I said that prints made with Claria inks are way better than prints made with pigment inks.
I know nothing yet about this new line of Claria inks. For a while there it was
pigmentpigmentpigmentpigment. Dye-based inks -- no, not for professionals, not for people who take print longevity seriously. That's
kid's-stuff. Thing of the past! Think
pigmentpigmentpigmentpigment! And now, "suddenly": dye-based ink again. And what does it offer? "Rich, vibrant colors." "Long print life." (Or whatever the ad copy
du jour says.)
And of course that's the claim for the pigment-based inks, too.
Ok, why? What is this about, anyway? Does the new ink offer some significant advantage over pigment-based inks? Are the printers that use the Claria ink somehow "better"? If every road leads to "rich, vibrant colors" and "long print life," then why one over the other? Five years from now, will the Epson printers that are the size (and price) of a compact car all be using dye-based inks again? Is this new ink just some kind of marketing gimmick, or a serious leap forward?
Though the Epson 1280 was a huge pain in the neck (endless head-clogging) there were times when I got d-max, especially on Pictorico gloss film -- better than anything I've seen with the Ultrachrome ink (I haven't used K3 inks, though). And that despite the endless published figures for d-max with this, that, and the other paper/pigment-ink combination. Numbers, schmumbers -- there it was in front of me: honest-to-godfrey _black_ in the shadows. Wow, just like a "real" print.
So the black was deep and intense with that film product. And then again, there were crappy batches of dye-based inks that caused the prints to turn orange-y in a short time (it was no urban legend -- saw it with me own eyes). I have no idea how well the Claria inks work with the film but it would certainly be rewarding to get that dense a black in prints again. (Although Pictorico's having _doubled_ the price of the film, overnight, pretty well knocks it out of the ballpark for me.)
In what respects have the prints made with Claria ink seemed better than prints made with Epson's current crop of pigment inks? Brighter colors? Larger gamut? Better blacks? Cheaper by the picoliter? And then there's can we really know at this point what kind of print life we'll have with the new non-Epson papers, and
any type of ink, when there aren't yet any published figures (per Wilhelm or whoever else)?