Which Pigment Ink for Epson 1500W?

[pharmacist]

Coral vs Fuji DL using "black ink only", another test on unknown glossy paper:
View attachment 2081

The left side look nicer to me, the right image is a bit greenish.

 

[martin0reg]

That was my first impression too .. but it is really a matter of relativity, the left side could appear a bit magenta, similar to the diluted ink.

(edit) in several pdf's about making b&w ink sets paul roark says, the noritsu black dye ink would have a greenish tint. This is interesting because noritsu dye ink for drylabs could be the equivalent to the fuji frontier DL ink...

PS: I posted my latest evaluation of the fuji ink set in the other thread:
http://www.printerknowledge.com/thr...uting-magenta-and-cyan.7545/page-2#post-76923

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

As long as we all look to those test images on our monitors we all will see something different, some are
probably not calibrated, and don't have a common white point either. The black levels should be measured with a spectrophotometer. If a RGB 0,0, 0 black is printed and looks like having a tint, you won't be able to correct that with an ICC profile, you would need a RIP to control the color channels independently and/or to correct the black level tint. Looking to those diluted colors ist just a comparison against each other, that works better on a monitor. I somehow remember some experiment quite some time ago, but cannot find a link anymore, o.k., somebody was trying to get a better black level, by overprinting the blacks with black again. You cannot do that with a normal printer in a second pass, the paper positioning accuracy is just not good enough for that, but good enough for a try, print a black square, and overprint that with a smaller square in a second pass , and under good illmination you'll recognize the overrprinted area being darker.
The experiment was to tweak a RIP for a Epson 4800 printer to reassign the black and gray channels to 2x black and 1x light black to achieve the overprint in one pass. There was some improvement seen from that experiment but it is apparently not good enough to convince many.

 

[martin0reg]

Besause here in this thread are already some interesting photos of diluted black inks, which are showing the "color" of different black inks, I want to continue this topic.

To tell the background - I had mixed a 6 color ink set from (4 color) fujifilm DL ink (which seems to be a very good substitute for epson's OEM claria dye ink) ..
And recently a B&W ink set from the DL black too, which is unsurprisingly much better for resolution and tonality than using the "black only mode" (see last postings in this thread)
Both mixes are described here:
http://www.printerknowledge.com/thr...d-ligh-cayn-by-diluting-magenta-and-cyan.7545

Until recently I have done this mostly with an old r285, but now I am curious what I could do with my new mr. big, a pro3880.
Refill carts are odered and also I had succeeded in trying jtoolman's modification of OEM carts for the 3880 to make them refillables
http://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/3786852

Now what I would like the most is to try the DL dye ink in the 3880. I would start with my dilution of the four DL inks to six (diluting M+C to LM+LC: see the link above). Additionally I would have to dilute K to LK and LLK.

But after poking an empty 3880 cartridge (to understand jtoolman's modification of 3880 carts) I had a rest of PK ink out of an original ultrachrome K3 set in my syringe.
Having also a small amount OEM claria black ink and my DL black ink I wanted to compare these blacks with the UCK3 black. Because from earlier samples of highly diluted blacks (one drop on a small glass of water, more images here in this thread) I knew that most dye blacks are on the violet side, while claria is supposed to be neutral.


Now there was a surprise to me: both the OEM claria and the DL ink seem to be almost the same: very neutral grey (good matching of DL as claria substitute)
- but the PK (have not tried MK yet) of UCK3 is looking clearly greenish!


Because the color tint of the black must be taken in account for the colors of the whole set, I am now thinking about possible issues regarding color matching of a refill ink set for the 3880, may it be my DL ink or other mixes.. or even ready made 3rd party ink sets.. Because I never saw such a green tint, mostly the opposite: magenta/violet ... or neutral grey in claria and DL..

Any comments or hints regarding the color of black in different ink sets...??

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

O.K., that's a rather tricky issue. There is somewhere - I forgot the name - an inkset on the market for B/W printing with which the prints still can be toned from a more blueish gray to a warmer gray. The approach is rather simple - not to create 'real' gray inks but to use inks which are pretty gray but still have a residual color tone M or C or LC or LM or Y. Then running an ICM profile on this ink set which results in a pretty small gamut, but using that profile will give you the technically available and best possible gray values by mixing wherever possible - via the profile corrections. And if you want another tone of your B/W prints you can tone the gray as you like it by software - what are the benefits - you can use that black ink which you think is appropriate, for stability, black level , dye whatever - you don't need to be bothered that those diluted blacks that have a residual color tone, those will be corrected by the profile

 

[martin0reg]

Just to make it clear: for the 3880 I want to mix a COLOR set (not a b&w set like I did for the R285).

I have read about those B&W sets where you can tint the output from neutral to warm or cold by adjusting channels with color or colored grays...

.. now to clarify my question: Do you think that the black in a selfmade dye color set for the 3880 (diluted from the 4 colors of DL ink to 8 colors of UCK6)
does NOT need this green tint, which can be seen in the OEM UCK6 ...?? ...(on the left of the three "blacks in a glass")

(edit) or do you mean that the profiling will balance it..?
..the more it matches the OEM by itself, the easier is the profiling..

 

[Smile]

Well true black ink needs not to have a tint, diluted or not.
This would result in better fading color stability also.

ICC profiles can correct this but imagine how angry you will get when prints will fade horribly in different shades of gray having different color cast etc.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

that may be a new type of artistic effect .....the ever changing printout. But o.k., my and other people's testing so far shows that the black ink (dye) from the Fujilfilm Drylab printers is by far better in terms of UV stability than any other ink I have tested in this context, other black inks have turned into a dark yellow in the meantime, and the Drylab ink stays black so far, and the other colors stay as well without visible degradation. So, if using a dye black at all as the base for such an ink set only this one would make sense.
In terms of mixing and matching there are 2 possibilities - either trying to mix and match by trial and error the original color tones needed for that particular printer, or using an icm-profile to let the profile with the printing software make the final corrections. If a black turns green by strong dilution I could try to compensate that with the complementary color, or let the profile correct it by printing the the correct amount of corrective color at printout time. A profile cannot correct any weird hue error, but can do a lot to keep the gray tones on the gray axis.

 

[RogerB]

Any comments or hints regarding the color of black in different ink sets...??

I'm not convinced that the colour you see in the highly diluted pigment ink is representative of how the ink looks in normal concentration on paper. Your glass of diluted ink is a suspension of sub-micron pigment particles (<200nm) which will scatter the light in a complex way. The green tint that you see may simply be a consequence of the scattering and not related to the actual "colour" of the individual particles. Think of the colour of cigarette smoke in the air - definitely blue; but when it settles on the ceiling it is definitely brown!

You can see a similar effect if you put a few drops of milk in a glass of water. Scattering by the sub-micron fat globules will make the water look slightly blue, while a light source viewed directly through the water will look more yellow.

I have done lots of measurements of K3 inks in generating QTR curves and I have not seen any significant green bias when printing with "pure" K, LK or LLK ink at any density. In fact the inks as printed are predominantly yellow. The lowest a* value I have seen is <1, a barely perceptable green tint. On the other hand the b* can be as high as 10, a very obvious yellow tint.

 

[martin0reg]

Okay, the color that you see in the one-drop-dilution is certainly not the color of the same black printed on paper ... but it is definitely in the ink, no optical effect. Just take a look at post 49!
I'm not the first who noticed a violet tint of many dye blacks - and a surprising neutral tint of the claria black.
How a certain black will look on a print is another question, because the second factor is the paper.
For example see p 3-4 of this pdf from Paul Roark, where he adds magenta to the DL black to compensate the printing on some sort of papers:
http://www.paulroark.com/BW-Info/BW-Dye.pdf
My prints in posting 58 and 60 are showing exactly this (very slight) color tint of black. They are printed with r285 in "black only mode" (using only the black ink channel) and comparing coralgraph with fuji DL (which is obviously pretty much the same as claria).

BTW I came to the "one drop dilution", because I wanted to estimate the density of normal and light inks. Took each 30ml of one-drop C and LC (of different sets), then diluted the C more, step by step, until it looked like LC. So I got a roughly estimated ratio for diluting my DL C+M to LC+LM. Besides I got helpful information here in the forum and from Paul Roark's site.

Now for DL ink in the 3880 I will have to dilute also to LK and LLK...how to do it?
I will take the calculation for B&W as an existing dilution ratio:
K: 100% (C: 30%, M:18%, ....)
LK: 18% black ink + 82% gloss optimizer
LLK: 6% black ink + 94% gloss optimizer
And to prove this with real UCK6 I will do the estimation with one-drop-dilutions of original K LK and LLK.. hoping the results will be at least very similar to the 18% and 6% - although these rates sound like very less black...