B&W printing - white ink

[Ray West]

I believe various companies offer black and white printing inks for colour inkjet printers. However, I have not found a supplier of white ink as such. Afaik, they rely on the white of the paper. Does any one know of a white ink suitable for the more usual epson printers, or a supplier of white laser toner, say?

I have some white ink, designed for an 'industrial cardboard box printer', but I think the pigment is not ground fine enough for the finer jets that we use.

Best wishes,

Ray

[Daniel Harrison]

Um, are you trying to print on coloured paper? Just wondering becuase if your not I can't see any reason to have white ink. If you are, I don't think there are any white ink's for printers although I could be wrong. If it is a photo then you won't want to use coloured paper. If it is for somehting else, try transfers designed for black shirts.

Maybe you could tell is WHY you would wan't white ink??
Thanks
Daniel

[Warren Carrington]

Years ago while experimenting with printers I purchased an Alps printer. One of the reason was that it did have a white cartridge. It was a thermal printer and could print on just about anything. I made some business cards out of real leather (black) and printed white on them. Not sure if they are still made but did a search and this site still sells them. http://www.aust-n-rail.plann.com.au/category1_1.htm Don't know if this helps. Found one place with some used Alps printers http://www.buyprinters.com/item.asp?id=580

[danielsan]

I remember this question came up on the old Rob Galbraith forums some time ago. I vaguely recall someone saying there was in fact something out there. If the new owners of the RG forums are still allowing unregistered members to search the archives for free maybe you can locate the thread

[danielsan]

I couldnt find the old post on RB. I did find a link to this

http://www.coates.com/sunjet/newtech/documents/CrystalUGW%20U2953-2954.pdf

Is that something along the lones of what you had in mind? I would think a driver rewrite would be necessary to use white ink.

[Ray West]

Thanks for your replies. Coates are not a million miles from me, I may contact them. I have used them for pcb materials. However, I have a feeling that the inks require specific printers. Still, I can buy for a few pounds an epson 220, and fit a cis tank, see how long it takes to clog up. ;-(

wrt the application, I need to overprint some coloured plastic type material. Not photographic, just text and diagrams, so I can either substitute white for yellow cartridge, say, draw my diagrams in yellow, knowing it will print as white. I could also prepare an icc profile, if I need colour blending. Although inkjets do not perform too well on gloss plastics, unless you use the sort of 'gritty' transparency oh projector foils, I have been told there is a spray that can be applied, to allow for ink jet printing.

The Alps is a dye sub printer, I will see how easy it is to get the ribbons over here.

Thanks again,

Best wishes,

Ray