Which Pigment Ink for Epson 1500W?

[Ink stained Fingers]

Isn't there anywhere an Anomymous Print Addiction group .....? I'm still after the differences of the Fujifilm Drylab and Epson Surelab Dye inks D6s (D700 printer ) - which one is better ? I think I'm coming to an end of that evaluation, here are my findings - I printed the 4 color bar patches each with the DL inks and the Surelab inks on a L800 3 weeks ago and kept that printout in the outside, under a balcony protected against direct rain.



I merged each of the 4 color bars with the corresponding bar of the other ink, here is the one for magenta, and overlaid the histrograms for both bars



The old PaintShop Pro 9 program has a nice histogram adjustment function giving detailed readouts at the cross hair cursor of the luminance diagram as selected - I'm only looking at the luminance here.
Look to the left DL ink diagram - it shows two peaks - one for the bottom part of the patch - folded away and not exposed to the light during the fading period - the 2nd peak belongs to the upper part, exposed and faded, the luminance of the left peak is 87 , the right one at 100, the display details show 40291 pixels with this lightness ( in the range from 0 - 255) , the DL magneta ink shifted the peak from 87 to 100 , a visible sign of fading. Look to the right histogram of the D6 ink, one peak only, at a luminance of 93, this ink did not fade at all during these three weeks. I did the same evaluation for the other inks as well, but did not beautify the findings into equivalent images, but just loaded the luminance values into a table

--------------- D6s ink -----------DL ink

Magenta --- 93 stable -------- 87 - 100 fading

Cyan ----- 52 - 58 fading ----- 50 - 60 fading

Yellow ----- 208 stable--------- 208 stable

Black ------ 36 - 42 fading-------34 stable

So to sum up - both yellow inks perform equally - the D6 Cyan and Magenta inks are better than the DL inks - and the DL Black performs better than the D6 black - so that's a pretty mixed result I didn't expect like that but only testing reveils the real results.

As shown earlier I created profiles for both ink sets on various papers, the gamut volume is about the same,
a profile would compensate any hue differences which are visible here at the cyan and magenta patches.

 

[martin0reg]

That seems to be a very special way to get some kind of evaluation, but as long as it is the same for both we may compare at least these two... And I would like to know how one of the average, faster fading dye inks would compare on this "scale"..?!

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

just look to the left, the magenta DL ink patch, you can see the upper part being somewhat lighter than the bottom part, that's what the luminance difference shows - this difference seems to be about the value at which it becomes directly visible when just looking to it, this after 3 weeks. When I would go back to the patch prints and comparisons from about a year ago when I tested various other dye inks a similar visible difference showed up already after some days to a week - o.k. there was some more sun over the summertime, but I remember one ink which reached this state already after one day - that was the winner as a fast fade ink. I do not measure any fixed value this way, the scanner is not calibrated, and may give me tomorrow some other values than today after a longer warm up, I could read the patches with the i1Pro Spectro but this histogram approach has the beauty of displaying thousends of pixels in one diagram , shows me the peak values and the distribution something I never could get with the Spectro. I'm always and only comparing those 2 inks on the same piece of paper exposed to the same outdoor situation, and scanned in the same pass excluding lots of other variables I otherwise would have to control and calibrate. Last years tests showed me that the DL inks were a class better than lots of other dye inks, always measured by comparison, and this was a test to find out whether price differences of the D6 and DL inks would justify the preference of one over the other. And after all these tests there is one result - dye inks fade - all of them - and about most of them much faster than these DL and D6 inks.

 

[martin0reg]

You certainly know aardenburg-imaging.
In their fading tests a typical OEM dye ink from canon or epson gets a
- "conservation display rating" of around 20-30 megalux hours.
Below this exposure a print is rated as "in good to excellent condition" regarding visible fading.
- similar results for fuji DL ink (the reason for me to follow that route)
- Pigments are reaching 50 to 100 megalux hours.
And the only two compatible dyes which I can find there, not the cheapest,
- are reaching 1 - 3 megalux hours..
..seems like you could actually see them fade..

The scale is explained in detail here:
http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/AaI_2009_0118_TA-01.pdf

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I don't have the Epson 'Claria' type ink available as Aardenburg tested it, that is too expensive since it is only available in small cartridges.

Yes, Aardenburg tested the Fujifilm inks with pretty convincing results but not the Epson Surelab inks to my knowledge, they were probably not widely available yet. I was interested to see whether there is any difference between them, and there is apparently one - so whenever I'll reorder inks again I'll go for those which performed better for me , I'll end up with a mix of brands , and I'll have to make new profiles again....

And yes - there are quite some fast fade inks on the market - that may be the next challenge for testing - to find the fastest fading ink ....giving you some caleidoscopic effect when you hold your prints into the sun and look at them.......changing their colors all the time
I'm happy with my pigment inks at this time, I won't do much testing with them. The challenge last year was more to find an ink/paper combination with the least bronzing, gloss differential and good gloss overall.
I'm printing some A4 with pigment inks - on the Sihl and Netbit papers - that's o.k. for the price but not as good as with dye inks, a Sihl metallic paper is doing better but is much more expensive, but most of my pigment inks go on poster type prints - either on matte fabric or an Emblem photo glossy from the roll with a Pro 7600 24", that Emblem paper is not available as sheet material at all, but gives me the best overall look.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I can add some info to my posting #109 above - short term fading of profiling targets - there is none now after 5 days - it does not matter if you scan a profile target after 1 hour or 5 days - I don't see a difference at all. Some people and companies do remote profiling, mailing in those target prints and waiting a few days until they are processed does not impact the correctness of such icm-profiles. O.k. - that all only applies as long as such target prints are kept in the dark.

 

[anazoolik]

My short experiences with both inks (DL and D6s) at Epson 1500W: i got more clogs with the fuji inks. Not only in OCP GLO deluted inks, also in original black and magenta.
I filled the external waste ink tanks 5 times with DL, but only 1 time with D6s.
At fuji ink machine i can wait for banding after 5-20 sheets A3+. At D6s machine it is really seldom. But it is possible, that the fuji ink machine printed a little bit more (i use different size paper on this machines), so it is not 100% comparable. But my decision in future is clear: D6s. More expensive, but less paper for bin

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

Thanks for your feedback, that is interesting to hear, I'm running the D6 inks now on a L800, and ran the DL inks previously, with no clogging problem with both inks so far, and this to a current print volume of about 2000 A4 photos. I'm using a cleaner as the dilutant for the light inks, not a gloss optimizer, I don't know how that would perform, it may be stickier, may be. I did a test longer time ago on a R265 running the undiluted inks in the light ink channels, I could create profiles that way, it was printing o.k. with no visible difference, the droplets are fine enough, but you cannot print with those inks anymore without a profile, just with standard driver settings, those prints get very much oversaturated.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I was wondering for quite a while how the ink passes through the printhead before it settles on the paper and fades away. I took a L300 out of operation last year because of clogging, and before it went to the electronic waste yard I took the chance to take the printhead out of the carriage.

The printhead assy sits in the bottom of the carriage and is connected with a flat cable to the main electronics, it took 3 screws and some fiddling with a plastic part to get it out:

You can see four rods with cone tips which pick up the inks from the cartridge outlets , there are 4 little holes in the grooves at the coned top, and this may indicate how some problems with 3rd party cartridges can occur - if the cartridge inside does not fit this rod tightly ink will not flow reliably.

Turning over the printhead assy you see the bottom plate



There are just 2 vertical rows with this L300 - a long one for black - and another segmented row for the three colors.
A crop of that picture shows the nozzles


There is nothing to see here whether and which nozzles are clogged.

The printhead assy from the image #1 above actually consists of two parts - a top plate with some internal channels to redirect the ink flow - and the actual bottom plate to which the nozzle assembly is attached.


the interesting details are the connections from the top to the bottom plate - there are 4 very fine oval filters visible on the right part - each surrounded by a small trace of a glue which separated when I opened this part. There is another small rubber gasket rhomboid shaped around all of it visible left in a little groove.
These filters are definitely good to protect the nozzles against any particles but at the same time can slowly clog up from gel and smeary type ink residue, a problem which quite similarly can occur with Brother printers for the same reason - a filter in the printhead clogs up. And it beomes clear that it is not easy to remove that stuff - not with typical forward cleaning via the cleaning pump in the printer, and not really with reverse cleaning trying to create some suction via the ink rods. That method of pushing and pulling some cleaner in and out of the printhead works in some cases but not in all of those which I have experienced.
And this image indicates a potential problem which might occur - bleeding of ink into another channel as soon as that glue around the filters is not perfectly placed during assembly, there is no way to inspect for that after top and bottom plate are matched together.

Long time ago I took a printhead apart of a R265 printer, that was quite a different construction, these filters within the printhead assy are missing. I find the R265 printer quite forgiving when it comes to ink problems - maybe for that reason.

 

[The Hat]

A great job @Inkstainedfingers explaining and showing the workings and inside of the L300 print head, there’s really nothing to it at all.

But those fine filters in photo 4, I reckon would be the cause of many a print head getting blocked, one because you can’t see them and two it would be impossible to know if the lack of ink on paper was cause by them clogging up or air bubbles.

Would it be possible for you to pull the nozzle plate photo 2, from its plastic mounting and post a photo of that also, it would be interesting to see the back of that plate and the makeup of the electoral connections..