Ink: the colour of money

As a general rule, inks are formulated and qualified for a particular printhead, and often designed for a specific printer model. Most manufacturers will offer a warranty for their printers, and this warranty normally only applies if you also buy the inks from the printer vendor for that model. But once the warranty has expired, usually after 12 months, customers are free to buy consumables from any source.

Mike Horsten, marketing manager for Mimaki Europe, says that third party ink manufacturers can afford to undercut the original ink suppliers because they do not have to pay a license to the printhead manufacturers to have their inks tested and approved for those heads. He argues: “A small deviation of the chemistry of the ink can destroy the head. There are special glues inside the head and these can be dissolved by certain chemical compounds.” He continues: “If you take the inkjet head platen, there’s a coating and this coating is quite sensitive to abrasion so if your ink attacks that coating then you have to replace the head.”

For this reason he suggests that a third party ink manufacturer should issue a warranty for the printheads. As it happens, several after market ink companies do just that, but most say this is unrealistic, pointing out that even the original ink supplier won’t issue a warranty beyond a set period, usually that one year timescale. Mimaki does provide a two-year warranty with most of its printers, and Horsten says that one of the reasons for this was to make third party ink less attractive.

Horsten also claims that as the price of solvent ink has dropped in recent years, so there is less to be gained from using a third party ink. But Tony Cox, business manager for Sun Chemical, says that customers have reported making savings of up to 50% when switching to an after market ink, although he cautions that the amount varies from one customer to the next, based on usage.

Cox agrees that customers are looking for inks that perform as close as possible as the original inks, adding: “With after market inks people want to feel comfortable and to feel that there is a low risk to conversion.” He adds that even though it would be possible to increase the colour gamut that wouldn't necessarily translate into an advantage as customers would need to change all their colour profiles. However, Sun does cater for some requirements, such as for stronger magenta from countries such as China, Russia and the middle East, where red features prominently in many logos and campaigns.

Sun Chemical has just added two new inks to its Streamline range of solvent inks. The ESL HPQ inks are targeted at those printers using Epson printheads, such as the Roland ecosolvent and Mutoh ValueJet machines. The Ultima HPQ inks are designed for use with the Mimaki JV33 and JV5 machines.

Cox says Sun has worked hard to ensure that these inks match the originals in terms of their colour and handling: “Customers just put our cartridges in and there is no need to change the dryer settings or the printhead frequencies so the risk and the time it takes is minimised.”

He believes that the Sun inks can actually deliver better quality than the original inks and points out that the company has been a major player in the ink business for many years, saying: “We have very good internal procedures to ensure that we manufacture inks to a very high quality.” Sun also has a European engineering support team to deal with any problems with customers’ printers that can be attributed to the inks. Sun will replace any parts that fail through using its inks free of charge.

Josero distributes inks made by Triangle, which is effectively the digital division of INX. Triangle also makes a lot of OEM inks so it doesn’t offer after market inks that would compete against its own OEM contracts. But Jon Spencer, a director at Josero, stresses: “They are very high quality inks, comparable to those made by OEM companies, but sold for less.”

He admits that the Triangle inks are not the cheapest but says: “Colour gamut is the main thing. Everybody says their inks are colour comparable but few of them are.”

Josero offers a replacement warranty to encourage customers to switch over without waiting for their original warranty to expire.

Josero offers both UV and solvent inks, but Spencer says that UV inks are a much bigger deal, noting: “With the UV we look after it more because of the volume and the much higher value of the machine. It’s much more of a service thing but the savings tend to be much higher.”

He says that customers look for the same performance as the original inks and are not looking for different finishes, such as more gloss, adding: “It’s fairly limited as to what we can do with them. They have to be a certain formulation and a certain viscosity so there’s less that we can do with them. They have to be very close to the original or they just won’t work.”

Fast Signs in Peterborough has been using the Triangle inks supplied by Josero together with a Mimaki JV3. Managing director Richard Towers says: “Regarding the performance of the inks, they are fine. The colour gamut is very good and we don't have any problems with the cartridge or the changeover. The service was good and the price was good so there’s no negatives for us.”

Another big supplier of aftermarket inks is Selectech, which sells the Colorific brand. Selectech doesn’t manufacture its own inks but instead collects other vendors together under the one brand name. Managing director Stewart Cobby says: “Every ink manufacturer says they make the best inks but they don’t. They do make one ink for a certain type of machine so we find the one that is the closest to the colour performance and causes the least problems with engineering.”

Selectech sells both solvent and UV inks, for a wide variety of machines, and will shortly launch inks for the LED curing printers from Roland and Mimaki. Cobby says that they usually have to send an engineer for the UV printers to flush out the older inks, install their own inks and set up the colour profiles. He estimates that customers should see savings of around 30%.

“We are converting around 30 customers a month,” adds Cobby, to back up his belief that print companies are more accepting of third party inks now.

Bordeaux originally produced dyes for textile use but started developing inks in 2000 for inkjet printers. It now produces many different inks, including solvent, UV and dye sublimation, for Epson, Roland, Mimaki and Mutoh printers, as well as some HP DesignJet and Scitex models.

Bordeaux also has a latex ink, designed for drop on demand printheads. This was demonstrated at Drupa on a Roland XC printer, which uses Epson heads. Bordeaux has said that the inks will run through printers with similar heads but that the printer itself will need to be adapted for latex use.

Sawgrass has a European division that makes dye sublimation inks. These will work with several head types, including Kyocera, Ricoh gen4 and Seiko. The company also supports the Epson wide-format printers and some Ricoh desktop printers. These inks include the M-XTR range, which claim higher pigment concentration and faster drying times, and are suitable for use with cotton, linen, polyester and silk.

Digital Ink, based in Manchester, manufacturers its own inks in the UK though it rarely sells direct to end users, and the company wouldn’t be drawn on its distributors. It produces both full solvent and mild solvent inks, mainly for the Roland and Mimaki printers using Epson heads, though it can also supply inks for the Vutek printers.

Marrutt Digital sells aqueous inks for the photographic market, mainly for Epson, though it will also cater for Canon printers. Marrutt has been supplying Lyson inks, which managing director John Reid says “give beautiful smooth gradations all the way up from the colour of the paper to the highest saturation.” Marrutt doesn’t offer a warranty but Reid says that the inks are thoroughly tested and that Lyson has always resolved any issues to a customer’s satisfaction.

Marrutt has recently started importing inks from Image Specialist in New York and is rebranding these as Marrutt Professional inks.

Lyson is owned by the American ink company Nazdar, which also sells inks in its own name, many of which are manufactured in Stockport, near Manchester. Nazdar sells inks via a distribution chain, and also makes many OEM inks, including the Vutek inks for EFI. But where most after market inks are sold on lower prices, Nazdar has taken a different approach, as product marketing manager James MacDonald explains: “We go beyond looking at price. We have a much wider colour gamut than the standard inks out there which gives customers the option to hit colours they might not have been able to. Also we have higher density so they can save some money by using less ink.”

Nazdar produces both solvent and UV inks, as well as inks for specialist applications such as thermoforming and even a form of latex ink, called HydroColor, though this is not available as an aftermarket ink. MacDonald says that the inks are tested not just for each printhead but with each type of printer, and that there is a full warranty for the printheads.

It is obvious that savings can be had from switching to an aftermarket ink, typically in the order of 20-30%, particularly for the various solvent inks.

UV inks are more difficult, because the inks and the relationship to the curing process is more complex, and the inks have a big part to play in the finish of the printed output, presumably part of the reason for choosing a particular printer in the first place.

Some of those inks will perform better than others, and it is up to each PSP to assess the value of the printer against the cost of the inks, and the reputation of the ink vendor.

The cost of the inks, and the potential damage to the machine are the most obvious factors but the long-term performance of the inks in different conditions should also be considered. Since many of the ink suppliers are also making OEM inks of one sort or another it should be possible to find a trustworthy ink supplier.