Yet another fading test of dye inks - the last one (?)

[The Hat]

The test ends here,

These fading test figures are really bad, and it’s not surprising most don’t know just how bad their individual 3rd party inks can really be, because they are only guided by the price and not by their own results.

But going on your figures about, it’s easy to see how blind everyone is to the simple fact that the ink they are buying is only coloured water..

Thanks for all the testing and work you’ve done over the past weeks, but will it make a difference in the long run, or is price the deciding factor every time and not partial longevity..

On a side note:.. As soon as my ink arrives I will post my black ink tests up, I have decided to include Canon 53BK Black in my test just to see how it stands up against my 3rd party inks..

Maybe next week, who the Feck knows..

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

or is price the deciding factor every time and not partial longevity..

I think that's the prime reason the majority of people switches over to 3rd party sellers and go by the price but to a degree as well by prior experience like fast delivery - no clogging.

I know that some people would like to know a little bit more about the inks - some ask me what the differences are when octopus-office offers three different inks for the same printer - InkTec or Octopus Fluids or OCP , there are some price differences but they could have business reasons - e.g. more discount from the ink supplier for a larger volume - or marketing reasons to promote one ink over the other - or some ink parameter like longevity making a price difference. I asked them longer time ago but just got some marketing speech about the high quality of all their inks.

 

[nertog]

I'm closing this test with these results:

View attachment 14095

The Tintenliebe ink maintains its first place as the fastest fading ink in several tests so far, but the Cenado ink is pretty close - black turned into a light milk chocolade brown at this time. The GSC 'Archival' ink is disappointing, and the Hongsam HLT ink performs somewhat better than the other 3rd party inks in this test, but does not really reach the performance of the Epson 106 ink at all. This clearly shows the difficulty to buy a 3rd party ink by its fading performance - no reliable data are available but just supplier promises like 'UV resistance' or 'archival' or similar. It's up to the user to find the balance between pricing, assumed performance and availability.
The test ends here, all non-OEM inks of this and other recent tests are collected by color into larger bottles already and will be used up over time for short term prints - internet and such.

Thanks again for the interesting info! The Hongsam inks I use show that relatively stable black ink behavior as well...and the other colors seemed subjectively quite good. Your test show that this is not completely true

Do you have gamut plots available for the inks you've tested here? I noticed the Hongsam magenta is quite dull, while the Cenado one is very vivid. I never bothered to profile the Cenado inks, though...

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

Please let me see what I still have from this test, I typically delete and throw away quite a lot - printouts, patch sheets , temporary data etc, it would fill boxes otherwise. I'll send you the icc-profiles I can still create. It's o.k. for comparison, but they would only be usable on a WF2010W printer.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

These are the profiles with Cenado - Hongsam and Epson 106 inks as the test started - they vary quite a lot in the darker ranges.
The profiles are created with a patch sheet with 96 patches, the i1Profiler software let me scan the patch sheets and can make a comparison of the patches before and after expsure and then calucates a deltaE per patch and takes an average of all those deviations. That is a first level indicator how those DeltaE's vary with the inks over time, but there are more effects hiding and covered up in these averages.

You can have different situations

- all patches vary by a similar amout

- or patches with one color - e.g. cyan - fade faster - deltaE's are larger - and are smaller for the other colors - the average may be the same as in the previous case

And does this make a visible difference - yes it does - when all patches lighten up with a similar speed the printed image gets lighter but the overall impression remains - there is no significant color cast or shift

or you have the case that the black ink fades much faster than cyan - gets even lighter than cyan - and turns chocolade brown which creates a kind of strange almost ugly look although the average DeltaE remains the same

and/or cyan is shifting much faster then the other colors which creates a very visible color cast in a printed image - and this is very much visible as well - although the deltaE still has the same value.

I have shown these effects in a test about a year ago that colors can shift with different speed - and adding more to the fun - this is not just an ink characteristic but depends as well on the paper you are using. You even can have opposite effects on different papers -one ink color fades faster than the other colors on one paper type and slower on another paper type. There is quite some fun when you start observing these effects. There is no way to put all this complex behaviour into just one rating number. These DeltaE numbers are a prelim indicator but do not tell the complete performance.

Considering all this I can judge the Hongsam HLF ink performing quite well in my test - better than quite a lot of other inks I have seen but the inks nevertheless do not come close to the performance of the Epson inks.

 

[nertog]

These are the profiles

Thanks!

I had a look at the different profiles and compared them to mine. The Cenado gamut is similar in size and volume to what I get on my testbed, but the Hongsam inks you tested show a much higher saturation in the magenta range. I would say these are not the same inks as the Hongsam Evernew series.

Looking at the color shifts of your test samples, do you have any idea which one of the Hongsam inks is the most fugitive?

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

Yes, the gamuts vary quite a lot - these are pretty different inks overall.

When I go into the detailed numbers you see this

- the Hongsam black just shifts by a deltaE of 4,1 in a week, that's very good - better than the average, other inks like Inktec run higher than average with the black, that's an ink in which black turns to chocolade brown very quickly, and that looks ugly.
When you look to the primary ink colors CMY you see this :

- Cyan tpyically fades the most - 17,11 for the Hongsam ink
- Magenta fades by 11,1
- Yellow by 2,7

- The ratio Cyan/Magenta is 1,5 , that is barely visible as a shift to red/brown after a while, I have seen ratios up to 4,0 with some inks , Cyan faded much faster than Magenta and prints got a red shift/color cast pretty soon, and when you combine that with a weak black you have the worst combination of bad properties.

And mixed colors with a higher ink density fade faster as well, specifically those in the lower , darker gamut range, there are just more color molecules which are affected by UV/ozone, so a dark brown can show a value of 25.

You see that an overall average is a good indicator to separate different groups of inks - a DeltaE of 3,9 is def. better than a DeltaE of 12 or 20 , but if you have numbers like 7,9 and 9,1 it is not that simple anymore, and a look to the individual inks - black and the ratio of Cyan/Magenta gives you much better information. You can go into details more and more but I don't see much of a benefit there, I'm not going to the level of Aardenburg Imaging doing spreadsheets and graphs etc.

https://www.aardenburg-imaging.com/ under the tab 'Research - Light Fade Test Results'

You need to get registered, but that's free.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

Yes, I'm starting another fading test - a short and simple one - I'll let these inks compete in this test run - the Epson 106 ink as a kind of reference - the Inktec E0010 color dye ink which is available about everywhere and a Hongsam Chinese dye ink with some HLF - High Light Fastness - properties, this is basically a test to compare a popular Inktec ink with this Hongsam ink; pricing is secondary in this comparison since this can vary very much between countries - same as actual availability. I got the Hongsam ink via their Polish distributor to Germany.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I can report some numbers to you after the first 5 days of this test cycle with the Hongsam HLF inks, numbers are slightly higher than in a previous test , there are more and longer sunhours in this period, the 106 ink is there to compare to, and as well the inktec ink at the low performance end.

These are the deltaE (76) values after 5 days of sun (and some ozone, not so much, the weather office did not publish an ozone warning yet)

5.35_____Epson 106 ink on a Glossy 300g PE/RC paper
7.81_____the Hongsam HLF ink
15,24___ Inktec E0010 - a 4 color dye inkset for a range of Epson printers

The Hongsam HLT ink performs very well and is pretty close to the 106 ink, this is the best 3rd party ink I see since a long time of testing, I tested lots of other 3rd party dye inks in the past with the claim of 'UV resistance' which at best did not do much better than the Inktec inks, and some inks did worse - even much worse.

Let me have another look to a different parameter - how does the black ink fade , just the black ink, RGB=0

0,98_____Epson 106 ink on a Glossy 300g PE/RC paper
1,76_____the Hongsam HLF ink
2,75____ Inktec E0010 - a 4 color dye inkset for a range of Epson printers

This confirms the above ranking already - just after 5 days of testing

And let me show you another characteristic how different these inks are - I'm measuring the pure cyan and magenta spots where they are not mixed to other colors

6,71_____Cyan Epson 106
5,07_____Magenta
1,3______Cyan/Magenta - cyan shifts a bit faster than magenta which will create a blueish color cast after some time

5,81_____Cyan Hongsam
9,21_____Magenta
0,63_____C/M - Magenta shifts faster than Cyan, prints will end up with a reddish color cast

12,57____Cyan Inktec
15,12____Magenta
0,73_____C/M - Inktec fades faster than the other inks, with a trend to Magenta, add here that the black ink as well shifts to brown pretty soon.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

Let me update you with the test results after 10 days of exposure, the overall ranking remains - the Hongsam ink confirms to be a very good 3rd party ink, better than most - if not all - inks I have seen over several years of testing, I remember a Fotonic (Lyson) XG ink with the promise of high UV stability, but with limited availability already 5 years ago, but I cannot recall any test results with this ink.

These are the deltaE(76) values after 10 days

8,18____Epson 106
11,51___Hongsam HLF
20,82___Inktec E0010

There are more parameters like the spread of the patch readings - a standard deviation, the different fading speed of different colors etc which show as well the much superior performance of the Hongsam ink over the Inktec ink, the Inktec inks show a strong color cast already - a shift to red/brown whereas the Hongsam patches stay more balanced colorwise; this is a test for an Hongsam Epson inkset, I'm not familiar if they have a comparable Canon HLF inkset.

( I actually tested another Inktec ink in recent tests without reporting any details, the Inktec E0014 inkset, an inkset offered for 6-color Epson dye printers - like the generation of the 1400/1500W, L800, L1800 , P50 printers and a wide range of combo models over the years and the XP photo printer series. These E0014 inks perform quite similar to the E0010 ink , there is not reason to replace one inkset by the other ).

I'm stopping this test cycle now after 10 days , a positive surprise is the performance of the Hongsam HLF inkset.
The only other inks left for testing are the Epson 502 Claria inks for ET- Ecotank printers in the U.S. - but it'll take approx. 2 - 3 months until I get a set.