Stinky Ink News

Colour Space and Colour Gamut

As a species, we have pretty good colour vision. Although it doesn’t extend far into the infra-red or ultra-violet spectra, it’s good enough to navigate the world we live in. The range of colours we can see, technically called the colour gamut of our vision, is quite a lot bigger than the gamut a printer can produce and, to a lesser extent, bigger than the gamut a monitor screen can display.

The way colours are represented differs between monitors and printers. With a colour monitor, colours are made up from various levels of Red, Green and Blue light – hence the term RGB – in an ‘additive’ model. This means that as you add more of each colour, the colour gets lighter and lighter until, when you have full levels of red green and blue, the screen should show white.

With a printer, though, things are rather different. Here you have three colour inks: Cyan, Magenta and Yellow, which work in a ‘subtractive’ or reflective way. The light that falls on a printed pages is absorbed or reflected in different amounts by these three inks. If you have fully-saturated prints of all three colours you get black, not white – printers rely on the white of the paper for light colours.

In fact, printer inks are not pure cyan, magenta and yellow, because it’s very hard to achieve these theoretical colours. If you mix them all you tend to get a dark, muddy brown, which is why a true black is added to the colour trio, to get the full range of colours – CMYK. K is used as an abbeviation for blacK to avoid confusion with B for Blue. In a similar way, six-colour photo printers include light cyan and light magenta inks, to improve the range of light colours they can reproduce – to extend the colour gamut for these colours.

Calibration

As you may imagine, mapping all the colours that show on a monitor screen to their equivalents on a printout isn’t an easy job, which is why you may have noticed that a photo or page design looks different – usually not as bright – when printed.

You can improve things by calibrating you monitor to your printer. Some more expensive printers come with calibration software and some high-end graphics applications, like CorelDraw do, too. They’re usually automated systems, where you select the closest matches for a series of printed colours to their equivalents on the screen, or vice versa.

An ICC profile is a standardised form of look-up table of the colours a monitor, printer, scanner or other piece of colour equipment can produce or resolve. Software, such as photo editors and graphics design tools, can use an ICC profile to determine the different shades available when displaying, printing or scanning.

If you do a lot of colour work, it’s worth running a calibration routine, so it’s less of a surprise when the colours your select from an on-screen palette are printed out. Utilities like Monitor Calibration Wizard (www.hex2bit.com) and Calibrize (www.coolsw.intel.com) will do the job of setting up your monitor (for free).

Colour spaces

If you study the rather daunting-looking diagram on this page, you can see how colour spaces work. The whole of the colourful horseshoe-shaped area represents the colours the human eye can see. You’ll notice that all three of the coloured triangles laid over this ‘colour space’ have much smaller areas. This is because neither a monitor nor a printer can get close to the full gamut of colours we can see.

The standard Red Green Blue (sRGB) triangle, with a dark blue border, is a standard colour space defined jointly by HP and Microsoft in the 1990s, to provide a standard set of colours that could be used on devices working with the Internet. Using sRGB, software and hardware developers can design their products and be reasonably sure that the colours they are using are the colours people using their software or hardware will see.

The Adobe RGB triangle, with the orange border, defines a larger colour space needed by the kind of graphics professional its products are designed for. Both these colour spaces are for monitors and use the additive colour model.

The third triangle-ish shape, bordered in yellow, is a typical CMYK colour space for an inkjet printer. As you can see, although it’s bigger than the sRGB colour space, it doesn’t extend as far into the green space as Adobe RGB.

So what happens if you try and print a photo or other colour document which uses colours that fall outside the inkjet CMYK colour space. Clearly the printer won’t be able to reproduce them accurately. It’ll have to choose a colour within its own colour space which most closely approximates to the one you’ve chosen.

This is where ICC profiles come in again, as software can compare the colours its working with, with those the profile says are available on the printer it’s using and make the best choice for mapping one to the other.

Some printer colour gamut basics

It’s no accident that the majority of photos are printed out on inkjet printers. Apart from the fact that inkjets are still quite a bit cheaper than colour laser printers, they also do a much better job of reproducing colours. Partly due to the different printing techniques, where inkjets use liquid ink, sprayed onto the paper and laser printers use powdered ink, melted onto its surface with heat, inkjet print has a much larger colour gamut than laser print.

If you compare prints of an identical photograph printed on both types of printer, you’ll notice the laser print looks exaggerated, with far less variation in some of its colours. This is particularly noticeable with things like sky and sea scenes, which involve a lot of subtle shades of blue and green. Colours that the inkjet printer can render quite naturally are much harder for a laser printer, which has fewer shades of colour to pick from.

It’s not all bad news for the colour laser, though, as its main use is in the office, where good, bold primaries are the order of the day. Even with a smaller colour gamut, these colours can be well reproduced, producing vibrant business graphics and promotional materials at much lower cost per page than from an inkjet.

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When we were approached by the BBC News team who were doing a special feature on the ‘Victims of Credit Card Crime’ to appear on a ‘BBC News Special Report’ we were only too happy to help.  Having been the victims of a concerted card fraud attack back in 2002 which cost us loads of money we believe that these days we have the most secure site it is possible to have.  In fact shopping online with Stinkyink.Com is more secure than shopping in the High Street.

When the Film crew were here filming their piece they said that if we had any reasonable sized fraud to call them and give them the details.  Sure enough on the following Thursday we found an order that had slipped through our Automatic Fraud checking procedures, but failed our Manual Assessment.  A plan was hatched between the BBC News ourselves and the Metropolitan Police Dedicated Cheque and Plastic Crime Unit DCPCU (the special police unit that tackles cheque and card fraud criminals).

We carefully packed up a parcel containing some old cartridges and dispatched it via carrier on a Before 9.30 Delivery.  Present outside the address were a Police unit and two camera crews.  The carriers van arrived and the driver knocked on the door, but there was no answer so he left a card and went on his way.  Back in our offices we were watching the Carriers website and were devastated when it came up as ‘carded’ on our screen.  Back in London the Police team were also disappointed (to put it mildly), but the decision was made to execute the warrant.  Like an episode of ‘The Bill’ the team piled out of their cars sledgehammers at the ready to smash a way through the front door, but when they knocked it the door just swung open, so in they swarmed and found four ‘people’ (editorial rules prohibit me calling them what I really think!) fast asleep in their beds.  They were duly arrested and their PC’s and mobile phones confiscated.  One up to the Good Guys!.

Card Fraud is an ongoing battle and we have suffered more than most.  You have to understand that if you find a doubtful transaction on your card statement, you ring your Bank and they will normally refund your money.  The Bank then come back to the retailer and ‘Chargeback’ that transaction so they don’t lose anything either - the only loser is the poor old retailer who has to stand the entire loss.

Here at Stinkyink.Com we have stringent fraud checking procedures in place and over the past four years I am please to say we have not suffered any significant losses due to card fraud.  However we are constantly vigilent, we protect your personal data with an SSL 128bit encrypted site, your card details are handled via Secure Hosting who are PCI 1 compliant and finally our own site is checked by Hacker Safe randomly every 24 hours.  It has been a costly and painful lesson for us to learn and we are pleased to help the BBC to publicise the fact that this is not a victimless crime.

Everyone and their brother/sister has been watching oil prices go up and up and up.  There seems to be no end.  With higher oil prices, means higher fuel cost, which in turns means higher prices for almost everything.  But what about the other products of oil, mainly, plastics.

Yes that wonderful non-degrading product we use daily is made out of oil.  I recently read an article that stated that a laser toner cartridge on average has between 1/2 to 1 gallon of oil in the creation process, while Inkjet cartridges are around 1-3 quarts.  This can add up over time.  The question is when will companies like HP, Lexmark, and Canon pass on the cost of the plastics on to consumers.  I would guess it is only a matter of time and here are the factors.

1. Cartridges are their money makers, even for a large company like HP.  So if their margins slip, they want to keep investors happy, they would raise prices.
2. Shipping cost have increased.  We have all seen this in food, fuel, and everyday purchases.
3. The cartridge bodies are made from plastic - Plastic is made from oil.  It only makes sense that the prices would increase.

We have already seen 10% price increases from Canon  and Brother, plus an increase due to the weakness of the pound against the Euro.  It is a long tine since we had to worry about currency fluctuations, but since September we have seen about 15% reduction in the value of the pound to the Euro and all of our Original Manufacturers cartridges base prices are in Euros.

However, using recycled and refilled printer cartridges should not see as big of increase for one main reason, we are not making new cartridge bodies.  We use the shell they made and add ink to it and make it work.  So not only is it still the best environmental option, but also makes much more sense financially to use remanufactured laser and inkjet cartridges

Q:

When I print from the Windows XP Picture and Fax Viewer using the Photo Printing Wizard, my prints look too dark. What is wrong?

A:

Some Epson printer drivers produce darker output from the Windows XP Photo Printing Wizard with Service Pack 2 (SP2) when used with their default color settings. We will be updating the drivers to correct this problem and posting them on the Epson Support Website for downloading. The updated driver is available for the Stylus Photo R200. You can download the driver from the Downloads page. 

Full information is available from the Epson website here

Epson R200, R210, R300, R310 Counter Reset

Here is how to reset the waste counter for the;

1. Epson R200;
2. Epson R220;
3. Epson R300;
4. Epson R310

• Press and hold “Stop”, “Maintenance”, and “Power” buttons for about 10 seconds. A message will come on the screen saying counter is reset and to turn the printer off. The R200 and others don’t have a screen so just wait until the 10 seconds is up.
• Turn the printer off, unplug the power cord. Wait about 1 minute and power the printer back up. The counter will be reset. That’s all there is to the reset procedure.

Message:

Service required. Parts inside your printer are at the end of their service life. See your printer’s documentation for details

If the waste pad is actually full and ink is about to overflow, then you need to install a waste container. You can see the waste pad by opening the access panel on the back of the printer.

Changing the waste pad requires almost complete disassembly of the printer, it is a big job. There is an easier way.

Open the access panel on the rear of the printer (remove screw) and look inside carefullly with a flashlight. You will see a tube (down and to your left) coming from the cleaning pump and it will have an open end on it. This is the tube that delivers ink to the waste pad.

Use a piece of coathanger wire or equivalent, and fish out this piece of tube. Bring it to the outside of the printer, thru the access panel.

Find yourself a suitable container (Tupperware or a plastic cup or jar) that is not too tall. Put the tube into this container and secure the tube and container so they won’t come apart or lose connection if the printer is moved.

If you wish you can make a hole or notch in the access panel cover so it can be replaced.

Now the ink will go into this container and not into the waste pad inside the printer. If it gets full, dump it.

Epson America Inc. announced that vigorous enforcement of its ink cartridge patents continues on many fronts following the Final Determination and Exclusion Orders by the U.S. International Trade Commission (“ITC”). The decision made in October 2007 bars imports of infringing ink cartridges for Epson printers in the USA and Canada.

“Epson strongly recommends that all importers and distributors of cartridges for Epson printers take appropriate precautions to avoid infringement and potential seizures and liability,” said Alf Andersen, assistant general counsel, Epson America Inc

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection Service (U.S. Customs), which is responsible for enforcing the ITC General Exclusion Order, has been inspecting incoming cartridge shipments and seizing infringing cartridges. Recently, the ITC issued a Seizure and Forfeiture Order against Mipo America Inc. of Miami,  after a U.S. Customs seizure. Last month, U.S. Customs issued a Certification that requires all importers of new and refilled ink cartridges to certify, under penalty of perjury, that importation of the cartridges does not violate the Orders.

Earlier this year, Epson filed three enforcement complaints with the ITC against three large foreign suppliers of ink cartridges and their U.S. subsidiaries alleging continuing imports and sales of new and refilled infringing cartridges in violation of the ITC orders. The three foreign suppliers are Ninestar Technology Co. Ltd. of Zhuhai, China (supplier of G &G and OA100 brand cartridges); Mipo International Ltd. of Hong Kong (supplier of Mipo brand cartridges); and Cana-Pacific Ribbons Inc. of Vancouver, Canada (supplier of Butterfly brand and generic cartridges). The ITC has the authority to issue penalties up to the greater of $100,000 for each day of importation and sales of infringing products or twice the commercial value of the infringing products. On May 1, 2008, The ITC instituted formal enforcement proceedings against the Ninestar and Mipo companies. The ITC has not yet acted on Epson’s complaint against the Cana-Pacific companies.

In April 2008, Epson filed an additional patent infringement lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Portland, Ore. against four prominent internet resellers of ink cartridges seeking permanent injunctions and compensation. The complaint alleges that the four companies continued to sell new or refilled ink cartridges that infringe 18 patents that collectively cover innovations in numerous on-carriage cartridges used in most Epson desktop inkjet printers, and off-carriage cartridges used in Epson large format inkjet printers. The defendants in the new lawsuit are Inkjetmadness.com, Inkgrabber.com ,Inksell.com of San Antonio, Texas; Meritline.com and Media Street Inc.

Epson recently took possession of 58,000 infringing inkjet cartridges from the bankruptcy trustee for MMC America Inc., which was the U.S. affiliate of Zhuhai Gree Magneto-Electric Co. Ltd., a Chinese conglomerate that manufactures MMC brand cartridges. The bankruptcy trustee surrendered the cartridges for destruction because the ITC Orders prevented their resale. In addition to the MMC America bankruptcy, many other foreign manufacturers and exporters of ink cartridges for Epson printers have closed their U.S. operations, apparently to avoid liability.

“Since U.S.-based resellers can be independently liable for substantial damages for patent infringement, Epson urges resellers to be very careful regarding claims of non-infringement and offers of patent indemnification from suppliers that have only a minimal presence in the U.S.,” said Andersen.

Epson maintains a Web site at http://www.itc.epson.com/ to provide U.S. importers and distributors with timely information about the ITC action and related U.S. District Court lawsuits. The U.S. Customs Certification, ITC Exclusion Orders, ITC Seizure and Forfeiture Order, ITC Enforcement Complaints and U.S. District Court complaints referenced in this press release are all posted on the Web site with other useful information, including a summary of the legal requirements for refilled cartridges.