UPDATE 10/2010 - AMAZON quits selling $17 ink msrp cartridge from kodak and farms it out - check your nearby office supply store for better pricing - msrp on this item is 17 bucks from kodak but the seller right now is charging a premium - if it returns to being sold by amazon like before it should be priced at 17 bucks because kodak is very picky about ink price. REVIEW FOLLOWS NOW.
Printer inks are NOT all the same. Yes, they look similar - little black boxes that eventually run dry and you gotta buy another one. But the ink inside can be run of the mill DYE based inks [frequently used on refill kits], or specially engineered PIGMENT inks. If you want the skinny just google (dye vs pigment inks) and there are more opinions, white papers, chem engineer's Ph.D thesis, and best of all - Manufacturer's "BUY ME" pdfs. I own just two FULLY pigment based printers (the Kodak I reviewed for Amazon's vine - their entry level combo scanner / printer) and an HP designjet Z3200ps 44". Now let's look at the ink in close detail.
Dye inks fade fast. A good example of Dyes are food coloring. Dye molecules are very small, and the energy carried by ultraviolet rays easily breaks the small bonds of dye molecules. Yellow is usually the first to go, followed by magenta, then lastly cyan. I used a laboratory 5,000 watt UV A-B-C lamp meant for outer space covering research to test my inks, but you can just put a printed page outside for a couple weeks and try it for yourself if you're curious - you'll get UV-B and C since the atmosphere stops A. My test lamp is like a tanning booth on steroids - 5 minutes simulates 5 weeks of UV on earth thanks to our atmosphere, and it's why NASA spacesuits are multimillion dollar attire. It's a great way to test longevity of plastics, paper, ink, etc.
Pigment inks have alot of the same stuff dye inks have but substitute pigment for dye. Both use a carrier (usually water but some mfgr's dare to use the nasty term solvent which brings up MSDS issues, California Proposition 65 (which states that anything that may harm you must come with a tag - even CA gasoline pumps have warnings), and quite often UV inhibitors listed on the MSDS as "proprietary ingredient < 5%". I read the MSDS on one company's pigment ink who's yellow caused cancer, and their carrier was a mixture of ether and antifreze. Their printer had to suck in its fumes and use activated carbon to treat the air before letting it escape.
So back to water for almost everyone who wants unrestricted shipping and sales of their product. Most companies use an ULTRA pure water (DI H2O or deionized water, meaning no traces of other chemicals are in it - one tiny step better than distilled water it's now used in manufacture of both dye and pigment inks.
Here again, Kodak uses a non-water base of essentially an antifreeze formula. Since the ink is stored in felt pads you can't drink it so there isn't a real hazard.
The difference is that the PIGMENT is a long chain polymer, which when mixed with UV inhibitors can "take the heat" of the high energy UV rays. Don't get me wrong - nothing lasts FOREVER, but we can get 100-200 year prints with modern pigment inks, and PIGMENT is by far the best ink. If Dye is food coloring, PIGMENT is house paint [greatly oversimplified but appropriate]
So why is Kodak so special? Well their chemist knew all this, probably wrote a thesis on it, and went with all pigment ink in the LOW COST printers. It's unheard of! Sort of like an economy caviar. In fact, he/she did a pretty darn good job on the whole system. I print mixed color & text pages on my kodak printer - it's held up great on USB but the wireless can't hear my AP 100 feet away while my laptop can, so it's strictly USB now. The printer is dirt cheap (as is the ink) - kodak has to make money so it's in the paper which carries the print formula for each grade of paper on the back in coded stripes which ties you to Kodak paper to receive their proper PIGMENT ink for your paper (calibration - it gets messy on the HP), and in reality you wouldn't want to waste pigment ink on paper not intended for it. My printer / scanner combo sells for 279 today and came with "introductory" ink (not a full load but enough to get you started). I'm surprised it's gone this far until I had to buy Ink!
That introductory ink printed (in black) a 96 page book, plus 10 pages of graphs heavy in black with little color here and there. I used 50% of hp's introductory ink just aligning the printheads and calibrating the color for the various paper rolls I use. In all fairness when I made a 20x24" canvas plot it only used 3cc of ink, but all the calibration work guzzled it. I don't miss that job on the Kodak - it's so simple by comparison.
I'm buying the Expanded black ink cartridge now because its worth the extra $7 or so to cram as much black in there and I'm setup with a pigment black printer that uses $17 ink. Now let's put it in perspective
Oh yea - My "other" pigment printer. It doesn't use the "normal" ink colors like cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. It's the HP Z3200ps, with 12 (yes, a full dozen) ink colors including such novelties as "Chromatic Red". All the inks are pigment, color and black (2 blacks actually - a photo black and a text black) JUST LIKE THE KODAK. The pricetag? Check it out here on amazon: HP DesignJet Z3200ps - 44" large-format printer - color - ink-jet - Roll (44 in) - 2400 dpi x 1200 dpi up to 2 min/page (color) - USB, 10/100Base-TX 6547.99 as of today, and yes, HP gives you "introductory" ink just like everyone else in the biz - they gotta make money on something somewhere. HP's other, cheap designjets use either full dye based ink OR they use a pigment black and then dye for color to keep costs down. This means that printing black and white is never a greyscale like a photo B&W print - so they threw in a photographic black and a photographic grey cartridge to get those colors right. CMYK printers can't use the black for photos because it will be too dark, so they blend lots of CMY to get a process black that is sorta green sometimes, and does not age well, especially in dye printers, hence the pigment b&w inks.
Now why 5 stars for Kodak's accomplishment of a 279 pigment ink printer?
Star 1 - Combines a printer/scanner into one unit and they work really good, fast, and simple.
Star 2 - seldom has a misfeed
Star 3 - Pigment inks - both black and color
Star 4 - You get to choose how much black (small/large) you buy.
Star 5 - Value. I can buy 23 of these printer/scanners + a ton of ink cartridges for the price of the Z3200ps - both printers are the rare breed that is using FULLY PIGMENT based ink. One HP 130ml pigment print cartridge costs $78 but keep in mind that I have to buy 12 separate cartridges for the HP printer (the UV inhib / gloss enhancer is $55 instead of $78 since it's clear, making a cartrige change out on the HP $911.00. Of course with a 44" print carriage you need 1.5 liters of ink onboard the hp photo printer, but $911? It's prints will likely last just a few years more than the Kodak, and both will outlast dye based printers by a long shot.
I'll bet you never knew ink could be so much fun! Kodak Black Ink Cartridge 10XL (8237216) - Kodak - Kodak 10 - Kod10bulk - Good Price'
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