Epson Photo - Ink Technology

UltraChrome K3™ ink

With the professional Epson UltraChrome K3™ ink, you'll achieve a beauty and brilliance for your prints unlike anything you've previously seen from a colour printer.

Epson UltraChrome K3™ ink improves print quality and achieves exceptional colour control, so you can be sure of outstanding and neutral grey balance, precise colours, wide colour gamut, consistent colour and glossy prints that deliver excellent longevity and durability. You can use Ultrachrome K3™ ink on a wide variety of different photo and fine art media.

How it works

Epson UltraChrome K3™ ink’s new pigment and resin improve glossiness and D-max readings on glossy media, and provide reduced metamerism (colour inconsistency under different light sources) to ensure you get superior black and white and colour photographs under any light conditions.

Superb grey balance

Until now, light colour inks were used to produce grey mid-tones and highlights. Epson UltraChrome K3™ ink significantly improves overall grey balance while eliminating colour casts with the introduction of a new colour - Light Light Black, which also reduces colour ink consumption.

Accurate grey balance

Epson UltraChrome K3™ ink uses three black tones to achieve a more stable and accurate grey balance, while also allowing for more accurate colour control due to the smaller amount of colour ink used. Superb grey balance and precise colour control enhance the ICC profile-making process and require minimum retouching to reproduce colours faithful to the original image.

Wide colour gamut

The high density pigments of Epson UltraChrome K3™ ink help to produce prints with an extremely wide colour gamut. This enables you to reproduce the colours you saw when you captured the image.

Glossy prints that are tougher and longer lasting

Epson UltraChrome K3™ ink is a resin-coated pigment ink that achieves superb longevity and durability. The new resin chemistry is part of a process that smoothes the surface of the paper when ink is applied and dramatically improves print gloss levels.

Black and white printing

New Epson UltraChrome K3™ ink produces a standard of black and white photographs that - until now - was simply not possible from a colour printer. With UltraChrome K3™ ink skin tones now come alive and shadows reveal subtleties lost on other printers. Designed for ease of use and fast, cost-effective printing, Epson UltraChrome K3™ ink technology marks a turning point in the history of printing photographs.

Highlights and shadows

The addition of the new Light Light Black ink in the Epson UltraChrome K3™ ink set provides more even gradations in highlights. Shadowed areas also reveal more detail and produce denser blacks - without colour twists or tone jumps.

Smooth tonal gradation

The three different density blacks found in Epson UltraChrome K3™ ink produce smooth gradation without tone jumps. The illustration on the right shows the three levels of ink density in Epson UltraChrome K3™ ink compared with the previous generation of Epson UltraChrome ™ink.

Improved depth and richness

The Photo Black ink in the Epson UltraChrome K3™ ink set has been upgraded, resulting in a higher D-max of 2.3 (depending on what media is used). This is very useful for reproducing jet black areas. The end result is a photo showing a depth and richness not seen before from a digital colour printer.

Colour toning

The three black inks and low saturation inks (such as Light Cyan and Light Magenta) allow for subtle colour toning. Professional photographers will appreciate this feature for producing various types of monochrome images.