Buying an inkjet photo printer - dye or pigment inks. Which is best for your photography?

hi my name is keith cooper nor flight images and in the short video i'm going to try and address a question i get asked by a lot of people quite often is if i want to print my photos should i get a dye based printer or a pigment ink based printer there are two main sorts of printers for inkjet printers that is there are ones that used inks which are predominantly dye based and there are ones which use inks which are predominantly pigment based now it happens uh if you look at the range of printers available the all the more expensive ones are pigment ink based and all the cheaper ones tend to be dye ink based also the pigment ink ones tend to have more colors they have more different color inks whereas some of the dye based ones may only even have four inks that's uh black cyan magenta and yellow and that's that's it i've looked at some recent printers canon pro 200 for example xnxp 15 000. i've got reviewers of those but this is a more general look at do i want pigment ink or dye based ink is one of them better well first of all here's a print produced on a glossy metallic style paper this is done with dye based inks and um it's rather impressive it's the cathedral ely but i'm not sure to what extent i can really show this in a video but it has a glow and brightness about the color that you won't ever get with pigment based inks similarly this picture here is also printed with dye based inks and this is on a very glossy paper and when you look at test prints and i do a lot of test prints and i always suggest testing new printers inked papers with known test images i've got lots of them on the north light images website when i look at this particular test image which is from the software you get with the iron display monitor profiler it's buried away in the installation somewhere but the images are there that's really impressive for a glossy print if i look at a shallow angle the color is there's no what's called gloss differential so i can't see the ink laying on the surface of the paper if i look at similar image printed um pigment ink printer superficially they're quite similar this is also on a glossy paper this is not on the metallic paper this is just a plain gloss paper if i look at a shallow angle i can actually see a slight impression of where the ink is laying on the surface of the paper and that's called gloss differential you'll never get rid of it if you want truly glossy photo style prints sort of that you might do for small snaps then dye base printer with a glossy paper wins every time if you're bothered about this now most of the time i'm not actually bothered about it what concerns me more is the fact that on archival papers and these are papers which are designed to last longer the prints that i produce using the pigment inks will last a lot longer than the dye based inks now dye based inks used to have a bit of a reputation of fading in a few years um the current generation from canon and from epson really don't do that so um these prints if they're stored well are going to last for years but if i actually want to sell prints and sell prints at high quality i want something that i can say is going to last 150 years or so under good conditions this is my kitchen this is not a place to hang prints without protection of them um the damp the steam everything else the light coming in will cause problems with them so do remember that just because somebody says pigment inks last a long while that's pigment inks kept under good conditions not just any underwear so i've said glossy prints look better yep they do and also you can get some really nice intense blacks off them here's a print using an archetype paper and the black level on this is quite phenomenal for normal prints you would not get this intensity of black if i printed this on a pigment ink printer so why are all the pigment ink printers more expensive why do they have more inks well it's very difficult to show here but the pigment ink printers have in general on many papers a much larger gamut that range of colors they can encompass and certainly if i use something a bigger printer than the ones i've tested recently such as if i look at one of the larger format ones p5000 canon pro 1000 one of the more advanced printers the range of colors you can get is greater than you can get of dye inks what you're getting you're being impressed by by the dye inks is just the brightness of them the actual color range is somewhat less and i can show that with a test image and things like that and do it with some soft proofing and show that but it's not really obvious but it does exist so the colors i can get off the pigment inks there are a wider range there also tend to give smoother gradations because they're small more inks as well but remember they cost more so you're you're paying for this there's one area where pigment inks with modern printers completely kicks the legs from underneath dye based prints and that is black and white if you're into black and white printing on almost any paper type apart from ultra high glossy pigment inks just look better they are more neutral now i'm shooting this video with led halogen replacement lamps i've got a bit of daylight coming in i can be fairly certain that as long as i've set the camera up okay this looks pretty neutral black and white the problem you can get with dye based inks particularly the cheaper printers where they've only got the four colors is that you may get a black and white print that looks black and white in one light but you take it somewhere else in the room with different lighting and lo and behold it's got a greenish tinge to it or a slightly magenta tinge to it there's nothing you can do about that you can correct the magenta tinge for viewing in one lighting but you take it back into the other lighting and the print comes out a different color that's a long standing problem with dye based inks so for black and white i would pick pigment every time there's one other area of paper types that makes a difference for pigment inks and that is printing on brighter style papers now brighter style papers these are fine art papers here but tend to be quite thick papers brighter style papers are designed for pigment inks they're designed to give something of that dark room look about them although actually anyone who ever mentions to you about the darkroom look of prince ask them to define what they actually mean by it and how much experience they've had in the darkroom you'll find that people use terms like they don't actually mean a great deal i have my impression of what dark room look means like i mean and almost everybody else who uses the term will have their own it's one of those terms that means almost whatever you want it to mean but anyway so what we've got to sum up we've got dye based inks printers are cheaper pigment ink printers are more expensive higher end printers tend to use pigment inks and that's because pigment inks give you a wider range of color and on some media give you distinctly superior results they also last a lot longer so it really comes down to depending on what you want to do if you want to print black and white and you're serious about your black and white printing pigment inks that's the easy one that's on almost any paper sort if you want to print bright glossy prints particularly if you're just doing small prints dye based inks can look great dye based inks incidentally can look impressive on the right paper and if i was handing out some prints for a portfolio presentation just to give people some prints just to take away for something and i have the right sorts of image i print them with a dye based printer that's because the prints with this glossiness have more immediate punch and impact and that's not always what i want i certainly don't want it with that and this one although we've got a black here it's um it's a bit yeah the surface already showing through it's not ideal so what i would say is if you're if you want cheap go dye those dinks if you want quality go for pigment inks if you want good quality small images dye based but a good dye based printer can help so something like the xb15000 or the canon pro 200 and i'll just leave you with this um this is a card i was testing cards in printers and every single i made some cards over christmas and for some people birthdays and other things and every single card i made i printed on a dye based printer i had several printers here to test had a choice i could print on whatever i like and i picked a dye based printer because with this paper which is a sort of luster finish paper i had some other cards which had a sort of art type paper and i had some glossy ones every single one of them looked better now the difference is this card in 50 years time the inks may have faded but if you use pigment inks they'd probably be absolutely fine how many cards do you send out do you expect people to keep for 50 to 100 years probably not that many hence why i picked cards to print on the diabase printer i've written a lot more about aspects of printer use with a lot more technical details about why you might choose one or over the other but suffice to say if i want to make fine art prints whatever fine art actually means it's pigment ink black and white pigment ink other stuff well it depends on how much money you want to spend so there is no simple hard and fast this is best it's just about what you want to produce what you want to spend so hope that's been of some use uh please do if you've got any questions ask away in the comments there are lots of articles about different printers and they all cover different types of printing and what they're good for so if you found this useful please do consider subscribing to the channel and thank you very much

Channel: Keith Cooper

Views: 14,691

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Id: 1jwb_FFGqdE

Length: 12min 38sec (758 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 27 2021