Which Pigment Ink for Epson 1500W?

[Ink stained Fingers]

Fading in the kitchen - on the fridge door - nothing yet , after 50 days - with the EV6 dye inks by precisioncolors, and no fading in the living room on a wall either.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I'm looking after my fading targets with and w/o the gloss optimizer to see their impact.

- there are the first signs that the pigment inks are fading as well, the numbers are above statistical and
measurement fluctuations now, and it appears that my pigment inks fade somewhat faster on the Labelheaven
CC paper than on the Tecco photo paper. That's not surprising, the Aardenburg tests show as well that the
fading of pigment inks depends on the paper as well. But I cannot say at this time that the GO makes any
difference to the fading on my targets. The GO does its intended job - to improve gloss and bronzing, but
here as well - depending on the paper, the look is better on the Tecco paper than on the cheap Labelheaven
paper

- the targets with the DL dye inks fade, that's no surprise, and they fade faster on the Labelheaven paper than
on the Tecco paper as reported earlier in more detail. The GO seems to slow the fading a little bit, but not
really enough to justify its use, and I don't like the look of the GO overprint on dye inks.

I let the sun to continue its job, but I'm not really expecting surprising results anymore.

 

[pharmacist]

Especially yellow pigment is prown to fade, I discovered a few years ago with the Image Specialist K3 ink set. Most of the time even cheap dye ink perform pretty well when prints are sealed behind glass.

Anyhow, after more than one year of using my Epson R2000 printer I got tired of this printer, because of the tenacious ink flow problems with this printer. Sometimes I had to perform 3-4 cleaning cycles to get ink flow well. I thought the problem was caused by using pigment ink, but even high quality Fujitsu dye ink caused ink flow problems. I don't think it was caused by clogs, but I think because of capillary problems (capping problems ?). Sometimes It just drops randomly ink globs on my prints, making the whole print useless.

So I am going back to an Epson 1500W printer, which works flawlessly in terms of clogging, even with pigment ink.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

Especially yellow pigment is prown to fade, I discovered a few years ago with the Image Specialist K3 ink set.

You confirm the findings of related Aardenburg tests, the pigment yellow is as well the weakest in the Epson genuine K3 inkset. The new HD inks for the P600/800 are claimed to be improved in that respect.
It's called 'premature fading of the yellow ink' in this article:
http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com/epson-uchd-versus-k3-inks/

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

When I'm looking to the fade targets and the effects over the last months I always observe the same - that the black inks at the end fade into some darker or lighter brown, except on the HP premium photo paper, and the black ink fades faster than cyan or magenta. There is probably a reason for it , the black color has to catch most of the photons with all the energy levels/wavelengths, the other colors only a part of it. The Fujifilm inks have shown the best overall dye ink performance, the Fujifilm black has a better black level than the Epson Ultrachrome D6 black , that's the status after print but not after months of exposure. When the Cyans and Magentas fade in an image the print may keep the color balance somewhat, and only getting lighter overall, but then the black turns into brown, changes this color balance and shifts it to a sunburn look. I'm asking myself what a quasi-black, mixed from cyan and magenta, would do under these conditions. The blacklevel would not be as dark as with a genuine black ink to start with, o.k. but what after a longer exposure period - could it be that the overall look is better since that the ugly brown shift of the black ink does not show up ?.

The lower end color printers with 4 colors, with a pigment black for normal paper, all models by Canon or Brother or Epson, mix the inks to black when selecting and printing on photo paper , this in the first place to offset the missing photo black, and probably not for long term light exposure.
I think there is something left for a test, a longer term test to get some impression how such mixed black would perform.

 

[martin0reg]

I have tested and compared canon bottled GI-490 ink, which is available only in C M Y, no photo black.
http://www.printerknowledge.com/threads/refilling-canon-with-oem-ink.10712/
After profiling the black level was almost as deep as with CMYK..
..But the fading was also just as bad as most other standard dye compatibles.
And regarding the "color of fading": most ink sets (if not all I know) are fading to the cold blue-green side. Which means M and/or Y is fading faster than C in general. And here the tested CMY ink sets wthout (photo) K were no exception.
This kind of fading to the cyan side will probably "override" the fading of K to brown, because the usage of K in any color print is rather small compared to C and M.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

the black level of a CM(Y) mix depends on the paper used, Canon , Brother etc tune the mix to look good on their own brand papers. Dark colors and dark gray are mixed from CM(Y), and transition only to the black ink, if available , for the last 5% of gray or so. The black inks fade faster than C and M, and pass C in lightness after some time, this at the end creates a kind of solarization effect inverting the previous black areas into light areas, that effect is changing outlines, borders , shadows etc more than an overall increase in lightness of the colored image parts. I still need something for the sun to do for the rest of the year......so I'm coming up with some of such ideas.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I was trying to find a easy way to overprint pigment ink prints with GO, I could use a dedicated printer for that, running GO in the black or all color ink channels, I could get a R2000/P400 whatever, but all that would not be justified by my pretty low A4 pigment ink print output. I was looking into and had a chance to test a Expression premium XP-520 for a short while, this printer family has 5 inks , 2 blacks like Canon was using since a long time. I thought I can use the pigment ink black channel for the GO instead, print the images on glossy paper with the remaining 4 inks CMYK, and overprint the GO in a 2nd printpass. The print quality is very good, the droplet size is 1.5pl, no granularity visible, sharpness is equal to the L800 as tested with the Clarkvision test pattern. But... the overprint does not work as planned , the driver does not provide the borderless print option for normal paper....so you get visible edges around the prints. The old R800 as the only A4 printer with GO is long gone and did not get any successor by Epson.

 

[martin0reg]

Good idea to use the textblack channel for GO in a second pass, with the same printer!
Sadly I have no such epson printer model.
I wouldn't mind the borders, because I like photographs with borders. Main question would be, how the overcoat looks, how it performs regarding gloss differential and bronzening.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I just did a brief test with the GO, normal paper, fine quality settings, B/W printing only. I need borderless printing, my R265 does that on normal paper so I was hoping other printer models would do the same but Epson has removed that option. The GO effect depends, as always, as well on the paper used, it looks very good on the Tecco paper, it looks better with GO on the cheap Labelheaven and Logic Seek papers, I don't like pigment inks with or w/o GO on the Sihl or Netbit papers. So I will look around for another solution.