Digital Prints

190
Mastering Digital Printing
For desktops, Canon pioneered individual ink cartridges (one cartridge or “tank” per
color), but Epson and then HP quickly responded with the same idea for several of their
newer printers. Whether having separate tanks will actually save you any money (one main
benefit cited) is open to debate, although separate tanks do have the benefit of reducing
wasted ink from discarded multi-color carts with only one color exhausted..
The way around the high-price and inconvenience of tiny ink cartridges is to use a bulk ink
system. These are also called continuous-flow (CFS) or continuous-inking systems (CIS),
and they pump bulk ink from large containers to the printer, bypassing those puny cartridges
entirely (see the next chapter for more about these). The rub is that the bulk systems can be
finicky, and they only work with certain printers. (Primarily desktops utilize bulk-ink
systems; wide-formats normally don’t need them because of their larger capacity ink tanks.)
Metamerism
If you’re concerned about metamerism (introduced in Chapter 4 and explained even more
in the next chapter), you should realize that, in general, dye-based inks will exhibit less of
it. It’s more the pigmented inks that give many photographer-artists fits. Even though
manufacturers like Epson and HP have worked hard to reduce its effects in their newer
printers (Epson’s adding a light black and reformulating its inks helped; so did their changing
the color mixing or black-generation formulas in the printer drivers), metamerism is
still a fact of digital-printing life and still a factor worth investigating in printer searches.
Third-Party Inks
The ability to use third-party inks can be an important consideration, and Epson is the
clear favorite in being supported by third-party ink makers. You’ll have a harder time finding
these inks for HPs, Lexmarks, or Canons. Some of the older Epson models don’t use
the smart-chipped ink cartridges (see Figure 6.2), which make them easily convertible to
third-party ink solutions. (Many of the newer “intelligent,” microchipped printers can
also accept aftermarket inks and bulk-ink systems, but it usually takes third-party marketers
at least six months to a year to come up with workarounds for the printers after they
Desktop inkjets use multicolor
cartridges (top left and bottom right;
note the foam inserts) or separate color
carts (bottom left). Most wide-formats
use larger, single-color “bag-in-a-box”
carts (110 ml shown).