ranges from office type printers with Durabrite inks and home use printers like the Expression home series you'll find always several models which use the same printhead with dye or pigment inks, but you can't switch as a user, genuine cartridges with both ink types are not available, and there are no provisions for that in the driver either. So it is a test, and there are more areas which might impact the outcome other than the printhead itself. Using pigment inks in other Epson photo printers is quite popular, or replacing Durabrite inks with cheaper dye inks as well, but I have not seen anybody yet doing this with a XP-950.

 

[te36]

Thanks, ISF,

I have not had the time to investigate the archival quality dye ink, i am just worried about two pieces, maybe you can put them into perspective:

1. "the embarrassingly poor results for the Fotonic XG inks is unlikely to be helped very much by any other media"

http://forum.luminous-landscape.com/index.php?topic=80675.0

2. I want to keep my options open on printers, having a boxed up Pro 100 in case i give up on Epson sometime (high maintenance products), so i was worried about the non-availability of the Fotonic ink for Canon. Not sure how relevant it is because i guess i could just profile out the Epson XG ink. But i could also not find a good page about photnic XG on nazdars webpage so i wonder if they're going to fold.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

let's go into some details since that link refers to http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com/ and their tests and reports, you need to register for full access.
They have developed a particular measurement method for the fading of inks and and assign a CDR rating as a result; you need to understand their methodology and the limits.
You can look up reports for the Claria ink on several different papers and find wide differences - by a factor of 3 - for the same ink, it is not possible to rate the fading performance of an ink without knowing the exact paper type. You can look up reports for the Fujifilm DL inks and find similar results, widely varying by paper, and the Fujifilm ink may have a better rating on one paper than the Claria ink on another paper. And even worse, you'll find pigment inks rated below the Claria inks - on the same paper, it is not true in all cases that pigment inks are always better than dye inks - without knowing the exact circumstances. The paper type is extremely important for the fading performance of the ink.
Aardenburg has tested as well the Fotonic XG ink ( just make it easier for Google to look for Fotonic instead of Photonic) with an apparent bad result. I believe their results as much as mine, I have tested the Fotonic ink about 2 years ago, in direct comparison to the Fujifilm inks, on the same sheet of paper, in the same sun at the same time, I did not see such a wide discrepancy, the Fotonic black was on par with the DL black, the colors slightly weaker. I tested as well the Inkthrift CL inks by Inkjetmall/Vermont Ink with similar results.
The SolutionCL, Inkthrift CL and Fotonic inks are pretty pricey, at least as high as the Fujifilm inks drained from cartridges, those inks are available in smaller amounts than the DL minimum of 200ml per color which may make it easier to start with.
Don't believe any claims of sellers that their inks are whatever 20% or so better than others, the Aardenburg tests show how difficult it is with the performance rating. And there is another problem, the paper type has a very strong effect onto the fading performance, but no paper supplier has any supporting information about this effect available for you to make a buying decision, that is even less information for you as a customer than infos about inks tested by Aardenburg or others like Wilhelm Research institute. You just don't know whether a Canon paper or Epson or HP paper or Hahnemühle etc gives you the best performance. You can go through the Aardenburg reports and compare the results with the same ink on different papers and just pick the 'best', but it could very well be that an HP paper would be even better.....

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I scanned some of the Aardenburg test results with these findings, they established their own measure for the fading of inks - measuring the color/lightness shift of the 30 colors of the X-Rite Colorchecker color set, and they separately measure the worst 10% of changes and calculate as well an average of all changes of all affected colors. The numbers are a measure for the accumulated light/radiation energy in MegaLuxhours, so a higher number is better, and it is linear - a 2x number vs. another result indicates that the fading takes twice the time until it reaches the measurement threshold. They call it CDR - conservation display rating...

You get for the Fujifilm inks
31/43 on the Fujifilm Glossy paper for the DL400 printer
17/37 on the Fujifilm matte paper

you get for Epson genuine Claria inks
10/15 on Epson Premium Photo Paper Luster
13/20 on Red River Ultra Pro Satin 2.0
1.5/2.1 on the same paper for a MIS D2 dye inkset
59/91 on the same paper with the Epson Ultrachrome K3 Vivid Magenta inkset
8.4/14 on the same paper with the Conecolor Pro pigment inkset
7/26 on Red River Ultra Pro Glossy Plus with the Epson R1800 pigment inkset

You can directly see wide variances with different papers and the same ink, or different inks on the same paper , so you are just not able to say which ink is the best, a bad paper can 'kill' any good performance of your ink, and these are all brand name papers, no name budget papers will perform much worse.

And how about the Chromlife dye inks by Canon,

8.2/17 on Red River Ultra Pro Satin 3.0
57/57 on Canon Photo Paper Pro Luster

It is quite a similar result, the paper makes a big difference for the same ink type. And if you now look to the performance of pigment inks and whether they are better than dye inks - it all depends.......
Much more data is available in the Aardenburg archives with 300+ test reports just in case you are interested.

 

[te36]

Thanks a lot!

Your data sets had only one pigment example, and the results for that where not really good. So i wonder how pigment ink got its positive hype. The way i understand it, both pigment and dye are organic molecules solid at room temperature, and dye is just dissolved in a solvent while pigment is not. Maybe you could even make a pigment ink out of dye ink by just suspending the same fine-grained material instead of dissolving it. Seems like many pigment inks just use water to avoid that pigments get dissolved.

Its quite frustrating that there is no standard for at least base level fade resistance, eg: measured on worst possible paper (80grams copy paper). As long as manufacturer lure customers into a siloed offering, printer, cartridges, ink, paper they'll keep a license to print money. And you still don't know for sure how fade resistant the results are because there seems to be no independent verification.

Why for example is there no base level measurement of inks without paper material taken into account ? Put defined amount of the ink (dye/pigment) onto a glass mirror, then measure color. Expose to lots of UV light, measure again, expose to lots of oxygene/ozone, measure again.

With some highly UV and some highly ozone/oxygene sensitive inks you can also baseline the performance of papers, eg: how well they protect from either.

Yes, there is certainly some more explicit 1:1 reaction between ink and paper, but i would be surprised if the mayor effect is not simply a degree of protection from UV and/or air.

 

[apetitphoto]

While there is certainly a "manufacturer silo" that the companies want you to live/spend in, that's not unusual. Auto makers, for instance, have a line of performance parts that compete with third party parts makers to keep you in their revenue stream. Printer makers do the same.

While it would be nice to have a standard bad paper that everyone used, no one is going to use a standard bad paper - for anything. A marketing slogan of "We suck less when using the worse" isn't going to play well.

Given that the chemical composition of all brands of paper vary, why is a printer maker going to test their ink compatibility on anything they don't control? It's pretty much up to you to test your custom arrangements. You may be able to devise a standard testing methodology, but at what cost? Perhaps there already exists such a standard? But, in reality, the only accurate test (time) will not produce results until, most likely, after it doesn't matter to you or I.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

The thread started with a concern of the fading performance of a 3rd party refill dye ink so I looked mainly to dye inks.

Your data sets had only one pigment example

Pigment inks are ConeColor Pro, Ultrachrome K3 VM and the R1800 pigment ink sets.
There are plenty more test reports with Epson Ultrachrome inks and Canon Lucia pigment inks reaching up to a CDR of 125 - 150, pigment inks indeed can be better than dye inks, but not all of them, and only with specific papers.
And there is another element to consider for the interested user - just calculate the cost of a typical A4 or whatever sheet printed with this or that ink on cheap or OEM paper , that may range from 5 cts up to 1€, and you can try to calculate and ask how and whether the price increase pays off with better fading performance, and what you are willing to pay for it, you have all options.
You can test lots of properties, and the chemical companies producing the base dye/pigment ink material do definitely more internal testing but won't tell you much about it.
A 80gr copy paper is not standardized and won't help much.
A business model with proprietary products can work very well - look to Apple....so take the available data and make the best out of it, for you with that price/performance ratio you are aiming for.

 

[te36]

I have not tried to search the marketing material of Canon/Epson, etc.: All i have seen reported here on the forum is that they make claims about eg: 30++ years fade resistance for inks. But do they make actual statements about the differences in fade resistance based on which of THEIR papers you use (with THEIR ink) ? If not, then any claims about the ink seem to be fairly useless. Unless i already know that the glossy paper is best so that i would always use their glossy paper for prints.

Lets say i am a normal consumer for my own consumption or a photographer wanting to sell prints:

Why the heck should i pay premium money for any ink or paper if i can not easily get easy to understand third party verified fade resistance data ? Comparable across vendors.

Is there any vendor of ink and/or paper that has on its web-pages easy consumer facing statements about eg: aardenburg (or any other third party) test results ? That would for me be a reason to consider that vendors products.

As a normal consumer i should not want to create an account and be bothered with technobabble terms like accumulated light/radiation energy or MegaLuxhours even thought they sound cool. I just want easy comparison, and as a photographer i want to be able to say something about the fade resistance that my customer would understand. Like: This photo will fade like a watercolor painting. Keep out of Sun, use UV glass. Or: This photo is like a poster, you can keep it in the sun for 50 years. Aka: relate to known non-photo knowledge customers will have.

As a more tinkering hobbyist: Lets say i test ink/paper (eg: PC/kirkland) into bright sun for a week. What print should i test ? Just my i1pro color pattern ? And then measure the result ? You mentioned d in before some program to compare color gammuts.. for windows... and i can't locate that pointer...

Lets say i have done bright sun for hmm one week, and result looks good. Is there some simple guidance how many weeks at indoor, non-direct sunlight that would translate to ?

Aka: trying to figure out the easiest rule of thumbs...