4 & 6 Colour printers - The comparisons/problems?

[Justin]

I've always believed that a 6 colour Epson produces superior images to a 4 colour. I know many folk argue that sublimation simply doesn't need the 6 colours but personally I find skin tones and gradients better.

I recently bought a 4 colour B1100 and use the same ink as in my 6 colour printer. Some of my designs have yellow and red in them, neither are 100% solid colour so I don't expect a pure print. That said, when I print them on the B1100 I can see tiny speckles of darker colour in both red and yellow. I appreciate that there is darker colour mixed in with these and this is what I'm seeing but on the 6 colour it isn't noticeable and everything looks considerably brighter, the B1100 appears almost murky for want of a better word.

Maybe I'm asking an obvious question here but should I notice this issue more on a 4 colour printer?

For the record, I've tried different papers, profiles and so on and the issue remains...if it is an issue!

[JSR]

For a long time, I believed as you do that 6-ink printers would produce better results than 4-ink printers. These days, I think that's a legacy of the past.

My first Epson printer was an Epson Stylus Color 600 (4-ink printer) which I bought on the grounds of comparisons between its forerunner (the 500) and two comparative prints from an HP and a Canon printer. Both the HP and Canon prints had significant "speckling" issues of black dots everywhere. The Epson 500 had the same but it wasn't so noticeable - you had to be really close up to see it - and the 600 was even better because it had a higher resolution option (1440dpi, IIRC).

After that came my Epson Stylus Photo 750 (6-ink printer with the addition of the "light" colours). This showed no "speckling" whatsoever, and it's this that cemented in my mind the view that 6-ink printers are always better than 4-ink printers.

Move forward 10-15 years and technology has changed. Today's printers have much smaller droplet sizes (down to 1.5pl in some cases) and much higher resolution because of those tiny droplet sizes. You shouldn't be able to see any speckling at this droplet size.

If you're printing in a fast or draft mode, then you will see some kind of speckling because that's not using the higher resolutions/smaller droplet sizes that the printer has to offer and, in this scenario, the lighter colours may be beneficial.

If you still see specking today when you're not printing in the faster print modes then the chances are that its due to an inaccurate profile - the printer is using black in the colours when it shouldn't be doing so.

The issue with skin tones and gradients is the same kind of thing. When I first used my 4-ink Brother printer, I would get blotching in areas of light gradients (such as the sky) which I initially put down to the lack of any light cyan ink. However, as soon as I had a more accurate colour profile done, the blotching in those areas disappeared completely. The same was true of skin tones. Any that might previously have been too purple or too orange came bang-on when I used a properly accurate profile.

When I used to print with my R1800, I had no speckling whatsoever - despite there being no "light" inks at all. All the colours were "full" colours, but it didn't matter because the droplet size was an almost invisible 1.5pl.

I suppose a little common sense dictates that the B1100 was designed to be an office printer first and not a photo printer so maybe we shouldn't expect too much from it. But I've printed from many 4-colour printers from Epson's B40W through three different 4-ink Brother printers and if I saw speckling I wouldn't still be using them. I have three 6-ink Epson printers here (a 1290S and two R1400s) that I could use if I experienced the speckling issue, but I don't use them. I've never printed from a B1100 but I have just received a sample print from Brother for one of their new ones and, like the printers I have here, when using the right inks on the right paper with the right profile, the colours are excellent - there's nothing "murky" about it whatsoever.

[Justin]

Checked the print on my S21 as well and similar issue. I don't think it's profile related, I've re-profiled the B1100 anyway.

It may just be the images, I'll check the colour combinations and see what the customer has done. They send them through as pdf's so I'll also get the original psd file and make sure nothing's changed in the export.

Appreciate what you're saying about skin tones. I've seen this where the profiles havn't been right but I don't get this problem any more.

Yes, the B1100 is intended for office use but these graphics are blocky vectors not photos.

Will take a look at the artwork again before delving any deeper!

[JSR]

There shouldn't be speckling in blocks of colours. I sometimes do vector graphics/designs, too, which require blocks of colours and I've not seen any speckling (maybe my eyes are just too old to see them? ) Perhaps you could try printing your own blocks of colours to see what results you get.

I don't see why the same image would be fine on the 6-ink printers but not the 4-ink printers. The droplet size shouldn't be big enough to notice when colours are mixed. PDFs might be an issue if the images are stored in quite low resolution (even if they look good on screen), but I don't know because I've not done that before. If someone sends me a PDF with images, I ask for the images because I typically print through Qimage and I want to avoid any compression wherever possible.

I'll be interested in what you discover.

[Justin]

Just thought I'd update this thread. Been looking in detail at the images again. The red being used is C0 M96 Y94 K0 and the yellow is C2 M0 Y99 K0. Might explain the issue but as JSR has pointed out I don't think this should be an issue caused by 4 colour printers when it's OK on 6 colour.

Other images look ok, general photos etc. I did wonder if the images might be at fault due to being converted to pdf but I have the customers original eps file and colours are exactly the same.