Pigment or Dye?

jjonsalt

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I'm getting a new printer. The one I am replacing was a top of the line dye based printer, at the time I bought it several years ago. Now, all of the top of the line printers I find are pigment ink users. I'm a bit concerned about using pigment ink with its pitfalls but the only upper class printer I can find is Canon's PRO 9000. I like the HP B9180 but of course it uses pigment ink. Any advice?
 

pharmacist

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jjonsalt,

the reason why pigment ink printers are favourable to professionals is the fact pigment ink is very fade resistant, whether dye inks degrades very rapidly (even OEM patented inks) in comparison to pigment inks. One can dramatically improve this by using the optimal ink and papercombination (expensive OEM ink printing on slow drying swellable paper), but even then pigment inks rule supreme.

The setback of pigment ink is pigment ink the gloss differential on very high gloss paper. On my Epson Pro 3800 pigment printer I prefer to use satin or semi-gloss paper to overcome this. The silky look of the surface suffers less from shiny reflections and I can not see any gloss differentials, even when spots are head on. But on high glossy paper my Canon i9950 (the predecessor of the chipped Pro 9000) beats them all in terms of gloss appearance.
 
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