Month List

Today we have a fantastic review from Roger for his ink refills. If you'd like to be entered in our monthly prize draw, and receive a discount on all dye and pigment ink purchases, send your review to reviews@cityinkexpress.co.uk

 

I would like to say how pleased I am with my city ink CISS ink system. This is the second one that I have purchased as due to a house move my last printer died.

 

Your system was the obvious choice for my new printer. This is the first ink fill up since I purchased the system 18 months ago.

 

Good results and good colour for the price. Much cheaper than original ink.

Today we have a fantastic review from Keith for his CISS. If you'd like to be entered in our monthly prize draw, and receive a discount on all dye and pigment ink purchases, send your review to reviews@cityinkexpress.co.uk

 

Received the above by next day delivery. On unpacking I found that there were extra clips for holding the tubes, a bonus. Watched the videos on the web site and had the kit filled and primed within 15 minutes. An easy job. Fitted it, switched on and got the dreaded “cartridges not recognised” warning. Followed the instructions on the sheet provided but they did not cure the problem. Eventually realised that I had the bung in and the printer thought that the lid was always down. Re-installed cartridges with bung removed. Replaced bung and the cartridges were recognised and have been working fine ever since. All done within an hour. I’ve printed out twenty or so colour prints on the paper that I ordered with the ink system. Everything is working great, and the paper looks to be good value for money.

 

PROS:

  1. Easy to install.
  2. Coloured plugs make it easy to tell which colour is running low.
  3. Long tubes give you enough length to reach rear of printer.

 

CONS:

  1. Lid has to remain slightly open (not a problem for me).

Today we have a fantastic review from Alistair for his CISS. If you'd like to be entered in our monthly prize draw, and receive a discount on all dye and pigment ink purchases, send your review to reviews@cityinkexpress.co.uk

 

3 Reasons Why CityInkExpress Is AMAZING!!

 

  1. I hate long reading documents on screens: The CISS has given me a painfully cost effective and cheap way to print PDF documents, manuals, comic books, emails and study materials without the worry of having to ration ink!
  2. I print photos in bulk: All those pictures I’ve taken for Facebook and Instagram are now backed up in hard copy on photographic photo paper, even those blurry ones that never got posted online (because I’m a sentimental fool) and I did it on the cheap!
  3. In 2018 I’ve ordered ink for the first time since 2016 (and I still have a lot of the previous ink left): I print en masse and still can’t believe what an amazing investment this has been. The dye ink I use is cheap and what ink is still left in the system has NOT discoloured, dried-out and prints to a high quality without issue. This is after 2 years of [the ink] sitting in the system!

 

I want to thank Zac and Shane from the City Ink team personally for their prompt, helpful, concise and friendly replies to several queries I had about my current order. Cheers, guys.

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We are resurrecting our monthly competition this months prize is

 


The winner will be drawn at the end of February

Just e-mail your review to reviews@cityinkexpress.co.uk quoting your order number and you will receive the 20% discount code for future dye*, pigment or edible ink refills, and be entered into the exclusive prize draw. Pictures are also appreciated as part of your review, but not required.

 

* excludes sub ink

In sublimation printing, just like learning any new process, there's a tendency to learn the basics and gloss over the finer details in the process. Our basic instructions are as guilty of this as anyone else's - we aim to give you enough instruction to successfully set up your sublimation business, without providing so much information that you feel utterly swamped.


Well, today's an exception to that. Prepare yourselves to learn some information about Photoshop which may never come in handy, and probably won't woo any prospective dates. It may even squeeze some useful information out of your already-crowded brain, so caveat lector.


We'll be taking a look at the difference between the various rendering intents available to you in Photoshop, CorelDRAW, and all the other programmes you might use for your sublimation printing. In our instructions, as mentioned, we tend to ignore this as an option and simply tell customers to select one and not change it.


This is all very well and good for 95% of customers, as it makes no difference in the majority of use cases, but sometimes a customer will have a specific image which doesn't print properly, even though all their other designs are printed without any problems. The problem in many cases is that the image cannot be printed completely accurately by the printer. And this is where your rendering intent comes into play. Depending on which you choose, the image will print differently.


Rendering Intents

Before we get into the differences, though, a bit of background might be necessary. In this first picture, we have a representation of all the colours your eyes can see:


Visible Colours

And within this triangle, all the colours which your computer screen can accurately display:


Screen Colours

And now all the colours which a printer might be able to produce (for the purposes of this post, we've based this on a SWOP profile because it's nice and small, and will give us some extreme examples to work with):


Printable Colours

So, where the screen and printer overlap, colours can be printed accurately. Outside of this area, shown in grey below, are colours which can't be printed 100% accurately, and our ICC profile will have to compensate for this. These colours are known as "out of gamut":


Out of Gamut

Perceptual Rendering


Perceptual rendering will squash the colours in an image until they all fall within the printable range. This means that if you have a steady gradient in your original image (such as the below), then the end result will be a steady gradient. Perceptual rendering intent is best for avoiding flat spots in a printed image, and preserving the overall "feel" of the design, whilst sacrificing accuracy somewhat.


Perceptual Rendering

Relative Colorimetric Rendering


Relative colorimetric rendering tries its very best to preserve the original colours in an image, but for any unprintable colours the computer will just give up and pick the closest colour it can find. This will give the best results for things like skin tones, which needed to be matched exactly, but can leave you with flat spots in out-of-gamut (unprintable) areas.


Relative Colorimetric Rendering

Absolute Colorimetric Rendering


For sublimation printing, absolute colorimetric rendering is absolutely awful. This rendering intent is usually used for "hard proofing" images, or printing them from one printer to try and see how they'd look on a different printer. This is only really useful if you're contracting out the printing of your images to another company, who happen to have a very large printer which has a smaller gamut than your printer, and who also aren't willing to do a test run to show you how the products will turn out.


So, absolute colorimetric asks your printer to do its best impression of a different printer, using different paper. This produces such lovely effects as your printer trying to colour in all of your paper to make it look like another paper, which is supremely useless for sublimation printing (you'd end up with a big coloured square on your finished products).


Absolute Colorimetric Rendering

Saturation Rendering


Similarly, do not use saturation rendering for your sublimation images, you'll end up with some terrible results. In the spirit of this post, though, we'll go ahead and explain it anyway. Saturation, as the name might imply, will try to preserve the saturation (or "boldness") of colours. This works well for things like graphs and charts, where you don't care so much about the actual colours displayed, as long as they're nice and bright.


This is quite difficult to show visually. The best I could do is shown below - saturation rendering will take a colour from the screen (dotted lines) and change it to the nearest colour with the same saturation (same coloured line) in the printer profile (solid lines). If it doesn't make sense, don't worry, as you shouldn't be using this mode anyway.


Saturation Rendering

So in summary, you can use either perceptual, or relative colorimetric, rendering intent. Either will be fine for the majority of cases, but if you're trying to print colours which your printer can't accurately reproduce, maybe try the other one as well.

CityInkExpress Distributor Program

 

CityInkExpress is one of the leading companies supplying sublimation printers, ink, and paper. We are looking for additional companies to distribute our sublimation products in countries outside of the UK. If you feel our products would be a good match for your business, and are already well-established in servicing the printing industry, please contact us for a full pricelist.

 

We pride ourselves on the support we off to customers, and have comprehensive support documents for our sublimation systems and cartridges, as well as video guides, but we recognise that customers want support in their own country, in their own language. By offering these products to customers, you can take advantage of a growing market throughout Europe, and we will help you to achieve this. You will also be best placed to offer quicker, cheaper shipping options to our existing customers in your region.

 

The nitty-gritty:

 

  • Minimum initial order of £500
  • Significant savings over retail price
  • Dedicated distributor support for your business

 

If you are interested in becoming a distributor, please email us at admin@cityinkexpress.co.uk with some information about your company. We look forward to working with you in the future.



Our current distributors



It's been a while since we have posted - we have been very busy and are proud to launch our new range of ciss systems similar to Epson Ecotank range with Epson Genuine ink - yes that's right Genuine ink - For those customers that only use genuine inks and still want to save money - its a Win Win for you with on going running costs of around £1 a cartridge when compared to the standard fill OEM carts , currently available on a range of around 200 selected 4 and 5 colour models with more to follow. 

 The continuous ink systems are our new design in a handy 70ml version which is the same size as the refill bottles. We will be expanding the range in 2015 to include 6 colour printers in A4 and A3 size

 

We have just released a range of refillable cheap inkjet cartridges for the following epson printers complete with ARC auto reset chips,

XP-600,XP-605,XP-700,XP-800,XP-510,XP-610,XP-615,XP-750,XP-850

 

 

As you can see by our video, simple to use and clean !

We are currently developing a new model ciss for the Epson R2000 printer - release date wil be may 2012

This is our discount review and ink system photos.
We installed this system on HP Office Jet Pro 8000 and its really impressive.

"This is a great alternative to normal everyday ink cartridges.
Very easy to install and use. Anyone can install this system within 5 minutes.
Offer a great quality print and a massive reduction and cost saving on the everyday printing.
Its lightweight and could be placed right next to the printer, don´t requiring much space at the office."

We hope this review fit your needs and we will be waiting for the discount code for ower next order.

Best regards from Portugal,