P600 vs Pro-1

[MHMG]

Just to be clear, the longevity information I reported about the Canon Pro-100 is for the Canon CLI-42 OEM inks. I have not yet tested a dye-based third party ink set that comes anywhere close to the light fade resistance of the Canon Chromalife 100+ (differs from the older and much worse Chromalife 100 set)  or the Epson Claria dye set used in Epson's 13 inch class Stylus 1410 printer. Essentially all third party dye sets are highly fugitive with respect to both light fastness and gas fade resistance even if they match initial OEM color and tone qualities.   The PrecisionColor ink set for the Canon Pro-100 will no doubt meet the initial image quality parameters of OEM ink, but print longevity is anyone's wild guess.

cheers,
Mark
http://Http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com

[Mark D Segal]

Just to be clear, the longevity information I reported about the Canon Pro-100 is for the Canon CLI-42 OEM inks. I have not yet tested a dye-based third party ink set that comes anywhere close to the light fade resistance of the Canon Chromalife 100+ (differs from the older and much worse Chromalife 100 set)  or the Epson Claria dye set used in Epson's 13 inch class Stylus 1410 printer. Essentially all third party dye sets are highly fugitive with respect to both light fastness and gas fade resistance even if they match initial OEM color and tone qualities.   The PrecisionColor ink set for the Canon Pro-100 will no doubt meet the initial image quality parameters of OEM ink, but print longevity is anyone's wild guess.

cheers,
Mark
http://Http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com

Mark, I too was wondering about longevity with third party inks as I could not find say on the PrecisionColor website any mention of it. I would take this to mean they haven't invested in longevity testing. Is the "100+" in the name of the OEM ink marketing or do they have good reason to believe prints produced with those inks on certain papers would be archival for at least 100 years? Any idea?

[MHMG]

Mark, I too was wondering about longevity with third party inks as I could not find say on the PrecisionColor website any mention of it. I would take this to mean they haven't invested in longevity testing. Is the "100+" in the name of the OEM ink marketing or do they have good reason to believe prints produced with those inks on certain papers would be archival for at least 100 years? Any idea?

I believe the "Chromalife 100" designation for Canon's OEM dye-based inks entered the picture (no pun intended) several years ago when Canon marketing folks learned from internal and WIR testing that dark album storage would be rated in excess of 100 years. Light fade resistance was rated by WIR to be on the order of about 24-29 years  on select Canon media as I recall using the WIR standard 450 Lux-12hr per day average daily exposure assumption to calculate the display life.  Unfortunately, the legacy WIR densitometric test still in use today has no color patches in test for max black and near black densities. The original ChromaLife 100 ink set therefore got a free pass on the black ink lightfastness performance, and it was pretty abysmal (please see ID#84 in the AaI&A Lightfade database for a good example of the ChromaLife 100 problem, and compare this result to ID#304 in order to see how much better the ChromaLife 100+ set is by comparison).

Canon quietly replaced this highly fade-prone black dye with the newer and much superior ChromaLife 100+ black dye, and to its credit rebadged the new ink set as "ChromaLife 100+ so that informed customers can easily tell the difference).  This vastly improved black dye performance now also forms the basis of the 3 photo gray channels in the Canon Pro-100 printer. Third party dyes will be hard pressed to match the state-of-the-art Black dye molecule stability used in the ChromaLife 100+ ink set. Ditto for the other dye colors as well.  The OEMs have come a long way in terms of both dye and pigment performance, but third party vendors as a general observation on my part can't match the R&D efforts that go into the OEM inks.

best,
Mark
http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com

[Mark D Segal]

Thanks for the clarification Mark.

[enduser]

I have heard from a so-called insider that HP have markedly improved their dye inks used in the various DesignJet LF printers.

[MHMG]

I have heard from a so-called insider that HP have markedly improved their dye inks used in the various DesignJet LF printers.

The older HP Vivera dye inks had very good lightfastness properties when they were originally paired with HP branded and other swellable polymer media. This dye/media combination was the one that got rated over 70 year of display life in WIR testing and ushered in the first use of a "WIR Certified" seal on the package.  However,  swellable polymer media had all sorts of other humidity related issues and has been largely if not totally replaced by microporous papers. HP switched away from swellable media around 2011 (new media packages not getting a name change, but a label "instant dry" got added to the package designs). This transition left the HP printers like the Designjet series which used the "Vivera" dyes with far less light fade resistance on microporous media.

Epson Claria dyes were the first dye set to show that respectable light fade resistance could be achieved on microporous media, and Canon has followed suit with its continuing development of the ChromaLife 100/100+ dyes. That leaves the original HP Vivera dyes which were once best in class now lagging behind. Hence, it is very likely HP has also quietly continued development of better dyes for use in all dye-based office and photo printers. HP has also set a commendable precedent (Epson are you listening?) by retrofitting newer inks into older printers (photo printers that used HP57 cartridges got an upgrade to 57+, for example), but I haven't personally tested any new HP Vivera dyes recently, so I can't confirm whether the "so-called insider" is providing up to date info.

cheers,
Mark
http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com

[TommyWeir]

Okay... a bash at a spreadsheet.  I hope it's clear enough in its thinking, conjectural elements abounding here.   Am putting up in the hope that by parading my ignorance, you all feel free to fill me in!
A few notes:
- Parameters up top, the printer cost is more for info really.
- The ink per sq ft is a guide I've come across a few times, can be changed and values will shift.
- The total printed ink presumes (of course incorrectly) that all the ink is used at equal levels and speed.  But variances are beyond my time and computational willingness, unless someone has a sensible suggestion.
- I figured 20% for waste (can be changed).  I didn't add a cost in for wasted paper, which would actually be a higher cost than ink.
- Paper costs etc. are my local prices.
- Again, I limited it to two basic sizes of output, the print area rather than the paper area.
- You can change the no of prints per type of size and paper
- The total Ink used gets a conditional highlight in Numbers but the Excel conversion kills it, it should be less than the Actual Printed Ink amount calculated in the Parameters area.
- I read a guideline of 6 months for trouble free ink, so number of prints per week and associated costs might be of interest.
- The cost of paper you would use per set is computed.
- I wondered about offering a printing service for friends/colleagues of their own work, and worked out the levels to cover a full set of cartridges over the course of six months.   Might help.

[Mark D Segal]

Okay... a bash at a spreadsheet.  I hope it's clear enough in its thinking, conjectural elements abounding here.   Am putting up in the hope that by parading my ignorance, you all feel free to fill me in!
A few notes:
- Parameters up top, the printer cost is more for info really.
- The ink per sq ft is a guide I've come across a few times, can be changed and values will shift.
- The total printed ink presumes (of course incorrectly) that all the ink is used at equal levels and speed.  But variances are beyond my time and computational willingness, unless someone has a sensible suggestion.
- I figured 20% for waste (can be changed).  I didn't add a cost in for wasted paper, which would actually be a higher cost than ink.
- Paper costs etc. are my local prices.
- Again, I limited it to two basic sizes of output, the print area rather than the paper area.
- You can change the no of prints per type of size and paper
- The total Ink used gets a conditional highlight in Numbers but the Excel conversion kills it, it should be less than the Actual Printed Ink amount calculated in the Parameters area.
- I read a guideline of 6 months for trouble free ink, so number of prints per week and associated costs might be of interest.
- The cost of paper you would use per set is computed.
- I wondered about offering a printing service for friends/colleagues of their own work, and worked out the levels to cover a full set of cartridges over the course of six months.   Might help.

Tommy,

This is a rather more difficult exercise if one wants it to be truly useful, in the sense of having a modicum of accuracy for business purposes; if only for a rough rule of thumb out of personal curiosity, the accounting bar would be lower. The primary problem one runs into before getting into the conceptual stuff is lack of adequate data for estimating ink consumption for both prints and maintenance. Measuring ink for prints is not possible to do over the short term with the Epson P800, is available for the Canon Pro-1000, but neither of them are forthcoming with ink usage for maintenance and this can be a big deal - at least it has been for my 4900 and one hopes it will be less so for the P800, but it's a black box unless using an ink consumption inventory approach, which takes quite a period of usage and record keeping to build-up, absent transparency from the printer manufacturers. The assumptions you've made for ink usage, for lack of real information of course - I understand, are not reliable. Throughput tracking of actual printed coverage on a print-by-print basis is also important to make sure that the printed volume and the ink consumption match properly. To insure that investment cost is properly factored in, you need an algorithm that makes certain assumptions and calculations for per period machine depreciation and then allocates that depreciation over the volume printed per period, meaning that your spreadsheet needs date-sensitive formulae in the per print depreciation accounting, which would be more or less substantial depending on the cost of the printer relative to the periodic volumes printed. I know this doesn't give you a detailed walk-through on how to improve it - I can't do that here and data limitations probably limit the value of the exercise unless you want to get truly far more rigorous and sustain it over a long enough time period to build an inventory approach to ink usage. Hence, what you have done, with some fixing up, would provide a pro-tem rough rule of thumb that goes part of the way.

[TommyWeir]

About as much as I can aim for given what I have... :-).

Thanks Mark.

[Mark D Segal]

Oh - I agree - not easy when basic information is unavailable or it takes a prolonged period to implement a workaround.