During the last weeks I’ve seen a lot of comments and questions about the ink density of the HP Latex 300 Printer series, not only here in the HP Latex Knowledge Center, but also in other online communities.
I’ve had a meeting with my colleagues of the lab in order to learn more about this specific spec of the printer and be able to provide you better answers. After a long talk, this is what I’m able to tell you:
The HP Latex 300 Printer Series came with 14 media presets defined, 7 for those medias which normally require less ink to get an optimum quality, and 7 for those medias which need high ink densities in order to get the best results.
This categorization was made under HP recommendations and in order to try to facilitate the printing process for the majority of the printing jobs. Here you have a table showing the categorization plus the ink density depending on the number of passes.
For those who want to print with higher print densities on those medias that we categorized as “Low Ink Medias”, we purpose you to load the medias as one of the “High Ink Medias” list. The following List will show you our recommendations based on the previous table:
Generic PVC Banner <> Generic Backlit PVC Banner
Generic Self-Adhesive Vinyl <> Generic Backlit Self-Adhesive Vinyl
Generic Paper <> Generic Backlit Paper
Generic Coated Paper <> Generic Backlit Paper
Generic PP & PE Synthetics <> Generic Backlit PP & PE Synthetics
Generic Polyester Film <> Generic Backlit Polyester Film
Generic Canvas&Coated Textile <> Generic Textile
Otherwise, if you want to do the opposite, print “High Ink Medias” using ink densities from the “Low Ink Media”, you just have to use the previous list backwards.
Using this system in order to get more ink density for your jobs, has some tradeoffs. If you want to print a media using a profile that was intended for Backlit (the name of the profile indicates that), you are not going to be able to do neither the color calibration nether the profiling from your HP Latex 300 Printer. Instead, you will have to do it from the RIP and using an external spectrophotometer.
You must have into account that the fact of printing a media using higher/lower ink densities that the ones recommended by HP can affect the final output of your jobs.
Finally, I will like to clarify also how the ink densities percentages are calculated. For HP, the 100% ink density is the one that the printer is using when printing at 8 passes and that provides the best output of the job. If we select 90% ink density, we are using a 10% less ink that the amount used by the HP engineers to get the 8 passes best output, and so on from that.
