[horseflesh]

I'm thinking about getting an ET-15000 and adding sublimation to my bag of tricks, but ink choice is proving to be difficult. I'd appreciate any input you might have. Sorry for dragging this horse out of its grave and beating it again!

While there are many options, Cosmos and InkOwl are among the top two going by what I see in forums like this one. Both apparently offer profiles, which is good because at first, I will not be able to make my own. As a "prosumer" style hobbyist I'll be dabbling with a lot of substrates, so I'll need an ink that either doesn't require a profile, or that comes with a profile that will get me into the right ballpark. I'll get my own profiling hardware eventually.

Cosmos is certainly more affordable. Seems like most support is via Facebook, which I am not on, but they do appear to offer email support. They have a reputation for vibrant colors. Cosmos endorses, and their profile presumably relies on paper from "Crafting Besties," which is also semi sold-out.

InkOwl is more expensive and I have seen more than one person post that they left InkOwl because the colors were not vibrant. But I bet inks are like TVs... "vibrant" may not be accurate, you know? So maybe that feedback is not relevant. InkOwl apparently has better support than anyone, too.

Both makers have people complaining about specific color reproduction problems... Reds for Cosmos, blacks for InkOwl. Impossible to say from scanning forums what's user error and what are real problems, though. Per this interesting review, InkOwl does seem to have more accurate color.

While it is always nice to keep costs low, ink cost doesn't seem like a critical factor at my scale. I'm certainly open to InkOwl if it's the wiser choice for a CMYK Ecotank.

Thanks a million if you have two cents to put in.

 

[NoXid]

I started out using Cobra, and next used InkOwl. Pretty similar to me. Both companies had been around a quite a while, whereas Cosmos is relatively new. Both printed reasonably accurately for me on mugs and shirts. But especially on the mugs I decided to tweak things myself via the Epson driver. Cut Y quite a lot, M a moderate amount, boosted C a bit. That got things pretty close. Now messing about with reducing Saturation, as too much ink is put down without the profile in play, which with sublimation on a hard surface can lead to some images coming out too deep in tone. To be clear, one can either use the profile or tweak the inks directly in the Epson driver. One cannot do both at the same time. Which is unfortunate, as I'd like to just tweak from the starting point of the profile.

EDIT: Anyway, depending on your substrate, your art, and your tastes, you may or may not need to tweak your settings regardless of the ink brand or whether they claim it works without a profile. If you are picky and printing hard things like skin tones and printing on lots of different substrates, you will be messing about with tweaking things yourself.

 

[horseflesh]

Great info, thanks. It's certainly too bad you can't use the profile as a starting point for tweaking.

I think most of my stuff will allow for slop in color accuracy but sooner or later someone's going to want a baby photo on something, so I'll need to figure it out!