Clear Ink Base for Canon/Epson printer to prepare light/photo colours

[pharmacist]

I want to share my experience with my clear ink base I made for Epson printers (see my post about my new Epson XP-15000 A3+ printer). I first started to use this CIB for my Epson 1500W printer to make light magenta/cyan from concentrated CMYK ink from Fujifilm Drylabs. Several years ago there was no ecotank printer and this professional ink for Fujifilm Drylabs printer is the first fade resistent dye ink especially designed for commercial use similar in fade resistance to Epson Claria Photographic ink. However I could not get the light colours for my 1500W and I experimented with several tries and this is the optimal formula for Epson printers:

-5 parts propylene glycol
-30 parts ethanol 96% denaturated
-15 parts of isopropanol
-destilled water up to 100 parts all in weight.

With this formule I could mix Cyan and Magenta to obtain LM and LC:

LM: 30 parts of Magenta + 70 parts of CIB
LC: 30 parts of Cyan + 70 parts of CIB

The obtained mix behaves very well: no bleeding, fast drying and no globs forming on the paper surface.

Also I could make an almost perfect grey ink for my Epson XP-15000 printer by the following mixture:

GY: 15 parts of PB + 85 parts of CIB

Since Epson printer use a vibrating crystal to expel ink from the nozzle cavity, the underlying technology needs no heat that partially evaporate the ink to create a gas bubble inside the nozzle to blow out the ink droplet onto the paper, I was a bit afraid to use my formule into Canon printers afraid of clogging or malfunctioning.

Today I tried with 2 already empty and dried up original Canon 550 cartridges cyan and magenta to look if this CIB is safe to be used in Canon printer. Since I sold my previous Epson 1500W I had two bottles of home made LC and LM inks made from 30 parts of Fujifilm Drylabs Magenta/Cyan with 70 parts of CIB: the whole mixture is is proven to work in piezo print heads like the Epson without any problems. Now what about using this Epson compatible ink in Canon ? The results are better than I thought:







Now the nozzle check printed: it is perfect: not banding or bad ink flow in the nozzle checks for cyan and magenta (the PGBK pigment seems to be a bit clogged, but that is pigment ink from Inktec so are yellow and photo black from Inktec too):



Now let's have look at the printing quality of my Canon IP-7250 printer (minimum droplet size is 1 pl): left printed using the Fujifilm Drylabs + CIB ink mix (LM/LC) and right printed with Inktec ink:

As expected the cyan and magenta on the left side is much lighter, but expected....Most importantly: my CIB seems to work flawlessly in Canon printers too.

Now it is possible to make Light Magenta/Light Cyan/Light grey inks using fade resistant Canon GI53 inks (Chromalife 100+) in bottles.