Regular and photo ink

[milto]

I have a S900 that does not work. I bought a new iP 4000. My question is can I use the Photo Inks in place of the regular injs when printing Photos on the 4000. Is there any advantage to this. Am I playing with trouble if I did this.

Just found this site and am enjoying.

Milto

 

[Grandad35]

milto,

Welcome to the forum.

The "Photo" inks are just diluted versions of the regular inks, and your pictures will be "washed out" if you use these inks in place of the full strength inks. Your photos will probably also have a strong yellow cast. See (http://www.nifty-stuff.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=498) if you want detailed information on this subject.

I don't see any reason why the photo inks will hurt your new printer, but you won't like the results.

 

[Nifty]

Grandad,

I don't have "photo inks" in any of my printers, so I don't know for sure, but I thought I remembered reading somewhere that that they were pigment based. Is this incorrect and photo inks are dye based and just watered down versions of the same?

 

[milto]

Thanks for the reply and sounds good to me.What is the reason for the 2 different inks on some models?

Milto

 

[fotofreek]

Mito -There is a bit of understandable confusion here. In my wife's old BJC3000 printer the ink tank ID numbers were changed by Canon, and the new ones were identified as photo inks. Presumable, they produced better photos. They replaced the previously formulated inks that Canon sold for this printer. She never used it as a photo printer and only printed gray scale emails and websites.

The current photo cyan and photo magenta are used in six and eight color printers in addition to cyan and magenta. They are used to get more subtle shading of colors that use cyan and magenta. In fact, all the inks (except for the pigmented black used for plain paper text only printing) that are used in the Current Canon lineup are used to produce photos. The PC and PM (designated as photo inks) are, therefore, misnamed. This was Canon's way of differentiating them from the C and M inks that the entire line of Cannon printers use.

 

[Grandad35]

Rob, Milto

The Photo Cyan (PC) and Photo Magenta (PM) for Canon printers are also dye based, just like the cyan and magenta inks. As the previously mentioned link shows, the "Photo" inks (some people prefer to call them "light" inks to avoid the ambiguity of the "photo" prefix) are very similar to the regular inks diluted with 3 times as much water as ink. As Fotofreek said, these inks are used because they produce a more subtle shading, especially on the lighter colors.

The (diluted) "Photo" inks only absorb about 50% as much light as the regular inks, so they obviously produce much lighter individual ink "dots" that are far less obvious to the naked eye than the darker cyan and magenta dots. Dark dots aren't obvious on the darker areas of a print, but on lighter colors they stand out far more than "photo" ink dots. Note that full strength yellow passes more light than even PM or PC, so there is no need for a "Photo Yellow" (even full strength yellow dots aren't visible to the naked eye).

I believe that this is also why the colored inks are used to generate the lighter shades of gray instead of black ink - widely scattered individual black dots are far more obvious than a blend of colored inks. When printers are targeted for B&W use, they often have several gray inks with different densities for this reason.

IMHO the photo inks are becoming less necessary as the size of the ink dots decreases (10-->5-->2-->1 picoliter), since as the ink dots become smaller they are obviously harder to see with the naked eye. Whether 1 pl magenta and cyan dots are visible on light colors will vary depending on the sharpness of your eyesight.

 

[milto]

Thanks everyone for the explanations. Great to have this resource available.

Milto