I just got a new inkjet printer, and it has a color cartridge with cyan, magenta and yellow inks. It also came with a ‘photo’ cartridge that has cyan, magenta and black inks. (The photo cartridge is interchangeable with a high-capacity black cartrioge.) What is the purpose of a separate photo cartridge? I noticed that some printers with separate ink tanks for each color have separate ‘photo cyan’ and ‘cyan’ inks. Are these inks somehow different, or is it just that cyan and magenta tend to be used more than yellow, and so a photo cartridge contains extra cyan and magenta ink? If the inks are different, why isn’t there ‘photo yellow’, at least in my printer? The only clue the documentation provides is that the photo cartridge provides ‘more realistic flesh tones’.
(I apologize if this question has been asked before; I did a search and couldn’t find an answer.)
This is a WAG till someone knows for certain but it might be that the different inks are for use with different paper. The photo inks used with special photo paper and the other inks with everything else. The issue I am thinking of here is ink bleeding so the different inks may be more or less prone to that. I know if I tell my printer that I have photo paper in and actually have regular paper in the results are very poor (the regular paper comes out a soggy, crinkled mess). Photo paper accepts more ink (or seems to) which allows for an overall better picture as well as a longer lasting picture (does not fade nearly as fast as a photo printed on regular paper).
That said I do not have different ink for photo paper but rather tell the printer what paper I am using and it adjusts itself accordingly so I may be totally off base here (just bored and thought I’d toss it out for fun as food for thought).
I’ve seen two kinds of “photo cartridge,” both of which replace the black cartridge in an inkjet printer. One contains dye black, pigment black and grey ink (I’m not sure whether the grey is black or pigment) - this is to produce sharper black and white tones. The other type contains black and two colors, cyan and magenta, both of which are lighter than the normal cyan and magenta - kind of a pastel. Since with normal cyan and magenta the only way to create lighter colors is to have more white space between dots of color, adding the pastel magenta and cyan helps to create smoother blends in photos with delicate mixtures of pale pinks and blues, such as skintones.
I also got a new Epson multifunction printer, clearly designed for printing photos, since it has a built in memory card reader and came with a pack of photo paper. But it just has the plain black, cyan, magenta, and yellow inks, and the same ink is used for documents and photos. The photos look great, however.
I was surprised that it used regular ink for photos, since the old HP inkjet I used to use had a photo cartridge that replaced the black cartridge.
Photo quality inks are formulated differently. At the very least photo inks will outlast the regular ones on any medium. Think of them as archival inks.
Individual manufacturers may create different inks to work especially well with their own machines. For example, if you go buy a great big Epson 2200 and use generic inks, you can almost guarantee that your print heads will become clogged. Since Epson doesn’t design their sub-pro printers to be modular, you’re going to wind up sending it in so they can fix it. By the same token, the photographic inks may be easier for the print heads to work with, faster drying, et cetera.
Epson photo black inks produce more subtle shades because they mix better and dry quicker than regular inks.
The Canon i9900 even adds plain red and green inks to increase it’s gamut, which is the range of colors it can reproduce flawlessly.
Photographers who specialize in B&W and don’t want to buy a photolab or want to go digital will choose the Epsons for a variety of reasons. 4-picoliter inkjets will produce the same image quality as a 2-picoliter dye-sub(what real photolabs use) anyway, so why not?
So yes, there’s a difference. Unless you are doing something for archival pictures or want something to show your grandson or are simply a nit-picking graphic artist like myself, the difference isn’t that huge. If you’re doing family photos, go with the good stuff.
BTW: If you buy an Epson, you are pretty much going to have to buy Epson inks and papers exclusively. This isn’t a bad thing, as the inks and papers are top notch.