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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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.

 

Six Steps to Greener Printing in 2008.

 

Printing can be ecologically costly. Printer ink can leach out of cartridges and papers in landfills and pollute the surrounding environment; and paper manufacturing destroys ecologically diverse forests and contributes to global warming. Luckily, however, it’s not difficult to make your home or office printing more environmentally friendly. All you need to do is develop some earth-friendly habits. Here are six easy steps you can take for earth-friendly printing this year.

 

Recycle your ink cartridges. When ink cartridges end up in landfills, the leftover ink residue leaches volatile organic chemicals (VOC’s) into the surrounding environment. These chemicals can cause cancer and birth defects in those who are exposed. In addition, the engineering-grade polymers used in cartridge plastic take about 1,000 years to decompose. Over 65 million ink cartridges are used each year in the U.K., and unfortunately 85% of them end up in landfills.

 

You can keep yours out of landfills longer by recycling your ink cartridges. Many companies will provide instructions for how to do this on the cartridge packaging. In addition, some recycling nonprofits will recycle your ink cartridges for free. Some provide free shipping envelopes or pick up your cartridges for you. Nonprofits in the U.K. that offer these services include Cartridges4Charity [http://www.cartridges4charity.co.uk/], Action Aid Recycling [http://www.actionaidrecycling.org.uk/], and the Recycling Appeal [http://www.recyclingappeal.com/].

 

Use fewer colours. The less ink you use on your printed materials, the less ink will eventually wind up in landfills. As much as possible, print in black ink or use simple two-tone graphics. This isn’t just good for the environment; it’s also good for your wallet.

 

Get the most out of your ink. Printer companies do the best they can to try to get you to buy more ink. This hurts both your budget and the environment. Conserve ink as much as possible by changing your cartridges only when your ink really is gone—not just when your printer tells you you’re running low. If you’re planning on buying a printer, choose one with individual cartridges instead of all-in-one, so you don’t have to replace every colour when one runs low. Whenever possible, print in Draft mode and in black ink.

 

Use recycled paper. In the U.K., most paper production comes from sustainable forests—forests that are planted, harvested, and replanted for the express purpose of paper production, rather than wild forests clear-cut by paper companies. However, these sustainable forests are usually uniform stands of fast-growing softwoods. Companies cut down slow-growing, diverse hardwood forests to plant these trees, but they can’t support the area’s ecosystem as well—so they’re still not environmentally ideal. In addition, the paper manufacturing and bleaching process releases toxins into the air and groundwater.

 

You can help by using less new paper and more recycled paper. Many people think recycled paper is discoloured, spotted, and generally lower in quality than new; this isn’t true. Quality recycled paper looks indistinguishable from new, and it’s not much more expensive.

 

Print on both sides. A great deal of paper is wasted when people print on only one side of a document. If your printer has a duplex setting, use it whenever possible. If not, it’s still feasible to print one page at a time and reload the page to print on the other side—although it’s time consuming for longer documents. At the very least, choose a printer with a duplex setting next time you’re shopping for printers. In addition, instead of throwing out waste paper with only one side printed, save it as scrap paper.

 

Print less. Printing less saves both paper and ink. Whenever possible, limit your printing. Send email instead of hardcopy mail when you can, and avoid printing out emails for your records—instead, back them up electronically. Instead of sending reports, white papers, and longer documents in hard copy form, send them in .PDF email attachments when you can. When you do print, shrink your margins to allow more words on each page.

 

Many people think that being environmentally friendly is expensive and inconvenient. This is not usually true. Most of these steps will save you money as well as benefit the planet, and they’re not difficult to do. Integrate these simple habits into your normal office procedure, and your office is sure to be more ecologically friendly this year.

New Photo Printer from Epson stretches the limits!

 

Epson are just in the process of releasing to the world their latest top end Phot Printer. The Epson R1900 is the latest in a long line of professional photo printers that dominate the top end of the market for high quality printing and can deliver photos up to 13 inches wide and 44 inches long on a wide variet of media types including glossy, lustre, matte, canvan and fine art papers.

With the introduction of their new range of high gloss inks the UltraChrome Hi-Gloss 2 range, the R1900 can achieve an optimal level of gloss and colour vibrancy in a pigmented ink system using eight colours – including new red and orange inks – plus an enhanced Gloss Optimiser. The Red and Orange inks have replaced the red and blue inks found in the Epson R1800, resulting in improved colour gamut and facial tones. This next generation pigment ink set produces quick-drying, archival resultas that can last up to 200 years under glass. A unique feature of the printer is the ability to auto-switch between photo and matte black cartridges to ensure the deepset blacks on any media type.

Other developments incorporated into the R1900 are:

• Faster Print Speeds – Creates prints up to 35 percent faster than the Epson R1800, particularly at higher resolutions, boosting productivity for final layouts and sellable photographic images. Produces breathtaking 11 x 14 prints as fast as 1 minute 46 seconds.
  
• Superior Media Flexibility – Offers the same media versatility as the Epson R1800 with the ability to print on glossy, lustre and matte medias as well as thicker fine art media, roll papers, canvas and directly onto inkjet printable CX/DVD’s.
  
• Ehanced Connectivity – Allows two computers to simultaneously connect to the R1900 via two high speed USB 2.0 ports for seamless printing from either computer.
  

Exceptional Reliability – Features a new ink-repelling coating on the print head that prolongs the life of the Epson R1900 and decreases maintenance time. A built-in sensor also allows for automatic print head alignment and nozzle checking.

Epson launch their ‘Print Academy’

Epson have launched a training day for users who want to get the most out of their inkjet printers. Users of Epson Inkjet Printers may get benefit from an in depth look at how to get the most out of their inkjet printers. With the increasing complexity offered by todays printers, most users (including yours truly) merely scratch the surface of what is on offer. In an effort to reduce costs the printer manufactures only give a very brief ‘how to setup the printer’ guide in the box so a huge amount of information is missed out. These ‘Academy Days’ are aimed at giving the user the opportunity of getting the most out of their hardware.

Epson Print Academy provides expert guidance on the fundamentals of image capture,
processing and print workflow.

• Colour perception
  
• RAW Vs JPEG
  
• Non-destructive processing
  
• Photoshop colour management settings
  
• Using ICC output profiles to print
  
• Printer driver options
  
• Printing B/W
  
• Hands on Q & A with Epson experts
  

Epson Print Academy UK is led by Jonathan Briggs past MD of the association in
imaging techniques. Alongside Jonathan will be members of the Epson team who
bring years of experience in digital printing.

The course is £56.40 inc VAT and includes a light lunch.
Choose from these two dates: 16 January or 17 January 2008.

Course spaces are limited so please book early to avoid disappointment.

For more information follow this link: Epson printer training