Artisans dont use any pigment black like HPs do?

[korny]

I've been reading in this forum for the past week or so with ALOT of interest.
So first off, I just wanted to say hello. Awesome wealth of info here.

I suppose I found this forum because I for the heck of it put a CIS on my new HP Photosmart...and having a blast in color

My question is about Epson Artisan though:
From what I understand, it excels in Photo printing with 6 dye Clarian inks for sure, but does it not suffer a bit compared to HP which has pigment black on plain paper for "office printouts", kind of thing.

If so Im curious why they opted to not include it... ?

I suppose I should disclose I just ordered refurb Artisan 800 for 100 bucks online, just to play with for another CIS.. I haven't received it yet though. No rush...

 

[qwertydude]

The Artisan is primarily for photos but I suppose if you really need the water resistance of pigment inks you can always get a Workforce. I find my Artisan prints documents just fine, albeit a little slower than comparable Canon's and HP. One big difference though is that with the pigment inks, there seems to be a resolution limit of 600 dpi. This can actually become a hindrance when printing out fine details like footnotes or small bar codes. The Epsons print any color with resolutions up to 1440 so you end up with I find sharper text than my pigment based Canon's and HP's. I think you'll find that other than the water resistance a dye based document is just as good a quality as a pigment based one.

 

[The Hat]

qwertydude The Epsons print any color with resolutions up to 1440 so you end up with I find sharper text than my pigment based Canon's and HP's.

The answer isnt the resolution of the text, but maybe something else Epson has in its print heads.
Text quality doesnt improve any over 600 dpi and usually 300 dpi is more than enough for quality.

 

[qwertydude]

The answer isnt the resolution of the text, but maybe something else Epson has in its print heads.
Text quality doesnt improve any over 600 dpi and usually 300 dpi is more than enough for quality.

That's a good point but there is something to it. I printed out a test B&W photo on plain paper settings so no color is used. So I dusted off the old Canon IP4700 I put in storage and I also refilled an HP printer that rarely gets used. They were both in operating condition luckily. I can't even take scans sharp enough to really display what I saw under my most powerful 20x jewelry loupe. I never paid too much attention to it before but on dark gradients on the pigment printers what I saw was larger more irregularly shaped dots. I think it is 600 dpi but with larger dots that overlap. This runs into certain limitations just like in the old dot matrix printer days where you had a dot that was 100 dpi in width but a printer that printed at 300 dpi by overlapping dots, it looks fine to the eye with solid text areas but shading becomes a bit more difficult and photo quality suffers, not to mention why I had trouble with smaller text and small bar codes. This explains why even with 600 dpi smaller details suffer, it is 600 dpi if you measure dot spacing but if you measure dot size because of the size of the dots and measuring for the ability to resolve lines you wouldn't get 300 lines per inch which is what true 600 dpi should be capable of.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DotMatrix-FudgedResolution.jpg

I think the fudged resolution is at play but in both directions with the pigment printers because the dot size is much larger and is always the same size. This would also explain why on the lighter shades on the pigment printers you had these terribly grainy lighter shades where you'd have a dithering pattern of these large dots that were widely spaced, and it's pretty obvious. The Epson goes about printing B&W completely differently. I noticed there was a variable dot size just like in photo printing mode. The lighter shades used much smaller and much more closely spaced dots vs the darker shades. And overall the Epson's dots were always smaller than the pigment printers and the dots almost never overlap except in pure black colors but that could just be paper bleeding and even with a 20x loupe it's getting hard to tell because it is so fine. I know the Epson can resolve much more lines of resolution too after printing out a standard line test sheet. More than the 600 dpi vs 1440 dpi resolutions would lead you to believe.

http://www.gpsinformation.org/jack/iso-gd-cb-955s.jpg