Digital BW, The Print

John,

>Paul:
>Some of your assumptions regarding pigmented inks for Thermal printers
>are just plain wrong!

I'm just passing on what I've heard from people closer to the ink business
than I am.

>HP has been using pigmented black ink in most of their desktop
>printers for a long time!

I believe many "dye" printers use a hybrid black ink with a low load. Low
load inks can apparently be kept in suspension with a lower viscosity base.


>HP also had pigmented ink available for their
>old classic HP5000 printer 8 years ago,

And do you now what the dot size was?  I believe these printers had large
dots that would be inappropriate for fine art.

> but as a friend who had the
>5000 commented, who wants to print with "prefaded" inks? Back then,
>the pigmented inks with wider gammut were not available.

Other media had high gamut pigments.  Why do you think the inkjet industry
did not?  

>Yes, the thermal head technology requires less viscous ink to work
>properly, but that is not the reason the other manufacturers have not
>switched previously. (and yes, thermal heads are much more sensity to
>viscosity/surface tension mismatches) 

>Probably the main reason has been the lack of pigments with
> sufficient gammut.

John, even I have used watercolor pigments that are not used by the inkjet
industry to print through an inkjet printer.  I believe there have been many
high gamut, interesting pigments out there that could have been used for
inkjets as soon as the inkjet printer got good enough to make it worth
while.

My understanding of the large format HP printers is that they used large
pigments for signage longevity. 

>Also, pigmented inks don't run nearly as "cleanly" as dye inks,
>requiring much more maintaince.

True, we are all fairly aware of these problems.

>It could be that HP and Canon have been resolving these issues.

I'm sure they are all working on these problems.

>From what I've read about the new HP "Z" series printers, sounds like
>they will consume much less ink in cleaning cycles compared to the
>Epsons. They also have non-printing nozzle detection, and built-in
>auto-profiling of papers using a colorimeter device.

Yes, the Canon apparently has automatic detection of defective nozzles as
well.  I understand they have a huge number of nozzles and enough redundancy
to cover for the defective ones.

I hope this is all correct.

I'm always inclined to take sales hype with a grain of salt, but the next
year ought to be interesting as we see what these new machines can really
do.

>All-in-all, it's great when printer manufacturers compete for our
>market. Keeps everyone on their toes!

That we can surely agree on.  

Paul
www.PaulRoark.com