Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Printing: Printers, Papers and Inks => Topic started by: Gemmtech on November 08, 2010, 10:29:42 am
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Why can’t “They” make a dye based inkjet with a pigment clear topcoat? That way you would get the benefits of both technologies; just like we can do in car painting or furniture finishing. Dye prints are nicer looking than their pigment brethren, whether it be the blacker blacks or no GD / Bronzing or the glossy gloss that is impossible to achieve with a pigment based printer.
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Is there such thing as a clear pigment?
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The clear may offer some UV protection but they are generally used to add gloss and to alleviate gloss differential and bronzing. They have no pigment content. The clear may contain Tinuvin P, which can offer UV protection, but I'm not certain that UV absorbers have the correct refractive index to be color neutral in a top coat. Is it possible to run a dye print through a pigment printer with gloss enhancer and JUST put down a coat of clear over the dye print? It would be an interesting test to see if a coated dye print would last longer, in terms of color fade, than a non-coated dye ink print.
I would be curious to see dye ink prints with various black/gray levels but I don't think this has been offered in dye ink printers to date.
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Why can’t “They” make a dye based inkjet with a pigment clear topcoat? That way you would get the benefits of both technologies; just like we can do in car painting or furniture finishing. Dye prints are nicer looking than their pigment brethren, whether it be the blacker blacks or no GD / Bronzing or the glossy gloss that is impossible to achieve with a pigment based printer.
Well
You can't have a "pigment clear topcoat". By definition, if it is clear, there is no pigment in it.
John
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Frankly, I'd love to see a clear topcoat from a pigment printer, so we can start making more prints without glass!
Ideally, this could eliminate the step required today to coat canvas, for example...
But this is probably O/T, as I suspect you're looking for a way to get dyes to last longer with a uv-blocking topcoat, rather than making coated pigment prints.
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Look into finishing sprays and liquid laminates.
Back in the bad-old days, we used to take our glossy prints and spray them matt and today we do the same with canvas and fine-art papers to do the same.
I think one of the Epson or HP printers does (or did) have a cart with what was called "gloss optimizer" which filled in the blanks.
An easy work-around to optimize the gloss in many situations is to simply add one more mask to the top of your master image. Simply add a "levels" layer and pull back the output highlight down to about 248 give or take. That will put jut a tiny bit of ink in the highlights which will help even out the surface gloss of many papers.
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Why can’t “They” make a dye based inkjet with a pigment clear topcoat? That way you would get the benefits of both technologies; just like we can do in car painting or furniture finishing. Dye prints are nicer looking than their pigment brethren, whether it be the blacker blacks or no GD / Bronzing or the glossy gloss that is impossible to achieve with a pigment based printer.
In a sense that is already done. Inkjet ink pigments as we know them are much closer to dyes than most think. Consider them as balls of long dye molecules like you would make a ball of a wool thread. There are more and stronger links between the molecules but nevertheless. To protect that ball more against fading, to keep the particles suspended in the ink medium, to get a better bond and to enhance the gloss properties there is a polymer resin coating on that ball, that is what Epson called MicroCrystal Encapsulation but Canon and HP have similar technologies. That resin could be a transparent acrylic. The gloss enhancer fluid of the HP Z models is an additional clear coating ink. There will be PVA in that ink like in most inkjet ink mediums but it is possible that another clear resin is in that dispersion too. Pigments and dyes are colorants and a clear colorant is more or less a contradiction of course. The fade protection of the resins is more in blocking gas like ozone etc. The layer thickness makes it hard to get any UV protection, if effective at that scale it would influence the gamut too.
met vriendelijke groeten, Ernst Dinkla
Try: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Wide_Inkjet_Printers/