NoixPecan
Getting Fingers Dirty
There are already many threads in this forum (and elsewhere) about the way Pixma printers are using their pigment black and dye black inks. I read many of them, including ghwellsjr's conclusive thread: The Truth about Canon Pigment vs Dye Black.
It is not surprising that the topic has been so much discussed. It is rather tricky, and counter-intuitive to say the least. For example, there should be nothing more simple than printing some black text on plain paper. And yet, depending of your page setup options (which one could think should be independant of print quality) in Canon's driver, you can get 3 different results:
- normal mode : pigment black only, the darkest result;
- duplex mode (auto or manual) : a mix of pigment black + magenta + cyan, noticeably lighter;
- borderless : dye black (5-ink printers) or a CMY mix (4-ink printers), the lightest result.
Weird. Of course, when you know this (few users do) you can choose to avoid duplex modes, and manage duplex printing differently (with the help of the Fineprint software, for example). But still, some way to override the default behaviour would have been nice.
Anyway, enough said about black text. My main concern is about photo prints. I always print my pictures on matte high-resolution paper, which is both pigment-friendly and dye-friendly. There are two questions for which I could not find a good answer.
1. With a 4-ink printer (e.g. iP3500) is there a way to print color photos in CMYK instead of CMY, without any quality loss? There are obvious reasons to prefer CMYK over CMY, like a better contrast (deeper black areas) and a lower ink usage. On plain paper, color photos are printed in CMYK, which is fine. On photo papers, photos are printed in CMY, which is good for glossy paper (not compatible with pigment black) but is suboptimal for matte paper. What do you think?
2. With a 5-ink printer (e.g. iP4500) is there a way to print grayscale photos using only dye black instead of a CMYK mix? Selecting plain paper allows to print photos using only pigment black, and the result is somewhat nice for some purposes, without any color cast or metamerism. However, because of the 5pl droplets, the dithering screen is fairly obvious. By using only dye black, thanks to the 1pl droplets, it should be possible to get smoother results, while retaining the neutrality of black-only prints. What do you think?
It is not surprising that the topic has been so much discussed. It is rather tricky, and counter-intuitive to say the least. For example, there should be nothing more simple than printing some black text on plain paper. And yet, depending of your page setup options (which one could think should be independant of print quality) in Canon's driver, you can get 3 different results:
- normal mode : pigment black only, the darkest result;
- duplex mode (auto or manual) : a mix of pigment black + magenta + cyan, noticeably lighter;
- borderless : dye black (5-ink printers) or a CMY mix (4-ink printers), the lightest result.
Weird. Of course, when you know this (few users do) you can choose to avoid duplex modes, and manage duplex printing differently (with the help of the Fineprint software, for example). But still, some way to override the default behaviour would have been nice.
Anyway, enough said about black text. My main concern is about photo prints. I always print my pictures on matte high-resolution paper, which is both pigment-friendly and dye-friendly. There are two questions for which I could not find a good answer.
1. With a 4-ink printer (e.g. iP3500) is there a way to print color photos in CMYK instead of CMY, without any quality loss? There are obvious reasons to prefer CMYK over CMY, like a better contrast (deeper black areas) and a lower ink usage. On plain paper, color photos are printed in CMYK, which is fine. On photo papers, photos are printed in CMY, which is good for glossy paper (not compatible with pigment black) but is suboptimal for matte paper. What do you think?
2. With a 5-ink printer (e.g. iP4500) is there a way to print grayscale photos using only dye black instead of a CMYK mix? Selecting plain paper allows to print photos using only pigment black, and the result is somewhat nice for some purposes, without any color cast or metamerism. However, because of the 5pl droplets, the dithering screen is fairly obvious. By using only dye black, thanks to the 1pl droplets, it should be possible to get smoother results, while retaining the neutrality of black-only prints. What do you think?
