Suggestions for 3rd party color inks for CISS

[juliandroms]

Many of the OEM color inks are marketed by suggesting that the fading characteristics of their inks may allow them to last for up to 100 years.

You may have seen a study by Wilhelm Imaging Research which concluded that the majority of 3rd party inks fade very rapidly.

I was asking myself if there were any standouts among 3rd party ink suppliers with respect to stability with fading, and the only company I found specifically referenced was MIS. I may be incorrect, but it looks MIS currently supplies through inksupply.com. I do see some discussion about fading, but it appears that they use a different test - using bleach instead of light - to test for fading. Here is the only info I was able to find:

http://www.inksupply.com/fading.cfm

Another company which I believe is well regarded on these forums in particular is rihac (rihac.com), but I don't see any data on their website regarding fade characteristics.

Another company I have seen favorably reviewed is carrotink.com, but I think this may have been based on color reproduction and I have not seen info on the fade characteristics.

Obviously, there are going to be differences based on paper. Are there known good 3rd party paper / ink combinations?

 

[qwertydude]

Most good quality inks have similar sunlight fade resistance, in my opinion after doing fade tests with rather ho-hum "universal" stratitec ink, canon OEM ink on various brands of paper show the paper has the biggest influence on print life, dye inks really didn't fade at any more significant rates compared with each other. My own experiments show that HP and probably all swellable type papers have the best fade resistance, though the compromise is zero water resistance and slow drying times, after 3 months pretty much no fading was present. A good paper like Canon's Glossy II is also comparable to HP but fades at a slightly faster rate but this is in direct sunlight over the period of 3 months, the worst performance was significant fading in two weeks from really cheap bargain paper from Meritline. This stuff is cheap has a weird waxy feel to it and the porous layer seems to be very delicate. And now I'm doing another round of testing with Kirkland paper and Epson ink. So in my experience print life is drastically affected by paper much more than ink.

 

[juliandroms]

Interesting. Thanks!

Does pigment black fade? That's made from charcoal usually, isn't it?