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They ALL make most of their revenue from inks and media - they hardly make any money at all from the hardware itself. The most "honest" approach towards ink and media seems to be Canon - but as I said they ALL rely on supply costs to make their bucks.
You just need to do your math regarding WHAT you need the printer for and HOW many prints you'll do. Often it is cheaper to have the image processed in a traditional photo lab.
ncw164x
Do most photo printers have issues printing text, seems regardless of vendor, you read that.
thanks again for the help
I realise that Lexmark ink can be expensive, but I don't buy the branded cartridges. I don't know about in other countries, but in the UK there are some good shops selling much cheaper versions of printer cartridges.
Lexmark = Headaches
What kind of headaches should I expect?
Anyway, don't get a printer they're nothing but trouble :P Just get a piece of paper and trace it from your screen then give it to your kids to colour in ;P
However it is not as grave as you may think, since there is always MORE ink in the cartridges than you pay for! The manufacturers make sure that you can SPEND the whole amount of ink you PAID for - the surplus ink in the cartridges is for a safety margin or due to technological filling problems.
From an environmental standpoint, of course it hurts to throw this surplus ink away. But you have NOT been ripped off by the manufacturer.
To rip you off, they have much mor subtle methods like mandatory ink-consuming test- and "cleaning" prints every so often (some models after EACH switch-on), ink-wasting cleaning procedures, excessive overprint-passes etc.
But as for the ink in the cartridge, the surplus ink is perfectly normal and not something you paid for.
P.S. The issue is much more emotionally discussed when you come in the area of wide format printers, where a single ink cartdrige can easily cost 150-300 US$, and where the amount of surplus ink is of course significantly higher.
I expect the printer to cost a lot.
P.S. Printers that cost more tend to have cheaper cartridges - and with photo printers it is the cartridges that affect your money the most in the long run.
With dye inks, the color is a molecule in the liquid - the whole liquid is the color. Dye inks give your brighter, more colorful prints, but they are very vulnerable to UV-light. The aggressive UV-light can split the molecules and they don't be colors any more.
With pigmented inks, the color is a very finely ground mineral particle, which swims in a liquid. The liquid - usually water but also oil, gasoline or solvent possible - adds nothing to the color. Pigmented inks usually have a less bright, slightly faded look, but UV-light can't hurt the pigments much.
Ink manufacturers like to claim 100 years "lightfastness", but that's ridiculous. You can try to simulate this, but the simulation itself is questionable. Most depends on how you store or display your prints. And educated guess is that if not exposed to plain sunlight they should stay some 10-15 years, maybe 20 without significant degrading.
From a technology point of view, the best bet is - again - Epson. Not only have they the finest and "roundest" pigments around (by a patented and not yet out-licensed technology), they also embed them in a resin which has several functions: when the pigment penetrates the first layer of the paper, the resin stays on top of the paper and seals the "entry crater", it absorbs quite a lot of UV-light, it gives a shiny photo-like finish, it shuts off water and grease and it makes the print scratch resistant.
If you push this thread further, I'm forced to talk about papers and medai too, and THAT is yet another science of its own...
Thanks for your great input.
Feel "forced" to share more! :)
Usually, you can't switch from dye to pigmented or the other way around, since those inks are not compatible and large areas of the printer needs to be changed (like tubes, printheads, etc).
So usually (and especially in small format [ISO-A2 and smaller]) you have dedicated pigment-ink printers an dedicated dye-based printers and now way to switch among them. Only a few printers (usually found in large format) have redundant tube-systems or redundant printheads or other technologies to switch between dye and pigemtned ink.
To complicate matters more, there are not only two types of inks, but also two types of printing technologies:
Thermoelectric inkjet (or "thermal inkjet" - not to be mistaken with "thermotransfer") - was invented some 30 years ago by Canon. You need inks whose main component is water. The ink in the nozzle-chamber is heated by a heating coil or heating pad within microseconds to steam, the steam pushes an ink droplet out of the nozzle. Then the pad or coil is cooled down again by the flowing ink itself. That's why you need water. Thermal printing is very stressful for the printheads so they wear down (and even break) very soon. Even though thermal printheads can be produced relatively cheap, it still is a significant cost facter.
For the printing business line, the patent on thermal inkjet is one of the biggest chunks of Canons income because of license fees from HP :-) (same goes for color laser printers - all HP color lasers are in fact made by Canon).
Piezoelectric inkjet (aka "piezo inkjet") was invented by Seiko and subsequently licencsed to Olympus, Xerox and Epson (Epson is in fact a daughter(!) company of Seiko - the holding in Japan is the "Seiko Epson Corporation). In piezo printing, you have a piezo-crystal in the nozzle chamber, which deforms when an electric current flows through it. This deformation pushes an ink droplet out. Once disconnected from the current the crystal swings back thus sucking new ink in. This is not only significantly faster than thermal printing (because nothing needs to cool down), you are also not limited to water but you can use oil, solvent or any other inflammable substance as carrier for your ink as well.
Piezo-printing is very uncritical for the printheads. Usually, the printheads are built fixed into the machine. They CAN break just like any other part can break as well, but they are not considered to be consumeables which need to be replaced on a regular basis.
Long story, short conclusion: a piezo-printer is more likely to use pigmented ink than a thermoelectric inkjet.
I also now understand why the prefix "piezo" is in Piezography. A number of photographer friends who specialize in black and white photography have gotten very excited by Piezography as an alternative to silver-gelatine prints. The process uses Epson color printers, replacing the colored inks with several shades of grey. The results I've seen are stunning... with a big tonal range and the subtlety of old gravure prints. I hadn't realized that Epson was using grey in their color prints too.
The 7 colors (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, Light Cyan, Light Magenta, 50% grey) are not used in ALL Epson printers, but only has been introduced last year for a few printers.
I wonder if they have these resin-coated pigments as well.
Search for piezography and you'll probably get better answers to your questions about the inks than I can provide. There's a whole archival movement connected with the area, but I'd value your take on it.
The 7 colors (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, Light Cyan, Light Magenta, 50% grey) are not used in ALL Epson printers, but only has been introduced last year for a few printers.
a) Are the 7 colors pigments or dyes (or both)?
b) How does Epson specify their 7 color machines, or do they just say "7 colors"?
c) Could you, on an Epson piezo head machine, easily switch the inksets from the multiple shades of grey to color, or is cleaning the heads etc a huge chore?
And to return to one of Acternaweb's original questions.
Do most photo printers have issues printing text, seems regardless of vendor, you read that.
I think the big issue of photo printers printing text is the cost. Most people I know who have photo printers have separate printers for the printing text. You'd have to do the math, but I think they pay for themselves pretty quickly.
"reset' the cartridge to a new state thus allowing the rest of the ink to be used. Might be worth a try
I know a few people that have tried this and damaged their printheads in the process. Pushing air through certain printheads can cause permanent damage. Bearing in mind that a new printhead(s) usually cost between 30% and 90% of the value of the printer, you will have to determine if it is worth the risk.
Cartridges do stop printing early for a reason - and the reason is not (as many believe), I repeat it is NOT so that you have to buy more cartridges. If they wanted you to buy more cartridges, they would put less ink in them to stop resetters being on the market.
Unfortunately, they make a bit of a mystery regarding their inks. I can find no information if they are resin coated or not. My guess is they are not.
a) Are the 7 colors pigments or dyes (or both)?
You can't really mix dye inks and pigment inks. They need in many cases differently constructed papers (yes - constructed - inkjet-papers are another high-tech area you would not believe until you know about it). Also there's the issue that a mixture of both tends to clog together or even produce fall out of particles. HP actually composed the black ink of the HP DesignJet 1050 from dye and pigment and this caused many, many inconveniences for the users.
So it's either one or the other. With Epson, it is usually pigment for all photo printers - no exception in the case of the 7-color inkjets.
b) How does Epson specify their 7 color machines, or do they just say "7 colors"?
Since Epson is the only company right now to offer 7 colors, they boast all over their pages with it. Yesterdays standard was 4 colors (and still is in low cost printers), current standard is 6 colors. Some companies have 8 or even 12 colors. Epson is the only one with 7.
c) Could you, on an Epson piezo head machine, easily switch the inksets from the multiple shades of grey to color, or is cleaning the heads etc a huge chore?
Wide format printers have the ink tanks and printheads seperated, with a tube system combining them. It is virtually impossible to clean such a system in order to switch the ink type.
Small format printers often have printheads and ink reservoir in one piece. So in theory, chaning the ink system is just changing the cartridge/printhead assembly. However this is only true for dye inks because their printheads are consumeables in any case. One of the main benefits of piezo technology is that the printhead ISN'T a consumeable. So if you switch the ink system, you need to clean the printhead.
Apart from that, there's also firmware issues to consider since the hardware-level processes for dye and pigment ink are different. Even though I'm less familiar with small format printers, I would guess that switchign back and forth is also not possible with them.
However, even high-end small format printers do not cost THAT much anymore. So if you really need dye AND pigment, consider simply buying TWO printers.
Do most photo printers have issues printing text, seems regardless of vendor, you read that.
Yes, cost is of course an issue. You get very reasonably priced monochrome laser printers which will print black+white text pages dramatically cheaper than any inkjet, even taking the TCO into account.
Another problem with photo inkjets and text is that the drivers for these printers are not optimzed for text - but for photos. If you print monochrome text, you better use only the black ink for it. But with some - especially cheaper - devices you simply CAN'T use black only - they'll always print the other colors on top of the black. Admittedly his gives a more saturated black in photo-printing (and makes you buy new cartridges faster), but it creates blurred edges with fine text.
At least here in Europe there are a couple of third party providers of "cloned" (not re-filled, but rather re-engineered) cartridges. I heard nothing bad, but also nothing good about them.
In our lab we tested several refill-sets and third party inks for wide format printers. These are different from small format because the ink tanks and the printheads are ALWAYS seperated. So refilling is actually easier.
We found that the color behaviour equals - and in one case even tops - the behaviour of the original inks. But we also found that it is often cumbersome to refill the cartridges and reset the chip.
You CAN save up to 60% on refilling, but you lose a lot of simplicity and comfort. It's up to you to decide which way to go.
