I realize that pigment-ink photo printers get the lion's share of the interest around here, but with both Canon and Epson currently selling as their top dye-ink photo printers models with inks that are, or claim to be, substantial departures from their predecessors' inks, I thought some of you might be interested in a relatively objective, data-driven comparison of their inksets (which is, of course,
not an overall comparison of the printers, or even their photo print quality).
The Canon Pro-200 is claimed to have both a new black ink for higher black optical density and a new magenta ink for larger gamut. The Epson XP-15000 traded the longstanding Epson light cyan and light magenta inks for gray and red inks. How do the Pro-200 and XP-15000 compare to each other? How does the Pro-200 compare to its predecessor, the Pro-100? How does the XP-15000 compare to its predecessors such at the Artisan 1430 / 1500W (and many others, plus the current XP-970 and XP-8600)?
With major assistance from Keith Cooper of Northlight Images (
http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/), an analysis was conducted and written up. The results is a PDF with one chart, two figures, and about four pages of text. It is posted here at LuLa as am attachment to this message (as is the summary table), but if you don't want to log in, at least for now you can download or view the report at
https://app.box.com/s/3pqoxbij9b1orn0z1psvzskkacalekws.
To be very clear, this test is certainly not definitive, or anything like that. One finding (for the Pro-200 on luster paper) looks like it could well bee an anomaly, although a retest produced a quite similar result.
So by all means, please comment. And even better yet, run your own test(s) and report what you find. Thanks for your interest.
