n00b home printer question -- black ink in color printing?

Forums › Digital Imaging › n00b home printer question -- black ink in color printing?

1 | 2

Lykho

253 posts

Ultimate Geek

#911836 10-Oct-2013 02:56

tchart: BTW I once heard that a ml of inkjet ink is worth more than a ml of gold. So go figure. Could just be an urban myth of course! LOL

this?

Geektastic

17943 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#911886 10-Oct-2013 08:39

HP were actually giving away free printers if you bought 5 OEM inks recently!

Fred99

13684 posts

Uber Geek

#911901 10-Oct-2013 09:22

Lykho:
tchart: BTW I once heard that a ml of inkjet ink is worth more than a ml of gold. So go figure. Could just be an urban myth of course! LOL

this?

And a ml of gold is 19.3 grams, about US$1,000.
I bet the average woman's handbag contains liquids which cost more per ml than inkjet ink.

I like Epson's pigment ink a3 (and larger) inkjet printers, they can certainly produce beautiful quality prints. Some that I have had mounted - but not behind glass - and have been on display for 8 years show no significant sign of fading (they probably have in fact faded slightly - but it's not noticeable). They are also water-resistant, so can be wiped clean with a soft damp cloth.
But Epson also really annoy me - they sell identical cartridges in their home Japanese market - at less than half the NZ price. They use different model numbers for their home market printers, then the cartridges are geo-blocked via the chips - so you can't use a Japanese cartridge in the NZ market printer. The model of printer I have is two generations out of date, but despite hope that Epson might increase ink capacity from the 14ml per cartridge in my old printer, they reduced it with the next model to 12ml, and now to 10ml. So this looked like a pretty good reason to keep the old printer - but no - Epson hiked the prices of the old 14ml cartridges from about $22 each, to about $30 now. Curse them. Could always buy one of their larger printers to use high capacity cartridges, but unless you print quite large volumes, the ink shelf-life will probably expire before you can use them, and although the ink is less expensive per ml (but only by about 1/2) than small cartridges, it's still a major cost.

For the OP, to get quality monochrome prints, it's very difficult to achieve neutral prints with conventional inkjet printers which use coloured inks to produce light tones. The higher end photo inkjet printers from Epson/Canon/HP use various tones of neutral grey ink (sometimes called "light black) to generate neutral tones for monochrome printing. A good photo shop or digital print service will have access to this type of printer, some hobbyists also have them.

Lykho

253 posts

Ultimate Geek

#912140 10-Oct-2013 15:19

Fred99:
I bet the average woman's handbag contains liquids which cost more per ml than inkjet ink.

sure. even my contact lens fluid is pretty high on that chart ... but I use literally four drops a day. for the amount needed for a single usage, ink is probably pretty high up there (over perfume, barrel of oil, etc.), I mean, aren't we basically talking around $5 for a full color A4 sheet?

Lykho

253 posts

Ultimate Geek

#912141 10-Oct-2013 15:22

Fred99:
For the OP, to get quality monochrome prints, it's very difficult to achieve neutral prints with conventional inkjet printers which use coloured inks to produce light tones. The higher end photo inkjet printers from Epson/Canon/HP use various tones of neutral grey ink (sometimes called "light black) to generate neutral tones for monochrome printing. A good photo shop or digital print service will have access to this type of printer, some hobbyists also have them.

is the number of inks generally a good indication of photo quality to be expected? (like, I recently saw a printer with not just 'cyan/etc.' but 'light cyan/light magenta'. and of course you guys have talked about pigment black and ink black...now grey... is this home printing emulating pro printing, or are there lab prints that don't even rely on their color range to get you good quality?

Fred99

13684 posts

Uber Geek

#912226 10-Oct-2013 18:45

Lykho:
Fred99:
For the OP, to get quality monochrome prints, it's very difficult to achieve neutral prints with conventional inkjet printers which use coloured inks to produce light tones. The higher end photo inkjet printers from Epson/Canon/HP use various tones of neutral grey ink (sometimes called "light black) to generate neutral tones for monochrome printing. A good photo shop or digital print service will have access to this type of printer, some hobbyists also have them.

is the number of inks generally a good indication of photo quality to be expected? (like, I recently saw a printer with not just 'cyan/etc.' but 'light cyan/light magenta'. and of course you guys have talked about pigment black and ink black...now grey... is this home printing emulating pro printing, or are there lab prints that don't even rely on their color range to get you good quality?

More available colours of ink increases the available colour gamut. Conventional "wet process" prints only use three colours of dye. Inkjet printers with more than three colours exceeded the possible colour gamut from wet-process printing at least a decade ago. So yes - number of colours is a reasonable indication of how accurately a printer might reproduce the full spectrum of colours in a photograph.
Printer manufacturers do tell big porkies though, claiming that their printers exceed sRGB or aRGB colourspace etc. While it's true that they might be able to produce "peaks" of more saturated colour than defined by those colourspaces, those peaks only correspond with where the colour is the same as the ink available. Most of the rest of the near or fully saturated tones will still be out of gamut.
I don't know what the present situation in NZ is WRT "real" photos from a shop. In the US, many minilabs have moved away from wet-process (ie Fuji Frontier etc) to use "dry process" printers (IIRC with "Noritsu" brand) , which are made by Seiko-Epson, and use the same pigment ink as Epson's enthusiast and professional range of photo inkjets.

Fred99

13684 posts

Uber Geek

#912246 10-Oct-2013 19:04

Lykho:
Fred99:
I bet the average woman's handbag contains liquids which cost more per ml than inkjet ink.

sure. even my contact lens fluid is pretty high on that chart ... but I use literally four drops a day. for the amount needed for a single usage, ink is probably pretty high up there (over perfume, barrel of oil, etc.), I mean, aren't we basically talking around $5 for a full color A4 sheet?

I did the exercise calculating cost once, and IIRC the cost of ink per a4 was about or a little over $1. Good paper is also expensive (I've tended to use Epson or Ilford papers - but there are other high quality papers available).
It costs less than commercial prints in theory, but the reality is that if you want truly outstanding results, then you also need a colorimeter for screen calibration, a good quality monitor, you need full Photoshop for a colour-managed printing process using soft-proofing and out of gamut checking. Then there's a whole lot of shagging around, and a lot of learning to do.
I have lost interest, not sure if it's me being obsessive or not. The geek side of me is interested, but the other side of the brain says that with photography, there's a massive obsession with technology - when in most cases a good photo (composition/content), you may as well use an iPhone - because if you nail the artistic side, the technical stuff matters much less than cameras salesmen and equipment geeks would like you to believe.

1 | 2