Canon iP4300 using pigment black on glossy photos

[twinkle]

Hi,

I'm trying to figure out if I accidentally filled photo black cartridge with pigment black ink. Does Canon iP4300 use any pigment ink at all when printing photos on photo paper? I am seeing some bronzing in near blacks, so some pigment ink is obviously present. But, when I print test page to check for clogged heads, the photo black patch seems to not bronze. I am puzzled and having a heck of a hard time calibrating this printer.

I am using www.precisioncolors.com ink and Costco Kirkland paper.

 

[jflan]

Sounds like the ink may not be compatible with the paper.
Under printer preferences, have you experimented with different "media types" ?

Edit:
The first thing that I see when I look at that site is Epson.
Are you sure you are getting Canon-compatible inks ?
Epson and Canon use different inkjet technology and the ink typically, does not interchange.

 

[ghwellsjr]

Do a nozzle check on plain paper. Let the ink dry for an hour. Dribble some water on the two black areas. If you see that an ink pattern smears and runs, then you know it was printed with dye ink.

This test will only be conclusive if your pigment black ink is 100% pigment ink and not diluted with dye ink so look for a difference in the smearing between the 3eBK grid pattern and the 6BK rectangular pattern. If the grid pattern shows no smearing (as it should) and the rectangular pattern does show smearing, then you haven't made a mistake. If the rectangular pattern shows no smearing, then you have made a mistake. If they both show equal amounts of smearing, then the test is inconclusive .

 

[pharmacist]

Thanks for you mistake:

Now I can say that the Canon dye nozzles are capable of handling pigment ink, because you don't have clogs with pigment ink in the CLI-8Bk cartridge. I already tried this with putting pigmented ink in an CLI-8 photomagenta cartridge and it works great. See here:

http://www.nifty-stuff.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=3048

Now I'm searching for pigmented ink which is bubblejet printhead compatible (NOT the Epson piezo printhead inks) for the following colours: CcMmYK. Canon Lucia or HP Vivera pigmented compatible inks should do.

 

[lin]

Hi,

I'm trying to figure out if I accidentally filled photo black cartridge with pigment black ink. Does Canon iP4300 use any pigment ink at all when printing photos on photo paper? I am seeing some bronzing in near blacks, so some pigment ink is obviously present. But, when I print test page to check for clogged heads, the photo black patch seems to not bronze. I am puzzled and having a heck of a hard time calibrating this printer.

I am using www.precisioncolors.com ink and Costco Kirkland paper.

I have a feel that you do have accidentally filled the wrong ink(pigment) into your CLI-8BK cartridges. The reason when you print the test page, you don't see the bronzing as you said was because you printed on plain paper. You won't see the bronzing effect on plain paper. As you said you are trying to figure out if you really mixed up the ink during refill, below are a couple of tests which you may consider anyone of them to perform

1) Print a nozzles check page and let it dried completely (give it enough time to fully absorbed and dried in paper), run under tap water, you should see that if the ink is dye, they will run. The dye ink will almost disappear if you run under water even longer. But do not let it soak in water untill the paper fiber disintegrated. For pigment ink, the ink adhere well on the paper and do not run like the dye ink when expose to water.

or

2) Print a photo, but select plain paper for the media type option & select the size according to your actual glossy photo paper size (4x6 or 8 x 11 or etc.....). Since you are seeing bronzing when printing on photo paper mode, so if you really have mixed up and refill your Dye black ink to PGI-5BK cart and Pigment Black Ink into CLI-8BK cart, you should see that when selecting plain paper mode, you don't see the bronzing. Because it's printing using the dye black ink. Usually, if you have refill correct ink into the correct cartridges, selecting plain paper mode printed on glossy photo paper will give you bronzing as the PGI-5BK is using Pigment Black Ink. But the degree of the bronzing will depend on the quality of your pigment ink.

 

[twinkle]

Thanks for the replies. It looks like I did not switch black inks. I printed nozzle check page on plain and glossy, and soaked both in water after 4 hours of drying.

On plain paper, pigment black was unaffected, while dye ink smeared. On glossy, pigment black came off with slight rub, and other colors probably faded (don't have an unwashed print on hand to compare), but didn't smear.

I did notice something else - what looked like bronzing, and I assumed was from mistakenly using pigment black, is actually gloss differential from cyan! Looking at the print on glossy paper (before washing), darker cyan patch had easily observable gloss differential, but other colors and photo black had none. After washing the print, gloss differential was gone from the cyan patch as well. I observed very similar results on glossy Canon, Kodak and Kirkland papers. I also looked at some color profiling patches on all 3 papers, and all have gloss differential apparently proportional to amount of cyan used in that patch.

I am sure many people here use Image Specialists ink. Can you observe the same issue on your prints?

 

[lin]

Thanks for the replies. It looks like I did not switch black inks. I printed nozzle check page on plain and glossy, and soaked both in water after 4 hours of drying.

http://www.cognistudio.com/washed.jpg

On plain paper, pigment black was unaffected, while dye ink smeared. On glossy, pigment black came off with slight rub, and other colors probably faded (don't have an unwashed print on hand to compare), but didn't smear.

I did notice something else - what looked like bronzing, and I assumed was from mistakenly using pigment black, is actually gloss differential from cyan! Looking at the print on glossy paper (before washing), darker cyan patch had easily observable gloss differential, but other colors and photo black had none. After washing the print, gloss differential was gone from the cyan patch as well. I observed very similar results on glossy Canon, Kodak and Kirkland papers. I also looked at some color profiling patches on all 3 papers, and all have gloss differential apparently proportional to amount of cyan used in that patch.

I am sure many people here use Image Specialists ink. Can you observe the same issue on your prints?

how long did you run those nozzle check print on plain paper under tap water? I hope you didn't soak for hours because the paper fiber will disintegrated slightly. And you don't need to use finger to rub the print. You just need to run under water until you see the dye run off.

Maybe you want to post a picture of your ink bottle or verify with MIS on the type of ink you used or check with them regarding your print result . Maybe some MIS ink users may respond subsequentlyand probably be able to provide you with more help.

 

[twinkle]

I did not really soak the prints, I just ran them under the tap for 30 seconds or so. I think at this point it is clear that I didn't switch black inks, and that gloss differential problem I observed comes from cyan. Presumably it is a question of over-saturation and cyan floating on top of paper to create gloss differential. There is something obviously different about physical properties of cyan compared to other dye inks in this set.

What I will do next is print patches of cyan to see when gloss differential stops, and whether at that point it still shows the same (or close enough) density as when fully soaked with cyan. Idea is that I would then use ink limiting to prevent cyan from over-saturating and bronzing. This is, of course, easier said then done. I am planning to use Gutenprint drivers (OS X) and see if I can limit cyan ink that way (there is an option to limit ink, I haven't tested if it actually works), then ICC profile it with cyan ink limit in effect to see if I can get good color and gloss differential-free prints.

 

[pharmacist]

One thing: if your CLI-8Bk cartridge still contains some dye in the sponge, it will take a whil before the pigmented black will reach the ink outlet of your cartridge. It is possible that the real pigment will come out after maybe 20-30 pages of photo printing. The CLI-8Bk is only used to strengthen the contrast or you have to use a lot of black area's in your pictures.

 

[Tin Ho]

I had used at least one dye based black ink for Canon that I used would have the bronzing look on glossy photo paper. It was a dye based black ink because it could be washed off by water easily. But it had bronzing on glossy paper. I first thought the ink had pigment in it. But because it could be washed off completely so I believed that it was not the case. I had to replace the black ink to get rid of the bronzing.

The black ink turned out to be a Chinese made one. The vendor explained to me that it was used as a cheap pigmented ink for BCI-3ebk cartridges. It was a practice to use it for text prints in China. A lot of after market prefilled BCI-3ebk out there in fact contained this type of ink. Not real pigmented ink. It probably prints better text than real photo dye ink.