Digital Prints

seemingly identical ink cartridges bought from the same lot at the same time from the same
source can—and do—sometimes vary. A bulk-ink system can mitigate this problem because
you buy ink in larger quantities to spread over more prints before a change is needed.
There are other ways around the quality concern. Some people set up bulk-ink systems
on their desktop printers and fill the bottles with cheaper-per-unit ink removed from the
larger cartridges used on other printer models of the same type. This can only be done
with same-generation inks—Epson UltraChrome, for example. A variation on this theme
for wide-formats is simply to use larger-capacity cartridges in smaller machines. Epson
9600 220-ml. carts will work on an Epson 7600, even though the cartridges will stick out
and look funny, and Epson doesn’t recommend it.
■ Printer Settings and Profiles: Realize that when you use third-party inks, the normal printer
settings may no longer work since you’ve changed the inks for which the manufacturer
designed the printer. The same goes for any printer profiles that you’ve made or bought.
Change the ink; change the profiles.
■ Availability: Don’t forget that you’ll have a harder time finding third-party inks for non-
Epson printers or for the latest ones with smart-chipped ink cartridges. It usually takes
third-party ink distributors 12 months or longer to come up with ways to get around the
intelligent OEM ink cartridges. Of course, by this time, your one-year warranty will have
expired, and you won’t be so worried about voiding it.
■ Back-and-Forth: Some third-party inks require that you flush or purge the existing OEM
inks from the printhead. This is usually done with cleaning cartridges. This is especially
important with third-party inks that are chemically incompatible with the original OEM
inks and can damage the printer. Third-party ink makers sell purging or cleaning kits where
needed. (Some printmakers make their own home-brewed concoctions.) This obviously
causes some ink wastage and limits how many times you’ll want to go back and forth
between OEM and third-party inks. With desktops, and even more so with wide-format
printers where a large amount of ink must be purged from the lines and reservoirs, the best
advice is to plan on dedicating the printer to only one type of ink and leaving it that way.
Media
If inks are the left hand, then media are the right to inkjet printing. You can’t have one
without the other. And, even more so than with inks, the variety available is tremendous.
There are coated and uncoated papers, watercolor papers, high-gloss and backlit films,
canvas, satins, fabrics, vinyls, plastics, polyesters, you name it. If it can hold ink and be
run through an inkjet printer, it’s a media candidate for somebody.
But before you get too excited, let’s back up and try to understand how media are made
and how they work.
Paper
Media is what you put through a printer. It’s what you print on. Because paper is the most
common type of media used in inkjet printing, let’s study it in more detail. (Non-paper
media are described in the “Alternative Media” section.)
Chapter 7 ■ Choosing Your Consumables 227