Starting to dabble in HDR photography

[qwertyydude]

Well it may be just my opinion but the experimental design of a lot of those sites that come to the conclusion that refilling inkjets is not worth it seems a bit lacking. They seem to cite manufacturers opinions on refilling and come to the conclusion rather quickly that refills mean poor quality prints and very short print life whereas numerous people on the forum have already proven the opposite. I only have my experiment on going just because I want to draw more definitive conclusions on the fading of stratitec ink vs oem canon.

Is refilling for everyone? No but if you want to save money or print a lot then it is a fundamental reality that oem ink is too expensive almost to the point where it's better to buy a new printer than it is to get a couple of cartridge sets. But as for 100 year print life? Your mileage may vary greatly, my oem ink prints didn't last 6 months before significant fading in direct sunlight. And what small fraction of people need their prints to last 100 years? It's now a more standard practice to keep photo's digital on archival quality CD-R's since it's easier to file into folders than keep big bulky photo albums that will sit and collect dust forever never to be opened, wanna share it? Then print it since you're not scared of the cost.

Plus if you're so scared to print you may be in for a shock when you find out manufacturers put a time bomb on their inks where the cart "goes bad" after a certain time whether you print or not. Even canon is doing this surreptitiously with excessive cleaning cycles to the point where the printer will use up all it's ink cleaning itself in a matter of 3-4 months even if you only printed a few dozen pages and the carts are rated for a couple hundred. And after so many cleaning cycles the printer will "break" because of a filled up waste ink pad and they don't let you clean it out and reset it anymore, you know for your "protection". Whereas when I refill my canon printer and it goes through the warning that your warranty will be voided and you shouldn't refill and the world will stop rotating, the printer disables it's ink monitoring as punishment for refilling but magically stops going through needless cleaning cycles so my printer will actually last longer before "breaking" ie filling it's waste ink container. These are the kinds of minutia missed by the anti-refilling sites. And these things are quickly discovered by people even the average people reviewing the printers on amazon.com notice the excessive cleaning the canons go through and know it's there to waste ink but actions like these and overpriced ink is what's driving people to refilling in the first place. And since it's a pretty established practice to refill you can even find inks that outperform those oem inks in certain applications, take imagespecialist brand ink formulated to be compatible 100% with oem ink there have even been lawsuits against ink makers because they made their inks too similar to oem ink, yes they can get so close in quality that oems want to sue their butts off. In this case the oems could learn a thing or two from the refillers about their ink but instead choose to put as much propaganda against refilling and touting about their ink instead of really just sell it reasonably. Remove the chips which make the carts artificially expensive and sell it for less and you'll have less people refilling period.

 

[UnknownVT]

Well it may be just my opinion but the experimental design of a lot of those sites that come to the conclusion that refilling inkjets is not worth it seems a bit lacking.
Remove the chips which make the carts artificially expensive and sell it for less and you'll have less people refilling period.

Thanks for that input -

At the least we now have a considered opposing view that OEM inks are the inks to use.

So people can now make their own choices based on hopefully better criteria.

Thank you.

 

[blasterman]

There's a big difference between OEM inks you buy at Walmart for $2.99 and reputed OEMs like MIS.

 

[qwertyydude]

I'd love to see oem inks at walmart for $2.99 then I'd buy oem, cli-221 carts are $12.99 a piece and there are 4 photo color carts and one large text black for 14.99 so a full set is pricey as the printer, got mine for $80 and a full set of cartridges are $65. You don't get too many prints from them even if you try to save ink as your printer will drink it up doing very extensive "cleaning" cycles every time you turn it on and in between several pages of color printing, which seem to conveniently stop occuring after you refill because I guess canon doesn't care about wasting ink after you've begun refilling. Ironic since if I were a greedy manufacturer I'd make it so that if you put aftermarket ink refills I'd "clean" the heck out of those carts, you know to keep the print quality up

And after a good profile I'd challenge even experts to differentiate prints made with quality refill and OEM ink. And my own personal tests with an only mid level refill ink brand have shown me that print life is similar with the paper being the biggest factor in determining longevity. Either way my refills only cost about 25 cents and are good for about 200 4x6 full color prints. So 25 cents vs $65 you decide.

 

[fyrstormer]

The canon ip4600 is real CMYK. Unlike most other printers canon has the finest 1 pico liter print head which eliminates the need for photo cyan and photo magenta which are really just watered down versions of the full strength ink. They're used to make lighter shades of the color because the shading would look grainy if you tried to use dark colors to make light shades. I know my canon ip4600 creates photos that are better than printing at walmart or costco and is cheaper since I refill mine.

I bought my mom a Canon 1pL printer a couple of years ago. Best damn printer I ever saw. I plan to get one of their 11"x17" printers eventually.

Further research shows that real-life CMYK color gamuts are generally smaller than real-life RGB color gamuts, because of the limitations of working on an imperfect substrate. As far as screens are concerned, I like my LGs (which are made with Philips LCD panels) -- they're not wide-gamut, but I've been slowly replacing my family's older/cheaper screens with them, and all of them who use Photoshop more than once a year almost immediately say "wow! I can see differences in colors I never noticed before!" Good stuff if you can't afford the $2000 wide-gamut screens (which are backlit with RGB LEDs, interestingly enough).

 

[fyrstormer]

I'd love to see oem inks at walmart for $2.99 then I'd buy oem, cli-221 carts are $12.99 a piece and there are 4 photo color carts and one large text black for 14.99 so a full set is pricey as the printer, got mine for $80 and a full set of cartridges are $65. You don't get too many prints from them even if you try to save ink as your printer will drink it up doing very extensive "cleaning" cycles every time you turn it on and in between several pages of color printing, which seem to conveniently stop occuring after you refill because I guess canon doesn't care about wasting ink after you've begun refilling. Ironic since if I were a greedy manufacturer I'd make it so that if you put aftermarket ink refills I'd "clean" the heck out of those carts, you know to keep the print quality up

And after a good profile I'd challenge even experts to differentiate prints made with quality refill and OEM ink. And my own personal tests with an only mid level refill ink brand have shown me that print life is similar with the paper being the biggest factor in determining longevity. Either way my refills only cost about 25 cents and are good for about 200 4x6 full color prints. So 25 cents vs $65 you decide.

It has been known for a long time that archival acid-free paper is the biggest single factor in determining ink longevity. That's why vellum (i.e. dried animal skin) was used on a lot of important documents back in the day, because it didn't leech tannic acid for years after its manufacture. In a lot of ways it would be better if we got away from using paper altogether, and started using some kind of micro-porous recyclable plastic for archival prints. I've gotten "quick start guides" for a couple pieces of electronics in the past couple of years that have been printed on such a material, and I wish I knew where to find some.

 

[jch79]

AFAIK, "natural" vellum (aka animal skin) is no longer used - it's now a synthetic material based from cotton. You can get it any just about any art supply store, and certainly online. It's used quite often in architectural plans.
:thumbsup: john

 

[qwertyydude]

There was an episode of Dirty Jobs where Mike Rowe visited a vellum maker. So at least one small company still makes real vellum, I bet it's real pricey though.

 

[fyrstormer]

AFAIK, "natural" vellum (aka animal skin) is no longer used - it's now a synthetic material based from cotton. You can get it any just about any art supply store, and certainly online. It's used quite often in architectural plans.
:thumbsup: john

Yeah, I have some at home. It's slightly sticky to the touch due to its hygroscopic nature -- it sucks the sweat right out of your pores.

I dunno what the stuff the "quick start guides" I mentioned before was printed on, but I tried to tear it and it wouldn't tear. What a great idea, I want to print everything on that stuff.

 

[blasterman]

And after a good profile ....

I challenge you to a vision test if your printer profile can compensate for loss of gamut range. Again, cheap inks typically have poor stability, and/or loss of gamut range. Current pigment based inks are dull enough.

Also, 90% of the arguements I have with people, like sports team shooters looking to save a buck, usually result in them getting nasty about the topic because they don't want to pay for retail stock ink - fine. I agree it's over-priced as well. Then 6months later the prints they charged $10.00 for are already starting to fade.

I've lost count at the number of relatives I have that get screwed with this every fall and spring. These are the same twanks that make it difficult for fine art printers like myself to sell ink-jet matte prints because nobody trusts them for stability. So I'm forced to only work with RA-4 Crystal Archive because of the bad rep that ink-jet has.

There are (1) manufacturer's ink that's more expensive than plutonium, but works great. There's (2) OEM ink psuedo licensed from the manufacturer like MIS that's often just as good as the expensive stuff. There's also (3) Chinese made garbage that's made to just fit in your nozzles and look good for a couple of weeks.

 

[will]

I started to use the demo of Photomatix to do some HDR. I took a few pictures inside with 3 shots,each -2, 0, +2 exposure. I then combined them . With what I have, the only real difference is that the black areas now have detail that was not as visible in the 0 shot.

I then took the 0 shot and ran it through the Nikon editor I use, enhanced the contrast, medium sharpness and compared it to the HDR shot. So far - I prefer the non HDR picture.


but - to be fair - I want to take a few more pictures

Pictures were taken using a tripod, no moving items in the picture.

( is this a thread on Printer inks ? )

By the way - I have a Kodak 4x6 sublimation printer - great pictures, expensive to print each one. but great looking

 

[jch79]

Hi Will,
The photos didn't seem to load? Did you load examples? Occasionally, an ambient single-exposure is really the best in that situation. I find that it's usually for exterior photos, but every once in a while, if there is enough lighting, I'll still do multiple exposures, but will end up using just the first exposure I take.

:thumbsup: john

 

[will]

I really have to fool around with it more. Next is some pictures outside when the wind dies down a little. I also want to keep the bracket exposure to -1. 0, +1

 

[jch79]

+/- 1 won't give you that noticeable of results in my experience. But I'd be interested in seeing your results!

:thumbsup: john

 

[will]

+/- 1 won't give you that noticeable of results in my experience. But I'd be interested in seeing your results!

:thumbsup: john

That is the nice thing about digital - you can experiment a lot.