Bronzing on Cone Type 5

InkjetMall Customer Support Piezography Inks & Printing
1

Dana-

I’m suddenly starting to get bronzing on Cone Type 5 paper even though I’m using the Gloss Optimizer at 30,000. Details: Epson R2880, individual carts, 50-50 mixture Selenium and Warm Neutral (i.e. each position has a 50%-50% mixture of Warm Neutral and Selenium), GO set at 30,000. I’ve been using this setup since the middle of 2012 with no problems. The last time I did any extensive printing was last January and had no problems with bronzing. In between periods of printing, when I not printing anything, I always run the printer once or twice a week by printing out a few Ink Pattern pages in QTR. And I remove the carts and shake them every week or so. I’m not having any major problems with clogs. The prints I just made look fine except for the bronzing. I find that I have to increase the GO amount to 60,000 which gets rid of about 95% of the bronzing. Problem is, the surface of Cone Type 5 tends to look too “lumpy” with this amount of GO. i’m also having the same bronzing problem with Canson Platine. GO at 60,000 eliminates about 90% of the bronzing on this paper. I get a lot of bronzing at 30,000. Bronzing on both papers looks like a red cast in the midtones, and light green or blue in the highlights. It’s only visible when light glares off the surface. The prints look fine when looked at directly with no light glaring off them. You may want me to send you these samples so you can see what I’m talking about. I have prints I just made that show the bronzing, and a print I made 2 yeas ago, same setup, same inks, which have no bronzing.

My concern is that the inks might be too old. I bought a 4 oz set of Warm Neutral and a 4 oz set of Selenium in the period March to June 2012. These are the inks I’m using now. They don’t have expiration dates but here are the batch numbers from the bottles:

WN
2 980417/100410
3 980417/110114
4 980416/101230
5 980416/101230
6 961010/110530
7 980415/101230

SEL
2 961012/110930
3 961012/110930
4 961011/101201
5 961010/110930
6 980415/101230
7 961013/110530

Could it be that the reflectivity of the ink particles change as the ink ages such that more GO is necessary to eliminate the bronzing? I should emphasize that although these inks may be 2 years old, I’m not having any other problems with them. There are no major clogging issues and the prints look fine so long as you don’t look at them at an angle so that light glares off them. Everything has been working fine until recently.

-John

2

Hi John,

I have been testing some of these Lot# in our 2880 and have not experienced any excessive Bronzing, I haven’t had the need to add any additional Go to the Type 5 as you are describing. Your inks are old and they the chemistry does change over time, they do break down and can have dramatically different results from month to month once they reach that 2 year mark. It sounds like you have done everything correctly with frequent use of the printer and agitation of the carts once/twice a week, but sometimes all those things can’t stop the aging of the inks themselves.

From your order history it looks like you are using SEL#1, recently purchased for your BK, is this correct? Is so, please provide the lot # for that ink as well.

Kindly,
Kelly

3

Kelly-

The SEL#1 that I recently bought is batch #1000830 with an expiration date of 11/2015.

My old inks should work fine on mat paper, since there is no bronzing to begin with on mat paper.

-John

4

I have been using this particular SEL1 in our most recent SEL tests and it hasn’t shown any signs of bronzing. So, as suspected it is probably due to old, expired inks.

Yes, you can use your older inks for Matte printing, clever solution I might add!

Keep me posted-Kelly