Are red and green ink really used in i9900?

[ghwellsjr]

So many people have observed that the red and green inks in the Canon i9900 are used so rarely that some have speculated that it is only cleaning cycles that use up these colors. To address this issue, I installed only cleaning cartridges except for red and green and ran this test print with all the different media types and print qualities:



On plain paper and on many photo papers, the green and red inks are never used.

The only papers that used BOTH the green and red inks were Photo Paper Pro (either quality) and Glossy Photo Paper in the High quality. In addition to printing green, the green ink was also used a little bit when printing dark shades of cyan and yellow but the red ink was only used when printing red. Red ink isn't used when printing any other colors on these two photo papers.

The Matte Photo Paper used only the red ink in either quality. Surprisingly, a slight amount is also added to all other colors as they approach the darker shades of grey.

So, you can expect the green and red cartridges to last a long time unless you do a lot of printing on the three photo papers listed above.

 

[Grandad35]

ghwellsjr,

I have kept detailed records of the ink usage on my i9900 for the last 2 years. I only print photos, using the "PPPro" setting 90% of the time and the "Glossy Photo Paper" setting for the other 10%.

Initially, I averaged 300 8x10 color prints from both the red and green carts. About a year ago, I started shooting everything in RAW mode and adjusting the "Exposure" and "Brightness" settings to optimize the appearance of the flesh tones. On average, this results in darker images than I got when using jpegs straight from the camera. As a result, I now average about 125 8x10 prints from both my red and green carts (about the same usage as I get on my Magenta, Cyan and Black carts). I may be using a lot more ink under this new system, but the prints are far more pleasing.

 

[WhiteDog]

My red and green cartridges are consumed at the same rate as the other ones. Mostly I print from Corel software using ICM profiles published for the paper, but which I customize with a slight increase of intensity, most often in yellow. I have no problems with color matching/management.

Edit 1: I forgot to say thanks for this thorough and informative expermimental result. Compliments. Likely, I would agree about the non-usage of red and green in the plain paper mode.