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Mixing dye and pigment inks
I have seen cautions raised about mixing dye based and
pigment based inks. My canon i850 uses black pigmented ink and dye based color ink. Both black and color ink is used to print either color or gray scale pictures. Support of these statements are in earlier posts on this subject at the end of this article. My understanding is that pigment inks are solids that are finely ground (usually acrylics) mixed with an emulsifier in a water based carrier. Dyes are salts dissolved in a water base (aniline dyes?). From my woodworking experience, stains can be either pigments or dyes. If the carrier is compatible there is no problem mixing them, but you get a mess if you mix oil based pigments with water based dyes. Home use printers use water based inks. I don't understand the problem in mixing dyes and pigments if they are water based. I don't see any problem in using dyes in a printer designed for pigments. I can see a problem in using pigments in a printhead designed for dyes. Why the caution about mixing dyes and pigments? Begin old quoted text Ray R Jan 9, 12:29 pm show options Subject: Yet Another - Canon Ink Question "Ron Cohen" wrote in message m... Your site says don't mix dye and pigmented inks. For color the i850 uses dye inks. The only choice you offer is pigmented black. http://atlascopy.com/refills/bulkcanon.htm offers a choice for the BCI-3 of either dye or pigmented ink. Their tech support says to use the dye ink in the i850. Which is correct mixing pigmented black with color dye ink or using all dye based ink? Thanks Ray On the i850 for photo printing, black is a mixture of the three color inks. The pigmented black is only used when a plain paper (text is assumed) mode is selected. An interesting hypothesis. One problem is that CY and M ink will not produce black. It is not within its color gamut. The darkest color CYM can produce is a dark muddy gray. To test the hypothesis I used photoshop to print gray scale gradient from 0 to 100%. I looked at the result under a microscope. Up to 80% gray it is composed of CY and M dots to produce gray. Above 80% it is black dots to produce darker gray and black. So at least on my i850 black ink is used to print dark colors in photo mode. An examination of dark areas on a photograph shows a mix of colored and black dots. This is true for either photo mode or plain paper mode. Now as to the type of ink the BCI3-eBK uses I emailed Canon. A received an answer within hours even though it was Saturday. The issue of mixing inks was ignored, but they stated that the black ink is pigmented and the color ink is dye. Very good tech support from Canon. My i850 produces very nice prints using Canon pigmented black or dye based black ink. I can't see any difference. My conclusion is that on the i850 using a mix of dye and pigmented ink is not a problem. Maybe it is because of the small dot size that not much mixing takes place. On the i850 photo black is not an option. It is an option for me, but using dye ink does nor appear to give any different results. Perhaps the easiest way to see it is to look directly at the print head carrier. There are slots for only four tanks. The black (pigmented) tank is physically larger than the three color tanks. Were you to use a photo black (dye based) ink,which of the three colors would you remove - Cyan, Magenta or Yellow? I think what may be confusing to you about the warning statement from the alotofthings page is that while a number of Canon printers used BCI 3e tanks, only a very few had the option to also use a separate photo ink print head. This is where the potential for using the wrong ink could be present. If someone refilled a photo black tank with pigmented ink, then not only would the inks not mix properly on the sheet resulting in poor results, printhead damage would also be likely. The following is a copy from a posting by John Mills of WeInk. I found it by doing a google search. I think he fully explains the i850 black ink issue. === start of copy =============================== John Mills Jul 12 2003, 4:02 pm show options Newsgroups: comp.periphs.printers From: "John Mills" - Find messages by this author Date: Sat, 12 Jul 2003 23:02:58 GMT Local: Sat, Jul 12 2003 4:02 pm Subject: Ink consumption question for Canon i850 owners Reply | Reply to Author | Forward | Print | Individual Message | Show original | Report Abuse If you use the i850 in plain paper standard or High Resolution Paper standard mode then all true black is handled by the black cartridge. Any gray scale other than black is a mix of both black and colors. Photos printed in plain paper standard mode or High Resolution Paper standard mode also use the black cartridge for true black in the photos, however what looks black to your eye may not be black to the driver and any off black color will be a composite of the colors. On all other modes the black is composited by the 3 colors. Ron Cohen Reply GB Jan 9, 5:04 pm show options Newsgroups: comp.periphs.printers From: "GB" - Find messages by this author Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 12:04:12 +1100 Local: Sun, Jan 9 2005 5:04 pm Subject: Yet Another - Canon Ink Question Reply | Reply to Author | Forward | Print | Individual Message | Show original | Report Abuse actually if you read the alotofthings url fully, which I have now, they go one to explain why the 6BK is dye, not pigment as the Canon tables tries to say it is. Basically the Canon table gets it wrong and another Canon document gets it right... However that doesn't change the fact that with my i865 I never fed more than a dozen pages of plain paper or HR-101 through it, 99.99% of all its printing was 6x4 photos. After printing a few hundred 6x4s the BCI-3eBK was near empty (from brand new). So I really don't care what people try to say about dye and pigment not mixing, and the 3eBK only being used for text etc, you can't ignore what happens in front of your eyes. Oh and exactly the same thing happened with my i850 before that. " Ron Cohen" wrote in message m |
#2
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A few corrections. Pigments aren't acrylics if that was you were trying
to suggest. Many pigment inks use an water soluble acrylic resin to help hold the pigment particles in suspension, however. Pigment particles are usually mineral of some type or an insoluble mineral salt. Carbon black is one used for black, for instance. The incompatibility you speak of is more obvious with some special inkjet coated papers. Pigment inks tent o sit on top of the surface of the paper, while dye inks tend to penetrate them. The problem is the black ink tends to sit on top and be fairly opaque and so if the other inks are dyes, they end up lying beneath the black and get lost. In some cases one of the other will not adhere to the paper being used. Certain papers will not hold one of the other rink types well or won't dry, or some bronze or texture the print only in the pigment area. Art ray wrote: I have seen cautions raised about mixing dye based and pigment based inks. My canon i850 uses black pigmented ink and dye based color ink. Both black and color ink is used to print either color or gray scale pictures. Support of these statements are in earlier posts on this subject at the end of this article. My understanding is that pigment inks are solids that are finely ground (usually acrylics) mixed with an emulsifier in a water based carrier. Dyes are salts dissolved in a water base (aniline dyes?). From my woodworking experience, stains can be either pigments or dyes. If the carrier is compatible there is no problem mixing them, but you get a mess if you mix oil based pigments with water based dyes. Home use printers use water based inks. I don't understand the problem in mixing dyes and pigments if they are water based. I don't see any problem in using dyes in a printer designed for pigments. I can see a problem in using pigments in a printhead designed for dyes. Why the caution about mixing dyes and pigments? Begin old quoted text Ray R Jan 9, 12:29 pm show options Subject: Yet Another - Canon Ink Question "Ron Cohen" wrote in message m... Your site says don't mix dye and pigmented inks. For color the i850 uses dye inks. The only choice you offer is pigmented black. http://atlascopy.com/refills/bulkcanon.htm offers a choice for the BCI-3 of either dye or pigmented ink. Their tech support says to use the dye ink in the i850. Which is correct mixing pigmented black with color dye ink or using all dye based ink? Thanks Ray On the i850 for photo printing, black is a mixture of the three color inks. The pigmented black is only used when a plain paper (text is assumed) mode is selected. An interesting hypothesis. One problem is that CY and M ink will not produce black. It is not within its color gamut. The darkest color CYM can produce is a dark muddy gray. To test the hypothesis I used photoshop to print gray scale gradient from 0 to 100%. I looked at the result under a microscope. Up to 80% gray it is composed of CY and M dots to produce gray. Above 80% it is black dots to produce darker gray and black. So at least on my i850 black ink is used to print dark colors in photo mode. An examination of dark areas on a photograph shows a mix of colored and black dots. This is true for either photo mode or plain paper mode. Now as to the type of ink the BCI3-eBK uses I emailed Canon. A received an answer within hours even though it was Saturday. The issue of mixing inks was ignored, but they stated that the black ink is pigmented and the color ink is dye. Very good tech support from Canon. My i850 produces very nice prints using Canon pigmented black or dye based black ink. I can't see any difference. My conclusion is that on the i850 using a mix of dye and pigmented ink is not a problem. Maybe it is because of the small dot size that not much mixing takes place. On the i850 photo black is not an option. It is an option for me, but using dye ink does nor appear to give any different results. Perhaps the easiest way to see it is to look directly at the print head carrier. There are slots for only four tanks. The black (pigmented) tank is physically larger than the three color tanks. Were you to use a photo black (dye based) ink,which of the three colors would you remove - Cyan, Magenta or Yellow? I think what may be confusing to you about the warning statement from the alotofthings page is that while a number of Canon printers used BCI 3e tanks, only a very few had the option to also use a separate photo ink print head. This is where the potential for using the wrong ink could be present. If someone refilled a photo black tank with pigmented ink, then not only would the inks not mix properly on the sheet resulting in poor results, printhead damage would also be likely. The following is a copy from a posting by John Mills of WeInk. I found it by doing a google search. I think he fully explains the i850 black ink issue. === start of copy =============================== John Mills Jul 12 2003, 4:02 pm show options Newsgroups: comp.periphs.printers From: "John Mills" - Find messages by this author Date: Sat, 12 Jul 2003 23:02:58 GMT Local: Sat, Jul 12 2003 4:02 pm Subject: Ink consumption question for Canon i850 owners Reply | Reply to Author | Forward | Print | Individual Message | Show original | Report Abuse If you use the i850 in plain paper standard or High Resolution Paper standard mode then all true black is handled by the black cartridge. Any gray scale other than black is a mix of both black and colors. Photos printed in plain paper standard mode or High Resolution Paper standard mode also use the black cartridge for true black in the photos, however what looks black to your eye may not be black to the driver and any off black color will be a composite of the colors. On all other modes the black is composited by the 3 colors. Ron Cohen Reply GB Jan 9, 5:04 pm show options Newsgroups: comp.periphs.printers From: "GB" - Find messages by this author Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 12:04:12 +1100 Local: Sun, Jan 9 2005 5:04 pm Subject: Yet Another - Canon Ink Question Reply | Reply to Author | Forward | Print | Individual Message | Show original | Report Abuse actually if you read the alotofthings url fully, which I have now, they go one to explain why the 6BK is dye, not pigment as the Canon tables tries to say it is. Basically the Canon table gets it wrong and another Canon document gets it right... However that doesn't change the fact that with my i865 I never fed more than a dozen pages of plain paper or HR-101 through it, 99.99% of all its printing was 6x4 photos. After printing a few hundred 6x4s the BCI-3eBK was near empty (from brand new). So I really don't care what people try to say about dye and pigment not mixing, and the 3eBK only being used for text etc, you can't ignore what happens in front of your eyes. Oh and exactly the same thing happened with my i850 before that. " Ron Cohen" wrote in message m |
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"Arthur Entlich" wrote in message news:u4QFd.93405$dv1.14156@edtnps89... A few corrections. Pigments aren't acrylics if that was you were trying to suggest. Many pigment inks use an water soluble acrylic resin to help hold the pigment particles in suspension, however. Pigment particles are usually mineral of some type or an insoluble mineral salt. Carbon black is one used for black, for instance. The incompatibility you speak of is more obvious with some special inkjet coated papers. Pigment inks tent o sit on top of the surface of the paper, while dye inks tend to penetrate them. The problem is the black ink tends to sit on top and be fairly opaque and so if the other inks are dyes, they end up lying beneath the black and get lost. In some cases one of the other will not adhere to the paper being used. Certain papers will not hold one of the other rink types well or won't dry, or some bronze or texture the print only in the pigment area. Art Thanks for the clarification. I have seen the bronzing effect, but it occurs with either dye or pigment ink. It is a function of the brand of paper not being absorbent enough. My Canon i850 works well with only a few brands of glossy paper. I have observed the ink pooling on the surface with both the color as well as the black ink. Are you saying if the ink does not pool on the surface there is no compatibility problem? Do you know specifically what minerals are used in pigment ink? |
#4
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Ink formulations vary considerably, especially in terms of drying times,
absorption, and so on. The paper coatings and bases can be extremely complex. As you likely know, some of these papers are produced in the same facilities are photo papers, because they require numerous coating be layered on top of each other. Once you are out of the manufacturer's recommendations, you are in uncharted territory. Unless a 3rd party company indicates they have tested and determined the inks you use will work with their papers, and even then profiles for the inks may or may not exists, you just have to experiment. There are no easy answers. In year gone by, I used to do a lot of testing of new inkjet coatings. I discovered that some might work well in a very limited driver profile, but "crash and burn" as soon as the slightest change in amount of ink went down. Some papers work well with heavy ink but poorly in lighter ink applications, more commonly, they opposite case, where light ink applications work, but heavy ink applications cause either a non-dry situation, or no perceivable variation for the last 30% of ink coverage... it all looks the same muddy black or brown. I found, for instance, that some papers worked with one Epson ink formulation but not another (both dye). Bronzing is yet another issue, sometimes caused by dichroic reflections in darker inks, due to the component colors used to make black dye inks dark enough. Still another issue is how long the ink will survive on the paper. I recall one brand of coated inkjet paper which, although looking quite nice when the print came out of the printer, would begin fading within weeks. Regarding which pigments are used... hell, even if they would tell me, I couldn't tell you. These are some of the most guarded secrets in ink formulations. Some "standards" are known, but the holy grail of finding pigments that fade slowly and evenly with their counterpart colors, have a wide color gamut especially when ground very finely, don't cause metamerism, and have other characteristics required for inkjet use, is a science all to itself, and one that is closely guarded. If you want to know more about pigment colorants, get a good book out of the library or check Google about paint pigments, or go to your art supply store and look at the tubes of color paints (water, acrylic or oil), but as to which specific mixes inkjet companies and 3rd party ink manufacturers are using... you'll likely need to hire some industrial espionage agent to work for you ;-) Art ray wrote: "Arthur Entlich" wrote in message news:u4QFd.93405$dv1.14156@edtnps89... A few corrections. Pigments aren't acrylics if that was you were trying to suggest. Many pigment inks use an water soluble acrylic resin to help hold the pigment particles in suspension, however. Pigment particles are usually mineral of some type or an insoluble mineral salt. Carbon black is one used for black, for instance. The incompatibility you speak of is more obvious with some special inkjet coated papers. Pigment inks tent o sit on top of the surface of the paper, while dye inks tend to penetrate them. The problem is the black ink tends to sit on top and be fairly opaque and so if the other inks are dyes, they end up lying beneath the black and get lost. In some cases one of the other will not adhere to the paper being used. Certain papers will not hold one of the other rink types well or won't dry, or some bronze or texture the print only in the pigment area. Art Thanks for the clarification. I have seen the bronzing effect, but it occurs with either dye or pigment ink. It is a function of the brand of paper not being absorbent enough. My Canon i850 works well with only a few brands of glossy paper. I have observed the ink pooling on the surface with both the color as well as the black ink. Are you saying if the ink does not pool on the surface there is no compatibility problem? Do you know specifically what minerals are used in pigment ink? |
#5
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In message yERGd.99391$nN6.21166@edtnps84, Arthur Entlich
writes don't cause metamerism What's that ? Cheers, J/. -- John Beardmore |
#6
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From the colourware uk website: "Metamerism refers to the situation
where two colour samples appear to match under one condition but not under another; the match is said to be conditional. Metamerism is usually discussed in terms of two illuminants (illuminant metamerism) whereby two samples may match under one illuminant but not under another. Other types of metamerism include geometrical metamerism and observer metamerism. Two samples that conditionally match are said to be a metameric pair. If two samples have identical reflectance spectra then they cannot be metameric - they are an unconditional match." Here's a webiste about it: http://akvis.com/en/articles/color-a...metamerism.php Art John Beardmore wrote: In message yERGd.99391$nN6.21166@edtnps84, Arthur Entlich writes don't cause metamerism What's that ? Cheers, J/. |
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