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I have been advocating this approach to inkjet printing for many years now.
Simply put, the whole reason why inkjet manufacturers have had to
introduce light dye load ink into the mix is due to the size of the ink
droplet.
Although it improved color fidelity somewhat, it was mainly a way to
sell you more water at horribly inflated prices.
The human eye, at anything approaching normal viewing distance cannot
tell the difference between a bunch of very small spaced darker ink dots
or many more larger lighter ink dots.
In early inject printers which used 12-20 picolitre dots, attempts to
produce lighter colors ended up looking like 4 o'clock shadow. Very
granular large dots with lots of white space around them. It was
obvious even at viewing distance that the gradient was not smooth.
As the ink dot size lessened and speed of placing the dots increased,
it became easier for the printers to produce something approaching a
smooth even color that imitated a lighter color. If each time the dot
sized were halved, twice as many dots could be put down in the same
area, the color appeared to become more and more smooth.
With the advent of 1 picolitre dot volumes, the dot literally becomes
invisible to the naked eye even on close inspection. If these dots are
laid down with full dye load inks it becomes their spacing that gives
the illusion of lighter colored inks.
How does this benefit the end user... greatly!
Full dye load inks are much less fugitive than lighter diluted inks.
The reason is because the way fading occurs is that the dye molecules
get activated by things like UV light, and they literally fly off the
paper surface. Light dye load inks have many less molecules per surface
area, and they are poorly protected by other dye molecules, since they
don't bunch up in layers very much. However, a small dot of high dye
load inks, has the dye molecules stacked on top of each other. That
way, the top layer of molecules might be activated by the UV light, and
fly off, but deeper layers remain protected from the UV, being filtered
by upper layers. This helps to maintain the ink staying within the paper.
Secondly, you use a LOT less ink. As has been been discussed
previously, printer drivers are designed to wash the paper with the low
dye load inks in printers that use them. These inks usually get used up
twice as quickly as the high dye load inks are. That is why you will
find yourself replacing the light cyan and magenta ink cartridges twice
as often as the others. The printer companies which rely upon ink sales
to make their profits, love these inks, because not only do they cost
much less to produce, since the pigment or dye components are the most
costly part, but you are continually having to replace them. Further, on
most inkjet printers, every time you replace a cartridge, the printer
purges all the other ink heads as well, wasting ink in every cartridge.
With the use of very small dots of high dye load inks to make even the
lighter colors, those areas will use almost no ink at all, so your ink
cartridges will last much longer if you tend to print with a lot of
middle range densities.
Depending upon the technology used, this process could even speed up the
printing process.
If implemented well, this is the type of breakthrough that could lead to
many advantages for the end user, for a change, while not degrading
image quality. We shall see. I give Canon kudos for this.
The one question is if they can do this with pigmented inks, or if they
have successfully improve the dye inks enough to make them more
permanent. I am looking forward to this. Having only owned 4 color
printers, it would be a great continuation of tradition to be able to
finally use a 4 color printer that rivaled anything the low dye load
printer inks could accomplish.
Art
J. Cod wrote:
> I read a press release describing some new Canon printers
> with ability to print with 1 picoliter droplets to be
> marketed in October.
>
> One was described as able to use fewer colored inks because
> of the improved resolution of the droplet.
>
> I'd be interested in hearing opinions on how this technology
> upgrade may benefit ... with the understanding, of course,
> that until you test it in the specific printer released by
> the manufacturer in a rigrous way, it's just idle
> speculation.
>
> J. Cod
>
>
>
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