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    I must say that your service is absolutely exceptional and I have recommended your company and products to several friends today; all are serious "printer" people.I retired last year and my friends are all into, or are still working in the photo industry. Sincerely,Gerhard

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    Dear, just to let you know than i realy appreciate your costumer service.
    Thank you
    Denis

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    Just a Thank you and all the best
    Grigore

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    Ce message est simplement pour vous dire que j'ai bien reçu la commande XXXXXX et que je suis très satisfait de la rapidité de la livraison et aussi de la qualité de l'encre. C'est la première fois que j'utilise de l'encre "autre que l'originale" et pour le moment je suis très satisfait. Soyez certain que je vais vous référez à mes amis et collègues de travail et c'est certain que je vais commander à nouveau de chez vous. Merci beaucoup.
    Stéphane

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    Je veux seulement vous dire un gros merci pour la rapidité avec lequel vous avez traité ma demande et aussi pour le petit extra en papier photos,c'est très apprécié.

    Céline

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    I received my order, thank you for your great customer service..
    Judy

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    Hello:

    It is not often people write emails or letters of praise but consider this one of the rare ones!
    I must say, ordering your product was about the easiest imaginable. Coupled with the fact that it arrived here basically “next day” I am thoroughly happy. To tell you the truth, I was expecting to have to go pay full retail for one black cartridge thinking that your’s would take at least a week to arrive but I was wrong, the order arrived before I could even go out to get one!
    Congrats people, I WILL tell all my friends and neighbours about you!

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Kodak enters Inkjet Printer Market

Posted on February 24, 2010 by kflack

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Pigmented Inks
After 3 years of Top Secret development Kodak is releasing a line of Multifunction Inkjet printers utilizing Pigmented inks. Pigmented inks have long been used for Black ink cartridges but up until now have rarely been used for color due to their reduced brilliance as compared to Dyes. ” Kodak used pigment grinding patents going back to its film emulsion technology to develop its tiny 20 nanometer ink pigments with polymer binders. The small size of the pigments accounts for a color gamut that exceeds dye-based inkjets. As the inks are pigments not dyes, they have a longevity of 100 years “. You don’t have to keep them under glass or in the dark to get that 100 years. They’ll remain lightfast for 100 years exposed and unprotected.

The inks are packaged in two cartridges: a large black cartridge used for text only and a large color cartridge. Kodak has five inks in the color cartridge, but it’s essentially a four-color system. The five inks include the standard Cyan, Magenta and Yellow inks, plus a Photo Black that is also used to enhance standard black text printing. The fifth “ink” in the color cartridge is actually a clear gloss optimizer (Rarely seen in low cost consumer products) overlaid on the white or uninked parts of the image to ensure an even gloss to the print. There is no Light Magenta or Light Cyan in the package.

Kodak challenges HP and Lexmark
Contrary to the current market trend, Kodak has decided to market their printers with an embedded print head. We have long been promoting that users stay away from HP and Lexmark brands as their Printers currently incorporate the print heads in their cartridges, thereby raising cartridge prices, and reducing competition (Patents) via the third party market.

Kodak swayed from Gillette Marketing Model
Contrary to popular methods Kodak has decided to depart the current trend of using printers as a loss leader in the industry to one where the user has to pay full cost for their printers. Kodak will be selling 3 different lines of MFP printers ranging in price from $149.99 to $299.99 in the upcoming months.

Cheap Ink
As a result of Kodak’s decision to embed the print head in the printer and not the inkjet cartridge they are in a position to sell their inkjet cartridges at a reduced price. Kodak intends to market their black inkjet cartridges at approx $10.00 while their color cartridges will sell for approximately $15.00 e.a. Although these prices are still double third part cartridge costs they do represent a 50% reduction from the list prices currently being offered by HP and Lexmark at this time.

Bundled Paper
Kodak has ever since the its inception and activities with photography been in the paper business. They realize that one of the major(if not most) important aspects of color reproduction is not just the ink but the paper used in the reproduction phase.To this end Kodak has decided to offer their cartridges bundled with Paper . As a result they have the ability to tune their inks to match that of the papers characteristics to provide the best overall reproductions.

Obviously by bundling paper as well they will be increasing their sales of paper products thereby increasing their overall profitability per user on consumables.

Printer Self adjusts for Paper
Kodak is offering a 3 tiered paper line. The top two tiers feature a stiff photo print weight, while the least expensive tier is a thinner sheet. All three are coded on the back using gold diagonal lines whose line weight and distance between lines tell the printer what kind of paper it’s printing on so you never has to think about it.

The printer will also configure itself for a generic photo paper if it detects a non-Kodak photo paper. None of the models feature a transparency adapter.

We are wondering what Kodak intends to recommend for paper when used with a duplex option as all three of their lines used gold diagonal lines on the back of the paper.

All of the new kodak paper lines have a porous surface instead of the gel-coat used by dye-based printers to encapsulate the dyes for longevity. Porous papers, which suck the pigment into the sheet are, unlike “swellable” papers, instantly dry. By using pigment inks on the porous sheet, the prints last much longer than if you had printed using dye-based inks.

Cost per Printed Page
As Kodak is bundling their paper and ink together they have the capability to actually calculate the total estimated price per printed page, and as a result will be putting this “calculated” cost on their marketing materials.

The New Kodak Printers
All three Kodak Printers us a permanent printhead using 2.7 and 5.6 picoliter droplets, and the same print engine. Kodak confirmed that, as inkjets, you still have to use them regularly to avoid clogging those heads but thanks to the lower ink costs, flushing them out doesn’t hurt your wallet as much.

All three models also share the same scanner mechanism and the same built-in paper tray. Two features worth noting on the scanner are its batch scanning and storage capability.
You can load the scanner with several images and the built-in software will crop and save them individually, straightening them as necessary, after the batch scan.This feature will tie in to a new version of EasyShare software to ship with the printers, which will be able to archive the scanned images and copy them automatically into an album on EasyShare Gallery.

The printers all rely on Kodacolor technology to enhance images automatically.

Kodak 5100


The $149.99 printer offers a dual-port USB connection also available on the other two models, as well as a Bluetooth wireless adapter and PictBridge.
 

Kodak 5300

The $199.99 has a card reader added to the input options with a 3.0-inch LCD for reviewing images.

Kodak 5500

Kodak’s top of the line $299.99 adds a document feeder and fax capability to the 5300, and also includes a duplexer to print on both sides of a sheet. Kodak plans to make the duplexer available as an option on the other two models as well. The LCD is 2.4 inches, but still generous.
Our Opinion

Although latecomers to the inkjet market Kodak is well positioned with their printers and ink products to be able to enter the market with a winner. Of increasing importance to the home community is longevity of prints and using the pigmented inks takes them in the right direction.

We’ll watch closely to see what if any 3rd parties jump on the bandwagon and offer 3rd party inks.

Where to Buy ?

At time of release Kodak had distribution rights established with Best Buy

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Inkjet Printer Ink II (Fade Resistance,Water Resistance)

Posted on February 24, 2010 by kflack

Thursday, January 04, 2007

So now you are educated about the basic properties of ink, and the trade offs of each different manufacturing process.

OEM Ink versus Third Party Ink

As the industry has evolved over the past ~10 years when Pigmented inks were first introduced by HP, Third part manufacturers first had to discover what was needed to be done to (in effect) copy the color reproduction properties of inks manufactured by the OEMs. This problem was made more difficult further by the price discounts needed to be maintained to remain competitive and then by ensuring that key Patented methods were not duplicated so as to open these manufacturers to lawsuits.

Third Party Inks meets the grade

After extensive development and investment many of the more reputable ink manufacturers provided the home user with clearly competitive products that met with similar functionality to those of the OEM manufacturers. I.E. The average user (Desktop environment) couldn’t distinguish between comparable products being marketed. It was during this time that many third party manufacturers became established organizations offering stability to a previously volatile industry.

The Next Challenge

With the advent of digital photography the capability and the desire to create you own photographic reproductions became evident, hence a new challenge was introduced to the marketplace.

Water Resistance/Fade Resistance

In order for the OEMs to provide photographic quality printers, they could no longer be content to provide output that could rival the appearance of Photographic Prints, but they also needed to ensure that longevity of the product could rival that of the older, yet more mature chemical photography processes. Here is when, and still does, a differentiation between manufacturers exist.

Each manufacturer now has to ensure that they develop color tables to match the appearance of your photo’s on your screen (Using RGB) technology, to that of your printer (using CMYK )technologies. In addition, the paper products used for reproduction offer varying level of brightness and permeability causing there to be variance with a single manufacturer just based on the paper being used. Now add to this the fade resistance and water resistance to provide for longevity.

Trade offs Abound

As we now have so many potential conflicting elements involved, each manufacturer has taken steps to provide for what they consider to be the key variables to ensure end user happiness, while taking advantage of their technologies advantages and disadvantages.

Epson leads the Market

At the current time Epson has taken a lead in the ink wars where they are offering their “DuraBright” inks. These inks, specially formulated allow for improved Water Resistance, and increased Fade resistance versus earlier ink formulations while maintaining increased overall brilliance. Of course these advantages will be short lived as competing suppliers constantly modify their formulations to compete with the latest innovations introduced by their competition. This is all good news to the consumer, as we can expect to see continuing improvements in head technologies, print speeds and quality.

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