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Pigmented inks are rapidly becoming more common. With good reason - They last much longer. Epson in particular have made great strides in introducing photo printers with pigment inksets and in gradually curing some of the drawbacks. Canon already have large format printers with pigment ink and have just announced a range of A3 photo printers.
The Good News : Better stability - They’re much better.
The Bad News : They don’t have the color range or gamut of dyes. Generally results look more subdued - not helped by the fact that they only work really well on matt papers. Because the ink particles are far bigger they don’t sink in to glossy papers in the same way as dyes. In areas of dark tone or black this results in a strange chroming effect. Epson have tried curing this with the R800 / R1800 which use a gloss optomizer to coat glossy prints and give you back that “real photograph” look. It’s very clever and works, sort of - they don’t have the look of a Canon glossy print or of a real photograph - but it’s close. Give them time.
Pigment inks have one other big weakness - especially if you print black and white. It’s called Metamerism and means that the inks appear to change colour under different types of light. So a print that looks great under normal tungsten room lighting might look greenish when you see it in daylight or magenta under fluorescent lights. It’s annoying and is a very real problem. Epson’s 2000P was reputedly the worst for this but the 2100 has the same problem. Again with time I’m sure they’ll find an answer, but for now, it’s a really strong argument to stick with dye inks.
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