The differences in Piezography inks.

Piezography inks are available in two main categories: PiezoTone (2nd Generation) and K7/K6 (3rd generation). A new generation of ink called MPS is the first universal purpose black ink on the market from any manufacturer.

PiezoTone inks: PiezoTone inks are true quadblack inks; meaning they are available in 4 shades. The shades are Black, Dark Gray, Medium Gray, and Light Gray. They were developed before the time of seven and eight ink printers. The most popular printers for quadblack printing had only 4 inkjet heads and therefore our ink sets had four shades of black. When the first EPSON Photo (six ink) printer models were released we adapted our inks for six shades by using two lights, two mediums, and one dark gray with the black. At that time we could think of printers as having Black, Cyan, Light Cyan, Magenta, Light Magenta and Yellow color inks. These were replaced with our own Black, Dark Gray (in cyan position), Medium Gray (in light cyan position), Medium Gray (in magenta position), Light Gray (in light magenta position), and Light Gray (in yellow position).

PiezoTone inks are also available in Warm Neutral, Carbon Sepia, and SeleniumTone hues. These hue sets comprise a dark, medium and light gray each. The black being without color was used as a common black in each of the three PiezoTone hue sets. But we also introduced two different blacks: Museum Black and Portfolio Black.

PiezoTone inks are made of 100% pigment and have extremely long lightfastness properties. Museum Black like PiezoTone is also made of 100% pigment. However, we offer Portfolio Black for those who wish to exhibit their prints temporarily and seek the absolute darkest dMax possible. Portfolio Black is only 92% pigment. The remaining 8% are metal hydroxides and are not very light fast. Although it is an interesting way to make black ink blacker, it is designed only for temporary use. Portfolio Black has also been found to be incompatible with the coating on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag. If it sounds like we do not recommend Portfolio Black, we don't! We think "wanting as black a black as possible and not minding a little fade" is a wonderful thought but it never seems to match the reality of what the little fade looks like.

PiezoTone inks simply DO NOT FADE. So having Portfolio Black ink get lighter when dark gray is not, looks terrible!

Speaking of longevity and fade, a funny thing happened on the way to the RIT testing labs. When we tested PiezoTones we also decided to test all of the competing inks including EPSON Ultrachrome. We had engineered PiezoTone inks to fade less than 5% at 1000 hours Xenon and less than deltaE2 in the same conditions. So we knew we were going to absolutely blow away the competition including EPSON! When we received lengthy volumes of data back from RIT we noticed that an ink that faded on average 28% (no not ours!) received the exact same rating as an ink that faded 2.8% (yes ours!). While it did not make sense to us at all, RIT explained that the industry standards that both they and Wilhelm adhere to permit a 35% fade rate before the "end point" is reached and the display life rating is estimated.

We also noticed that an ink that faded 25% in the first part of the test and then tapered slowly to an end point of 34% received the same high rating. This literally means that one of the competing inks fades significantly fast but received a 100 year rating because the fading slowed until it reached the end point. While we think that this may be acceptable to color photographers, we know that black and white photographers are much more sensitive to density loss.

In other words, when you read about an ink set on Wilhelm or RIT lasting 100 years - it means that it has faded 35%. The rating is for reaching the endpoint. If it says 75 years, then the ink faded 35% in 75 years. 35% is a lot. Humans can perceive a 5% fade and can detect a color change at deltaE2. So what happens when a company engineers their inks to fade less than at human perception rather than the 35% that the industry has adopted? They name it Piezography and every one raves about it!

PiezoTone inks generally speaking, were made for older generation printers and for use with PiezographyBW ICC. However, its most popular use is in large format printers using a professional RIP software which has a built-in Piezography inks profiler. We'll discuss this in more depth in the Differences in our Printing Systems article. But first a word about our most recent ink system.

Piezography K7 and K6 inks: This is a third generation of ink that improves printability over PiezoTones as much as PiezoTone did over the original PiezographyBW inks. Piezography K7 and K6 inks are ground to extremely small tolerances and filtered six times by osmosis to a very narrow band of particle sizes. Further the pigment are treated in such a way as to eliminate or limit their attraction for each other so that there is no conglomeration. In short talk, they do not clog and they can be left in a printer longer before the pigment comes out of suspension. While EPSON recommends using an entire cartridges of Ultrachrome K3 ink in six months or less, once its been installed - Piezography K7 and K6 inks can be left operational for at least a year. This new generation of ink is the first third party ink which can perform as well as the OEM. Its reputation for printability is excellent. And we further improved fade resistance by adding a polymerization to filter UV light.

K7 is a seven shade ink set. K6 is a six shade ink set. K6 is actually K7 without the seventh shade. I developed K7 because I wanted to take advantage of the seven inkjet heads that EPSON began producing when they launched Ultrachrome inks. No one thought that more than 4 shades of black ink were required in order to print the highest quality print. But the reality is six shades and seven shades of ink do in fact produce a superior print to four shades. The reason is quite simple. When a grayscale image of 256 values of gray is divided into seven shades of ink rather than four, the human eye perceives a much smoother tonal scale. The amount of detail in the highlights and shadows is also increased. EPSON as of this writing only uses three shades of black. While this is an amazing development for a company which builds color printers, it is simply not enough to divide 256 values of gray into in order to produce highest standard quality.

With Piezography K7 and K6 inks, we produced three hue sets: Neutral, Sepia and Selenium. Neutral K7 (and from now on K7 refers to both K7 and K6), is the only achromatic ink set on the market. This ink set is without color when perceived by humans. Because printing this ink on Blue paper will make it appear blue (all inkjet inks are nearly transparent), we need to qualify "neutral". We engineered Neutral K7 to appear "neutral" to a human when printed on the paper base white of Bradford Rag, Hahnemuhle Photo Rag, and Innova Photo Cotton Smooth. Those three papers share the same paper white and are very popular. Further, the resultant print needs to be viewed not under red light which would make it appear red, but a proper viewing standard. We chose 5000K because humans perceive 5000K as having equal amounts of red, green and blue light and is therefore a "neutral" viewing condition.

Neutral is a very unusual photographic condition because very few traditional darkroom papers have ever been able to print "neutral". They have almost always been warm or cold, etc. Because Piezography Neutral K7 is achromatic it means that using a paper white which is warmer or cooler than the base papers I mentioned above will produce a warmer or cooler print.

The biggest aesthetic influence of the Piezography K7 inks is that their pigment treatment means that they lay down on the paper different than any other ink on the market. This is literally a marriage of ink to paper. The resultant print looks similar to silver impregnated in gelatin. Further there is absolutely no trace of metamerism (when the inks look funny under different light sources) like that which plagues the EPSON K3 black and white system.

Sepia K7 is warm shade of carbon ink and is subtly warm. Selenium looks just like a fiber based silver print which has been given a short to medium bath in selenium tone. It's soft purply grayish tone has made it one of the most popular inks as a PiezoTone. Selenium K7 is also a new formulation called MPS but is being sold under the K7 label until its full gloss potential is realized.

Piezography Selenium MPS is a new ink system developed as a universal ink set which is as at home on glossy papers as it is on matte papers. The most significant development is Shade 1 (black) of MPS is which is the first universal black ink ever developed. It is glossy on glossy papers and matte on matte papers. Photo Black inks such as EPSON Photo Black have traditionally been made with dye additives in order to reduce the amount of pigment necessary in order to penetrate fully the surface of gloss papers. We took a different approach (we won't say how) so that our 100% pure pigment ink can accomplish the same. While EPSON Photo Black appears dull and muted on matte papers, our new black does not.

We're proud to continue to lead the industry in monochromatic ink jet. However, glossy inks need optimizing. EPSON first used a Gloss Optimizer in its R800 and R1800 printers. It still uses a Gloss Optimizer in the form of Light Light Black ink. We can only imagine that there are 1000s of man hours in programming of the EPSON printer driver to perfect their gloss effect. When you read next how we print Piezography inks - you will see that we need to use different printer drivers which do not have built-in support for Gloss Optimizer. So we are slow to introduce a perfect gloss as we continue to produce a system for our supported drivers. But we have released the Piezography MPS Selenium ink as K7 Selenium because its just too beautiful an ink not to be used on matte papers. We understand that some users are spraying their glossy prints in order to eliminate bronzing.

By the way - we mentioned Shade #1 of K7 is black. Shade #7 is our lightest gray. It is so light that it is hard to detect in a nozzle check!

Next we think you should read about how Piezography prints are printed by clicking here...