HP Canon & Epson Ink, Lexmark, Brother Toner cartridge Printer Ink Cartridges 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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Thinking of buying a new inkjet printer?

Recently my trusty old Epson R300 started to play up, so I thought it was time for a new printer. Obviously I wanted a printer that did everything that my R300 did as I had got used to its functionality. I looked around and was a little bemused by the choice on offer. However, working in the ink industry I knew to steer clear of certain manufacturers due to the running costs, as my kids are quite happy to print anything and everything that appears on the screen without any thought for the cost of the ink!

This in mind, I whittled down the choice to Epson, Canon or Brother as I know the ink is fairly reasonable for these manufacturers, also that third party ink is readily available. From my knowledge I also decided to keep away from tri-colour cartridges. This is because once you have used up one of the colours, the other two are wasted.

Before the R300 I had an older Canon, the Pixma IP1500 and was always very pleased with the results it gave, in fact I had given it to my father and it is still printing superbly years later! My mind was made up then I was going with Canon, the only issue was which one?

The are many to choose from but the Pixma range is by far the best for home use, as they are reasonably priced, have lots of features and print superb colour photos quickly.

I settled on the Pixma IP4300, I wanted to get IP4200 but found out that it is now obsolete. I had heard a lot of good things about the IP4200, but the IP4300 is an upgraded version.

I am so impressed with the printer I wanted to share my findings.

The printer is neat looking and was slightly smaller than the Epson R300. The Canon Pixma IP4300 takes individual ink cartridges, CLI8-BK, CLI8-C, CLI8-M, CLI8-Y and PGI-5BK which is a pigmented ink cartridge, so when one colour runs out you can simply replace it. There are also alternative cartridges for this printer, the first require you to take out the chip from your old cartridge and put it in the replacement versions or if that puts you off, there is a new system from Armor. This system comprises of an adaptor which sits inside the print head and then you put in the replacement cartridges into the adaptor. Both these options can save you a considerable amount of money.

I picked it up for around £50.00 which I think is good value, especially when you see what it can do. I had not really read all the information on this printer but when I did I was surprised to see that it can print a 6×4 full colour photo in 36 seconds, my old R300 took 2 minutes for the same picture. The Canon can also print a full colour A4 picture in under 2minutes wow! On top of this it is whisper quiet and the output is superb, this is mainly down to the 1 picoltire droplet size (picolitre’s are basically the measurement used for the size of the droplets, the smaller the droplet size the sharper the image with no obvious dots when you look closely) as opposed to the R300 droplet size of 3 picolitre’s. There is clear difference in image clarity when put side by side. The smaller droplet size also means that the printer uses less ink when printing therefore being more economical to run

I then tried out the text quality, again I was very impressed. In draft mode the pages literally fly out of the printer at high speed but although it was in draft mode the text was still clear and sharp. In normal mode the quality was comparable to laser output and would be more than acceptable for office use.

The Canon also comes with two paper trays, which is very useful. I keep A4 plain paper in one and use the other for photo paper, the printer also has a built in duplex unit which basically prints on both side of the paper without the need to take the sheet out and reinsert, amazing! Duplexing is normally saved for much more expensive laser printers.

If all this was not enough the Canon Pixma IP4300 also prints onto printable CD’s and DVD’s by using the special tray, one good thing here is that when printing CD’s and DVD’s the tray does not come out of the back of the machine like the R300, meaning it needs less space.

One thing I can say is that I found that using the Canon software that comes with the printer produced better results when printing photos than using the windows default option as the output was not as vivid, this was also the case for the R300.

To summarise I cannot fault this printer, it was reasonably priced, it is fast, quiet, gives excellent quality prints on plain white paper, photo paper or disc, it is cheap to run, easy to use and there is the built in duplex function.

If you are thinking of buying a new multipurpose inkjet printer for home or small office, I recommend you consider the Canon Pixma IP4300 printer, you won’t be disappointed.

HP have been working on high-performance printers for business for a while now and have pioneered the development of HP Edgeline Technology, this new ink-based printing engine has been designed to meet the demands of high-volume workloads. HP Edgeline offers innovative printing solutions for businesses with high-volume printing requirements, such as retailers, industrial printers and office environments. This new technology offers faster printing speeds, outstanding print quality and reliability, and low operating costs. The HP engineers were tasked with one thing, how to make printing better! It looks like they have managed it, the new Edgeline technology will offer excellent performance, be incredibly reliable and cost efficient. So what makes HP Edgeline technology so good? HP Edgeline Technology is a totally new way of printing; the ink-based print engine is designed with several printheads which span the width of the page, which means the paper moves, not the printhead. Simple eh! This allows greater printing speeds using large, stationary printheads—arranged in a line—which dispenses ink across the entire width of the page as the paper passes beneath them. What you get is an accurate ink-drop placement and breathtaking print speeds for crisp, print-shop quality output—fast. This amazing new design of printhead design delivers outstanding reliability, allowing for longer printing time, lower maintenance bills and lower overall cost of operation. The new printhead works in conjunction with HP Vivera inks to deliver market leading print quality.   HP Edgeline Technology is fast too, the system is used in HP Photosmart Express Station retail photo kiosks which deliver lightning-fast prints of digital photos, in fact 20 4 x 6-inch photos can be printed in about two minutes and the print quality is outstanding. HP Edgeline Technology is also used to power the new HP Photosmart pm1000 Microlab printer, which delivers photo lab–quality prints as fast as five seconds per print.  HP Edgeline Technology will start to be used in many more high-performance HP products. For example, HP has announced the production of the new HP CM8060/8050 Color MFP with Edgeline Technology available in Spring 2007.  Although these printers will be expensive initially, look out for them in the future as lower priced more accessible Edgeline printers, aimed at the home market are released.

Eastman Kodak has announced a new development in digital image sensor technology which improves sensitivity and may reduce or even eliminate the need for flashes.

Kodak’s new sensor technology adds “clear” panchromatic pixels to the traditional red, green, and blue color capture elements in a traditional image sensor array. Since the clear pixels are sensitive to light at all wavelengths, they collect more of the light which makes it through to the sensor, enabling a camera to take clear images in low-light conditions without increasing exposure time. Overall, the technology offers a 2× to 4× increase in sensitivity.

“This represents a new generation of image sensor technology and addresses one of the great challenges facing our industry—how to capture crisp, clear digital images in a poorly lit environment,” said Chris McNiffe, Kodak Image Sensor Solutions group’s General Manager, in a release. “This is a truly innovative approach to improving digital photography in all forms, and it highlights Kodak’s unique ability to differentiate its products by delivering advanced digital technologies that really make a difference to the consumer.”

Most digital camera sensors are built on what’s called the Bayer design, a two-by-two pattern developed by Kodak researcher Bryce Bayer in 1976. It contains four sensors—one red, one blue, and two green—and uses the green pixels to capture most of the luminance information for an image. Kodak’s new technology uses a four-by-four grid in which the arrangement of the photoreceptors can be changed, if desired, and which is interspersed with the “clear” panchromatic pixels to create a more sensitive luminance channels that is sensitive to all visible wavelengths. The technology can be applied to both CCD and CMOS image sensors.

Kodak expects to being sampling the new sensor technology in the first quarter of 2008, and says it is working with other leading companies to implement the technology across a wide range of industrial, special-purpose, professional, and consumer products.

The new sensor technology represents a public step in Kodak’s current strategy to embrace digital technology and largely leave behind its traditional film-based imaging business. The company says it will be able to fuel the transition by leveraging its existing patent portfolio, which it has traditionally guarded very closely. Its new image sensor—combined with a recent venture into the ink-jet printer market—may represent the first visible moves in a new long-term strategy for the company.

Compatible cartridges for the Epson Stylus D92 are now in stock at Stinkyink.com. When these printers were first released they had a new chip with 9 pins on it whilst the old compatibles only had 7 pins. We have just received stock of the new T0711 Black ink cartridge, T0712 Cyan ink Cartridge, T0713 Magenta and T0714 Yellow ink cartridges all with the 9 pin chips. These cartridges are Universal and backwards compatible with the older Epson Stylus D78 printers still in circulation.