- Joined
- Dec 27, 2014
- Messages
- 5,864
- Reaction score
- 6,988
- Points
- 363
- Location
- Germany
- Printer Model
- L805, WF2010, ET8550
I did quite some testing as a background activity over the last months with a P400 printer , refill inks and the effect of the gloss optimizer GO. I tested moe than 10 different refill ink sets - all pigment inks - cheaper inks from China up to Cone color inks and made test prints - patterns and test images on more than 10 different glossy type papers. I printed with the standard driver setting - automatic GO, and with a separate GO ink pass.
I went to the Photokina photo exhibition last year and passed by at the Epson and Canon booths and picked up test prints with the Epson P5000 and Canon Pro 1000 on Glossy paper, both look pretty similar and very good - effectvely no bronzing and barely visible gloss differences between colors and areas with a lower or higher ink density - overall very good - with genuine Canon or Epson inks on the resp. media. These prints are quite a good visual reference to compare other prints against.
It's difficult to measure the visible effects of bronzing and gloss differentials - between colors, between printed and unprinted areas. So let me just summarize my findings - solely based on my personal judgement with no chance to compare against any other test by somebody else.
Prints with the original Epson HiGloss2 inks with the P400 on Epson paper look quite good, but prints with the P5000 look much better by quite some margin - it may be that the P400 and P5000 are of a different generation, inks are different whatever.
I tested P5000 inks in the P400, I got some from Robert I did the Datacolor evaluation with
https://www.printerknowledge.com/th...-profile-comparisons.13275/page-2#post-114837
He is using the P5000 inks in his P800, he is tapping the larger cartridges which gives him a pricing benefit over the P800 cartridges. I mixed yellow and magenta to orange and red for the P400.
These P5000 inks in the P400 print quite well - on some papers - and almost terribly on some other papers, the print results depend quite heavily on the paper used - from cheap to luxury papers .
P5000 inks are not in the pricing range I would like inks to be in, so I used lots of other inks, Lyson, Cone Color, several China ink sets and more, even inks for the Canon Pro10s.
All inks deliver some acceptable results on this or that paper type, and poor to mediocre output on some other papers varying by ink. There is not one worst ink and not one worst paper to report, but the findings overall are somewhat disappointing - you can argue that I get what I paid for.
I was almost finished with testing and remembered a roll of 24" glossy paper I did not use since quite a long time because I don't like glossy prints in larger formats that much - A4 or A3 are o.k., but anything larger gives too many reflections on the glossy surface. I took that paper, cut off some A4 sheets, decurled them and tested them with some inks and got a surprise - the prints all look much better than anything else I tested before - with any ink set, still not as good as the P5000 prints but much closer than anything before. This paper is an ultrawhite glossy 240g by Emblem , a company which just ships large format printing supplies - no sheet paper at all. That's an acceptable compromise for me, a paper with a better look than all other papers I tested before, but with limitations - it's only available as a 240g paper, not 270 or 300 grams, and I have to cut it down to A4 or A3 as I need it - but it looks good with various ink sets - overall a situation I can live with.
I went to the Photokina photo exhibition last year and passed by at the Epson and Canon booths and picked up test prints with the Epson P5000 and Canon Pro 1000 on Glossy paper, both look pretty similar and very good - effectvely no bronzing and barely visible gloss differences between colors and areas with a lower or higher ink density - overall very good - with genuine Canon or Epson inks on the resp. media. These prints are quite a good visual reference to compare other prints against.
It's difficult to measure the visible effects of bronzing and gloss differentials - between colors, between printed and unprinted areas. So let me just summarize my findings - solely based on my personal judgement with no chance to compare against any other test by somebody else.
Prints with the original Epson HiGloss2 inks with the P400 on Epson paper look quite good, but prints with the P5000 look much better by quite some margin - it may be that the P400 and P5000 are of a different generation, inks are different whatever.
I tested P5000 inks in the P400, I got some from Robert I did the Datacolor evaluation with
https://www.printerknowledge.com/th...-profile-comparisons.13275/page-2#post-114837
He is using the P5000 inks in his P800, he is tapping the larger cartridges which gives him a pricing benefit over the P800 cartridges. I mixed yellow and magenta to orange and red for the P400.
These P5000 inks in the P400 print quite well - on some papers - and almost terribly on some other papers, the print results depend quite heavily on the paper used - from cheap to luxury papers .
P5000 inks are not in the pricing range I would like inks to be in, so I used lots of other inks, Lyson, Cone Color, several China ink sets and more, even inks for the Canon Pro10s.
All inks deliver some acceptable results on this or that paper type, and poor to mediocre output on some other papers varying by ink. There is not one worst ink and not one worst paper to report, but the findings overall are somewhat disappointing - you can argue that I get what I paid for.
I was almost finished with testing and remembered a roll of 24" glossy paper I did not use since quite a long time because I don't like glossy prints in larger formats that much - A4 or A3 are o.k., but anything larger gives too many reflections on the glossy surface. I took that paper, cut off some A4 sheets, decurled them and tested them with some inks and got a surprise - the prints all look much better than anything else I tested before - with any ink set, still not as good as the P5000 prints but much closer than anything before. This paper is an ultrawhite glossy 240g by Emblem , a company which just ships large format printing supplies - no sheet paper at all. That's an acceptable compromise for me, a paper with a better look than all other papers I tested before, but with limitations - it's only available as a 240g paper, not 270 or 300 grams, and I have to cut it down to A4 or A3 as I need it - but it looks good with various ink sets - overall a situation I can live with.
Last edited:
