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Canon Pixma Pro9500 Mk II - part 6 of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

by Mike McNamee Published 01/06/2010

Monochrome

A failing of fully pigmented inks of the past has been in their metamerism and this is one of the compromises that had to be made when setting off dye versus pigment (initially) and full-pigment versus Epson pseudo-pigment (more recently). The compromise is offset by the longer fade resistance of the fully pigmented inks. All the technologies have moved on since that time and the Lucia ink set is no exception. Such variations are of greatest importance to the monochrome worker as it is there that the errors in base neutrality and metamerism are most evident to the human observer. To this end we measured metamerism around the near neutrals and along the tone range using a variety of measures. As the graph indicates the variation around the gamut is quite low, ranging from 2.44 to 2.96 in the Colour Inconstancy Index (CII). This value is higher than some of the values around 1.0 that we have measured but significantly lower than the values of 5 that we have measured on legacy samples of full-pigment inks from some years ago. In summary then, the metamerism (as measured by the Colour Inconstancy Index) is higher for the fully pigmented Lucia inks, than UltraChrome with a like-for-like improvement of around 50% on fade resistance. However, just as the variations in overall colour error are hard to detect, differences between fade resistance might be similarly obscure. In either case the life of monochrome renderings is always greater than that for full-colour renderings


So what did the monochrome prints look like? Well the 9500 Mk II made some very nice, neutral monochrome prints using the 'grey scale' setting in the printer driver. When we used 'Photoshop Manages Color' they were weak in the blacks with the Dmax never getting above 1.6. This was a detectable deficit, even without a reference print to compare against. Changing to 'Printer Manages Color' increased the Dmax to 2.02. This is still a little low for a premium paper as we have measured up to 2.7 using the Epson Advanced Black and White driver onto a variety of papers. To gather more data we printed from the Epson 3800 but using the Canon Platinum Gloss paper. We employed the ABW driver using Dark/Neutral as the settings and 2880 as the resolution. This delivered a Dmax of 2.80, comprehensive proof that the difference between the results is down to the ink set not the paper. The Epson ink set was a poorer match to the Canon paper producing a slightly greener looking print although the CII was identical (1.57). Ignoring all the statistics, we preferred the Canon/Canon combination which is hardly surprising as we assume that is the way the system has been optimised.


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1st Published 01/06/2010
last update 21/07/2022 08:46:23

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