Printing Artwork on an Inkjet - Multiple Issues and Questions

[Elohim]

INTRODUCTIONS
Hi everyone, first post here on the forum.

Some friends and I have a small home based arts and crafts business in which we put together crafts kits for children to use. We print full color covers, instruction sets, and artwork for use in our products and need fairly high quality and very good cost per page to keep things going for us.

EQUIPMENT
At this point in time we are utilizing four HP Business Inkjet 1200d printers and buying refill ink from "Atlantic Inkjet" in liter bottles of each pigment(cyan, magenta, and yellow) and black. Our general purpose paper we are using right now is XEROX Extra Bright Multipurpose 24lb bond (750 sheets to a ream) from our local Sam's Club store. Our current cardstock base is Georgia Pacific Image Plus+ Card Stock 110lb, also from our local Sam's Club store. Both paper and cardstock are both 8.5x11 and white. Our average print volume per month per print probably runs about
2000 sheets. We estimate our cost per sheet of full color printing at only about $0.02 including the paper, ink, and original printer purchase costs.

PROBLEMS AND QUESTIONS
So, now that we've got the initial stuff down, on to the fun stuff.

Black Ink Bleeds On Cardstock.
Our current major problem is the bleeding that occurs when we print black on cardstock. It's pretty significant. It's to the point that text is a bit difficult to read when printed in size 10 font or less. The bleeding is much less pronounced on our regular bond paper. We have recently switched ink suppliers from "The Printer Ink Warehouse" to "Atlantic Inkjet" which helped reduce the bleeding, but not eliminate it.

Should we consider changing ink, paper, printers, or all of the above? We are really stumped and not really willing to go to a laser printer where the toner costs would kill us.

Black Ink Does not Cover Cardstock or paper completely.
We have a second problem in our black of it not completely covering our cardstock and bond paper. I don't mean banding here, but something like little flecks of white all over in a solid piece of black. I've uploaded an image to give you an idea of what I am talking about.

The black above should be a solid black, but instead you get these flakes of white all over it. Is this an ink, paper, or printer issue? All our printers do it to one degree or another.

Advice?
So, again, I am looking for any advice out there from anyone who would like to give it. Specific reccomendations for treated papers or different inks and printers would be great! Thank you in advance!

Mark.

 

[fotofreek]

Very well organized and presented! I see a few problems here. Dye based inks are water soluble and might not be the best for children's products as the prints are not water resistant.

The best papers to use for resisting bleeding are coated papers designed specifically for inkjets. For card stock the best I have used is Staples photo supreme double sided matte paper, and I have found it on two-for-one sales periodically. That will totally blow your two cent budgeted cost, however.

Pigment-based inkjet printers are the best for being more water resistant and preventing bleeding on standard paper finishes. They tend to clog more frequently and need more maintenance for this problem. Epson has several pigment-based ink printers, and Canon has just come out with a fairly high line of printers that use pigment-based inks. If you are only printing black text and graphics the Canon printers with one black pigment-based ink cart would do the trick (ip4200, 4300, 5200). Even though the newest Canon printer ink carts have chips to attempt to prevent refilling, they can be refilled as long as you are prepared to visually check ink levels before and during long print runs. Too bad the previous generation of Canons are nearly all out of the sales pipeline - the carts were not chipped, were easily refilled, and there was a ready supply of aftermarket prefilled carts.

I haven't had occasion to try to print a totally black page on white stock, but I would guess that this may be a difficult feat for most inkjet printers. It wouldn't take much of a slight clog or occasional tiny malfunction to show up on such a printing task as a white spot. This sort of thing would probably not be noticed on multicolor prints.

Bottom line - if your printing needs are primarily black I would look into a decent quality laser printer with cartridges you can refill. There are supplies for refilling HP carts, and I am sure there are materials for others as well. In addition, some laser printers are refillable with containers of toner which are available aftermarket, but they generally require service periodically to take care of the parts that the cartridge-based lasers simply replace with each cartridge change.

 

[Elohim]

THE SOLUTION!
Well, for those who read this and are interested in what happened. We ended up switching to a different brand of cardstock that one of our small local printers was able to order in for us. We are now using "Lynx Opaque" 80lb cardstock - Lynx Item# 638800.

Thanks for the comments fotofreek! It looks like we are ok with out current printer setup and ink. We do still get some banding, but it can often times be fixed by replacing printheads, or just aligning them now and again.

Elohim

 

[canonfodder]

Elohim,

If you are doing about 2000 pages/month and you buy ink in liter bottles, sooner or later you should consider a CIS System. With the right system you could connect those 1 liter bottles to your printer and not be refilling so often.

Many on this forum would appreciate knowing how much ink you use for 2000 pages. Such information coupled with the paper, ink brand, and printer model is allways helpful. See if you can post those statistics, please.

Thank you,
canonfodder