Re: How does the printer choose which black ink to use when it has pigment and dye based black ??

Inkjet printers are amazingly complex in the way their head nozzles are activated. The drivers can dictate which nozzles will be used for specific applications. My guess is that the pigment head is used in it's entirety with black only text printing, but when it is combined with color ink, it only uses half of the head nozzles to match the width of the color head nozzle configuration.

The drivers control which nozzles are active, how much ink they send, how close the dots will be to one another, even the dot patterns used, which will differ depending on the paper profile used.

Art



Michael Johnson wrote:

DanG wrote:

"Michael Johnson" <cds@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:V5KdnWLe9PhM_wDanZ2dnUVZ_t2inZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Look at the nozzle configuration on the head. The row for pigment is

very different than the dye rows. They physically don't line up. It looks to me that they are designed to work independently from each other. It also explains why the ppm rate for black and white is much faster than color. The pigment row is 2-3 times longer than the dye rows so it lays down a much wider swath of ink on every pass.


You can look at the heads all day long. The fact remains that they do, in fact, print black and color at the same time. If you wish to demonstrate this to yourself, simply print a page and stop the print 1/2 way through and inspect it.


I just printed a partial color page and the black was laid down before any color which leads me to believe it is the pigment nozzles. The funny thing is it wasn't the full width of the pigment nozzles, just a portion. Roughly 2X the width of the color nozzles. If it does use the pigment then not all of the nozzles appear to fire on a given pass of the head.

The reason the pigment black head is larger is to produce the faster times on documents when no color is used.

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