I've had my Epson S40600 for about 3 months now and it's great! love the thing. It's fast and the quality is great. One thing I have noticed is the ink use is a little odd, not sure if it's this way for others. I've replaced 3 of the 4 cartridges since installing it. (Black, Magenta and Yellow) I still have not had to change the Cyan. And the other 3 are half or a 1/4 of the cartridge left. Is this normal for these to use the other 3 more?
And I was thinking about getting and iOne Pro to make profiles. If I do go down that road will this save me ink possibly?
Hi, if you build your own profiles, you COULD save ink. There are some parameters in the profile building process that you need to fully understand, and what their effect is on color gamut, image quality and the effect they have on each other. The first ink limits (individual CMYK ink restrictions) define the gamut of the primary (CMY) and secondary colors (M+Y=R, C+Y=G, M+C=B). Pick a black ink limit that no longer shows white spots in a solid black. Your rip only suggests ink restrictions based on colorimetric data coming from the spectrophotometer. It does not know how the individual color CMYK looks like, or how they look combined (RGB). If a control printout shows bleeding, puddling, if it's still tacky when reaching the take-up roll etc, your ink limits are too high for the given printing speed. The total ink limit is the limit of CMYK together. It defines how much CMYK ink will be allowed together. Remember that the darkest point in your profile normally will be 100% (of a restricted) K, and a combination of CMY. This of course depends on the choices you have made in the first step. In Onyx this is mostly around 190-300%. Both the individual and total ink restrictions have an effect on ink saving. Restrict them too much, and you'll not be able to print the colors you want, because necessary saturation or density can't be reached. Next in the process is the printing of the profiling target (I've skipped the linearisation ramp).
The measurement merely results in a file that has input CMYK on one side, and the resulting spectral values (and L*a*b*) on the other side. CMYK 0,0,0,0 = paper white, and this is also part of the ICC profile. The opposite has to be calculated: from L*a*b* back to CMYK. You have control, by means of the output profiling parameters, to define how the perceptual rendering takes place (contrast, saturation, ...), the ICC ink limit, and how grey balance will be composed. The choice of parameters of GCR, grey component replacement, defines the mix of K with CMY to compose grey. A light GCR setting means that lots of CMY and less K ink will be used to compose grey. The most aggressive GCR, sometimes called MaxK, used as much K as it can, only using CMY to help in neutrality and density. The starting point of K defines how early in your greys you want K to be used. The GCR settings have absolutely the most effect on ink saving, except for bright saturated colors because you cannot introduce black here. You will notice that default GCR settings for most of the profiling applications have moderate to light GCR settings, and start K at around 30%. My experience tells me that this does not result in neutral grey images, most of the time they're too greenish. If you have a printer that is capable of printing black ink with good image quality, and I mean it prints okay (no missing nozzles), the smallest dots are small, give MaxK and a black start of 0% a go. Ink saving will be none compared with other GCR settings for the purest colors, but up to 35% for all colors where K can be used instead of CMY. Take note that if you want to alter the output profile settings, just copy the media profile and rebuild the profile with other settings. You cannot alter the primary and secondary ink restrictions (the step before printing the ICC chart.)
Here are some screenshots from a presentation I've made a couple of years ago.
Have fun!
