Digital BW, The Print

<miguel.jimenez@...> wrote:

>I have been using recently this black ink to complement MIS hextone
>inks and using Paul Roark's curves on an Epson 1290 printer. I
>followed the advice of Jerry Olson here. The results are very good,
>very blak indeed, better than the MIS black I used before. Now I was
>going to buy a bottle to refill my cartridges and I read that this
>ink has 75% pigment ink and 25% dye ink. Is this something new, or I
>didnt notice?

It's not new.  Most of the older black inks appear to have had some black
dye in them.  The carbon black by itself was just not dark enough.  The more
dye, the blacker they can be, and the faster they will fade and warm.

> Would this affect longevity on prints? (Not that I
>aspire to see my prints in 100 years, but you know...)

Yes.  How one weighs the advantages of darker black against the faster
warming/fading is subjective.

> There is another set of inks (Generations Elite)
>with 100% of pigment. Is this as black as the other one?
>Is it something new?

I beleive it is actually an older ink.

The only pure pigment inks I've tried that are black enough for me are the
new "high-load" blacks that manage to get darker than the older pure pigment
blacks due to a new base that allows about twice as much pigment to stay
suspended.  The ones I know of are the Epson UltraChrome Matte Black,
PiezoTone Museum black, and MIS high-load matte black (not sure what MIS is
calling this, but it will probably replace all their existing pigment
blacks).  These three black inks are darker than the existing MIS VM/FS
black and much more stable, but they are still not as black as the
Generations Enhanced Black.

Paul
http://www.PaulRoark.com