Black dye and pigment ink either or

[mrelmo]

my ip4200, mp560 and mp640 printers have the 5 cartridge systems which use 2 black cartridges, i am now considering going to just black dye ink. the larger cartridge that takes pigment i am thinking about filling with black dye, for the simple reason of eliminating the need for 2 seperate black inks, i understand that the pigment was designed to stop smearing with a highlighter, but if using a highlighter is not an issue what difference would it make, what are the thoughts of the community

 

[Tin Ho]

Dye ink is subject to moisture damage. If your documents need to kept for long term and your storage environment is humid You may find some smearing of the text on the documents. Pigment ink generally produces sharper and crispier text. For outdoor display you will want to use pigment ink.

 

[The Hat]

mrelmo
Two of my printers use dye ink instead of pigment ink and they have being working
like that for the past number of years with zero problems.

The printouts are only slightly thicker that the normal pigment printout but are not really that noticeable.
So if you have no need for waterproof text then it makes a lot of sense to only purchase one black ink instead of two,
there are no draw back at all in my case anyway, but then I do have four other printers using pigment black.

It would help to purge the big cartridge first but its not really necessary..

 

[mrelmo]

hmmmmm i just printed the same page of text the second one i set as glossy photo paper, the dye based ink came much darker and i could not see a difference in sharpness, after letting the prints dry for 2 hours there was no smearing from a highlighter the paper i am using is ageneric copy paper i don't think there is any color lock on it but who knows, soooooooo i think i am switching to black dye

 

[ghwellsjr]

You will get smearing of all your dye inks (color and black) on plain paper that is not treated with ColorLok but chances are, the next time you go to buy plain paper, it will have ColorLok on it.