any views on 4 or 6 ink systems

[Paul]

Lol. They all will print. But collor reproductio will be diferent. Send me your profile and i see how big your gamut is

[Limara]

Thanks to every one who has replied

Appreciate and agree somewhat with the comments here. The vast majority of customers will be happy with a 4 colour output. If you're dealing with photographers etc. they may find issues with this. Over and over again I have compared outputs from several printers and always come to the same conclusion that I am far happier with 6 colour output but this is partly down to the type of work I do.

The distinct lack of 6 colour printers in favour of 4 on the 'supported' list is evidence that most customers will be perfectly happy with the output though.

I echo the advice given, Ricoh A4 is an excellent starting platform....would be interesting to know what sort of work you'll be doing

I plan to do " one offs" for the mugs, mainly dogs, I have a friend that arranges dog shows and the mugs i have seen for sale at them have been really terrible ( not printed just really awful commercially produced mugs) and the others will just be line drawings and text.
I am very pickey and can spot a fault on anything a mile off and I have seen some badly printed mugs as well, I dont know how to spot if its because of lack of colours or a badly set up printer, I have been doing graphic work for years and I personally think there is a difference with the 4 and 6 ink on photographic work but I dont know if this would be the same on the sublimation inks.
For T shirts I think I am going to be buying the commercially produced transfers as I personally prefer a cotton Tee.
I am going to test out pigment inks and transfer paper first though, I also have a epson sw something printer that has pigment ink its a 4 colour and they are real cheap at the minute If the pigment ink tests dont work out I thought i could get refillable carts and sublimation ink for this printer
Its such a shame the sublimation inks are so expensive its a lot to spend out and I really need to be able to do mugs.

new Ricoh printer such as the GXe 3300 which come with sublijetR inks and PowerDriver for colour management. This will cost less than buying the ink alone for your R 300 and will get you printing perfectly in no time without having to trial and error or try getting your CISS to work on a used printer.
This isn't intended as a sales pitch, just as your new to all this then there are easier ways to start making this work.

Thanks for the Info Martin and the price of printer and ink being less than the ink alone sounds good untill you factor in the difference in the ink quantity 29ml in the ricoh compaired to 125 ml bulk

my sugestion is to stick with 4 colors. Only few people can actualy notice the diference in color gamut.

I have never heard of a colour gamut either where do you obtain that info from?

[bms]

Thanks for the Info Martin and the price of printer and ink being less than the ink alone sounds good untill you factor in the difference in the ink quantity 29ml in the ricoh compaired to 125 ml bulk

Very true, but what you don't do is numerous head cleans with the Ricohs which flushes ink down the drain. Whilst 'on paper' the ink costs appears to be significantly more expensive, the true increase in printing cost is small when you get it down to the cost of ink on a mug. Coupled with this is the lack of down time that accompanies head cleaning, waiting for the heads to recover from over cleaning, re-priming the CISS, pressure of getting the job done etc - I think the vast majority of Epson to Ricoh covertees over the years will testify to the fact that the Ricoh printers are a walk in the park in comparison to others that have had issues (not everyone does have these problems of course as we have lots of Epson users as well as Ricoh users). So looking just at the cost of ink per ml is a bit of a red herring.

[purpledragon]

Very true, but what you don't do is numerous head cleans with the Ricohs which flushes ink down the drain. Whilst 'on paper' the ink costs appears to be significantly more expensive, the true increase in printing cost is small when you get it down to the cost of ink on a mug. Coupled with this is the lack of down time that accompanies head cleaning, waiting for the heads to recover from over cleaning, re-priming the CISS, pressure of getting the job done etc - I think the vast majority of Epson to Ricoh covertees over the years will testify to the fact that the Ricoh printers are a walk in the park in comparison to others that have had issues (not everyone does have these problems of course as we have lots of Epson users as well as Ricoh users). So looking just at the cost of ink per ml is a bit of a red herring.

Whilst i agree with martin re less down time etc i still prefer 6 ink systems . i have 2 printers an epson 1400 6 ink and a b1100 4 ink and the only time i have had a complaint over colour is when using the b1100 though it was only 1 complaint out of god knows how many prints

[Justin]

This is exactly my issue, the B1100 is a good printer but better suited to business documents rather than photos etc imo.

[Earl Smith]

Very true, but what you don't do is numerous head cleans with the Ricohs which flushes ink down the drain. Whilst 'on paper' the ink costs appears to be significantly more expensive, the true increase in printing cost is small when you get it down to the cost of ink on a mug. Coupled with this is the lack of down time that accompanies head cleaning, waiting for the heads to recover from over cleaning, re-priming the CISS, pressure of getting the job done etc - I think the vast majority of Epson to Ricoh covertees over the years will testify to the fact that the Ricoh printers are a walk in the park in comparison to others that have had issues (not everyone does have these problems of course as we have lots of Epson users as well as Ricoh users). So looking just at the cost of ink per ml is a bit of a red herring.

Totally agree with you Martin. You also forgot to add the time it takes to do a head clean and the frustration it causes. If you are running a busy shop which is doing other things, you dont need to spend time doing head cleans.
My calculation of the print cost per mug is 12p to 15p (+VAT) . A full A4 print costs 50p. Sorry, in my opinion that is not expensive when you think of buying original Epson ink at 15 pounds per 15ml.

[Paul]

Limara. I dont think you can check it you self but send me your icc profile an i will show yo what your ser up is able to get.

Paul

[JSR]

Unless you're using a custom profile, it's not going to matter if you have 4-inks or 6-inks.

I used to swear by 6-ink Epson printers, believing that they produced better results than equivalent 4-ink models. And they did. But they did because the off-the-shelf ICC profile provided with the inks wasn't accurate enough.

I didn't know that at the time. No one tells you that a stock profile isn't the solution to all your problems.

When I tried out a 4-ink Epson B40W, it just confirmed my preconceptions because it printed with a horrible green cast using the Sawgrass profile. I was ready to scurry back to my 6-ink printers, forever apologising that I'd ever doubted them.

But then I made a custom profile for the B40W. Not only did that eliminate the colour cast, but it also produced prints that were far more accurate than the 6-ink printers with the Sawgrass-profiles ever did.

That led me to experiment with the Brother printers (which only come in 4-ink varieties). In the past, Brother printers haven't been particularly accurate with their 4-inks, which only served to "prove" that 6-ink printers must be better - right?

I tried my first 4-ink Brother printer (from what was a newer range at the time) and it, also, backed up the notion that 6-ink printers were better because it was incredibly weak in the areas of light gradients (like blue skies).

That was until I got an accurate profile made up by Paul. Immediately those weak areas improved and the light gradients are now spot on.

The only conclusion I've come away with is that you absolutely must have an accurate ICC profile for your printer. If you're just using stock profiles, you're not going to see much of a difference between 6-ink and 4-ink because the gamut of dye-sub inks is so small in the first place. Only an accurate profile is going to push the envelope of what colours your specific printer can produce.

In short, a 4-ink printer with accurate ICC profile is likely to produce better results than a 6-ink printer with a stock profile. If you go for a 6-ink printer, get a custom profile made that suits your ink, your printer, and your substrate. That's the only way to take advantage of the extra ink colours. However, for the vast majority of the time, a 4-ink printer with a custom profile made will produce excellent results.

[TonyMast]

In short, a 4-ink printer with accurate ICC profile is likely to produce better results than a 6-ink printer with a stock profile. If you go for a 6-ink printer, get a custom profile made that suits your ink, your printer, and your substrate. That's the only way to take advantage of the extra ink colours. However, for the vast majority of the time, a 4-ink printer with a custom profile made will produce excellent results.

That is exactly what I have had done for my Epson SX660 printer that uses 6 colours. Paul has done a profile for the ink and paper, and the output is superb on to mugs. Unfortunately it was a brand new printer and I can not say what the output was prior to the profile being created so can't give a comparison of before and after except using the sub ink (which it was not actually designed for in the first place).

As someone that is new to this as well, I am making use of some of the advice given in the printer sections on the forum and make sure that I use my printer every day even if I do not have a customer to print for. Hopefully this will cut down on the number of blockages and clean outs of the print heads that might occur. Touch wood, I have no reason to do a head clean yet as the system is still to new (I think).

Tony

[JSR]

If it helps to put this into perspective for anyone, I've just done a gamut comparison using the Windows Color applet to compare the difference between the stock Sawgrass profile for a six-colour printer (the Epson 1400) and a custom profile done by DSF profile-guru Paul for my four-colour printer (the Brother MFC-295CN).

These are the results:



For clarity, I've inverted the colours here:



By comparing the two gamuts, we can clearly see that the 6-ink profile is addressing far less colours than the 4-ink profile. In this comparison, the 4-ink printer is going to produce more accurate results over a wider range of colours than the 6-ink printer will. In order to print those same colours, the 6-ink printer will have to print "nearest approximation" colours based on your chosen rendering intent to approximate the colours that the 4-ink printer can print directly.

While both printers are using dye-sub inks, they're not using the same dye-sub ink. The limited gamut of the 6-ink printer could be due to a poor profile, or it could be that the 6-colour Artanium inkset is just incapable of producing as many colours as the 4-colour non-Artanium inkset.

I hope this has helped someone in their 4-ink vs 6-ink deliberations.