Replace pigment ink with dye ink

[zzuurraa]

Hello, so i have HP 6500A Plus printer and i found out that black cartridge uses pigment ink and photos are just awfully dark, i have to lighten up a photo by 5 tones it to look properly exposed, so can i refill cartridge with dye ink instead of pigment?

 

[turbguy]

Typically, there is no problem with substituting dye for pigment inks, but your may have a bad experience with printhead life.

Most inkjets do not use pigment black ink for photo printing. I would be surprised if yours does. The black pigment ink is typically reserved for text printing only, where it is much more resistant to moisture (such as from highlighter use).
Many inkjets mix CYM inks to MAKE black (or dark gray).


The cause of your dark photos could easily be something else, such as a badly profiled monitor.

Wayne

 

[ThrillaMozilla]

A canonical complaint is that photos are too dark because the monitor is set nice and bright for viewing.

 

[zzuurraa]

oh thank you so much i have printed black text on a plain paper but i selected photo paper option and i actually see that there are three colors mixed to produce black, i guess i have to tweak the brightness in Photoshop before printing.

 

[PeterBJ]

zzuurraa wrote:

...but i selected photo paper option and i actually see that there are three colors mixed to produce black, i guess i have to tweak the brightness in Photoshop before printing.

You are right.

Your printer is an office printer with 3 dye colour cartridges: cyan, magenta, and yellow. It also has a larger pigment black cartridge used only for text printing on plain paper documents. The pigment black ink gives a sharper and more waterproof print, but only on plain paper. It is unsuitable for photo printing. Printers dedicated to photo printing also have a dye black and maybe more dye colour cartridges, but may lack the pigment black.

You can replace the pigment black with dye black without ruining the print head, but it would only give lower quality text print on plain paper. Pigment black should never be used instead of dye black, it will clog the finer nozzles used for dye colour inks.

 

[thanhhuy123]

Could anyone post an image of a sample text printout using dye black ink?? Just wanna see before make decision...

 

[The Hat]

Could anyone post an image of a sample text printout using dye black ink?? Just wanna see before make decision...

I dont know what different it makes to you because there is so little between dye and pigment ink
except for one being water proof and the other is not ..

 

[PeterBJ]

I agree with The Hat.

I have a handful of Canon printers that have pigment black for text printing, but I also have a dedicated photo printer, the Pixma 6600D, which has no pigment black, but uses dye black for plain paper documents. The photo printer also produces nice plain paper documents.

If you are printing labels for letters and parcels the better water fastness of the pigment ink is preferable, but else dye ink is satisfying for plain paper documents.

 

[thanhhuy123]

Many thanks!!

Based on the picture I also see barely no different accept some "stuff" (sorry my English is bad that I don't know the word to describe) in the back of the paper.

The reason I ask for this is that I'm refilling my HP564 pigment black cartridge but...well many problems arise. After reading some hundreds of posts on this forum I decided to have my cartridge purged and refilled with dye black ink to print some non-important paper.

 

[ThrillaMozilla]

HP564 pigment black? If you can get the right ink for that, I would use pigment black. That's what I have, and results are perfect. If you cannot get pigment black, then all right, try dye ink.

If you make sure the printer knows it's printing on photo paper, it will NOT use the pigment cartridge on photo paper.