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IP-8720 Not Printing Dark Enough & Pigment vs. Dye Ink

Tek420
Apprentice

Hi,

 

Just got an IP-8720 and it is printing black OK but I need it to print darker.  I am printing onto a translucent inkjet film.  The part I am printing is used to tightly press against a light-sensitive photoresist file and then exposed to a UV light.  The graphic I am printing is needed to block the light from getting through to the photoresist film and is best to use pigment ink but more on that in a sec.

 

What I found out is I have tried a number of settings to get this to print a dark image but they all seem to end up about the same darkness which is almost a dark, dark gray.  I have tried all combos of settings on all sorts of paper types but think these are the way they should be:

 

  • Photo Paper Pro Luster 
  • Print Quality - High (or higher depending on paper type)
  • Grayscale Printing
  • Color/Intensity set to Manual
    • Brightness - Dark
    • Intensity - 50 (Dark as it goes)
    • Tone - 0
    • Contrast - 0

These are almost identical to the setting the people who make the film say to set a 'Luster' paper on the Epson 15000 they recommend and pigment ink, not dye.  The Epson seems to have a DPI setting, Photo RPM (Max dpi), that I do not see for the Canon.

 

So with the ink, I saw that the main black cartridge, the PGI-250 is a pigment ink to make text 'crisper', and the color cartridges, CLI-251s, are a dye-based ink.

 

So my question are:

 

  • Can I specify somewhere to use the PGI-250 cartridge or is that an 'automatic' when printing in Grayscale?
  • Is there a cartridge with pigment ink that I can replace the CLI-251s with?
  • If there is a pigment ink for the CLI-251s will that hurt the printer or jets using the pigment ink?

 

Anyway thanks so much in advance for any help!

Stay safe and be well!

 

Dave

1 REPLY 1

Patrick
Product Expert
Product Expert

Hi Tex420,

 

When setting the driver to a photo paper, the colors ink tanks are combined to make black.  To use the pigment black, the paper must be set to plain paper.

 

Canon does not make color pigment inks for the PIXMA iP8720.

 

Another printer, the PIXMA PRO-10, uses pigment ink for all of the colors.

 

 

 

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