G&G 3e black cart problem

[neilslade]

I've been using G&G ink for years, and it's been my evaluation that it is the best third party ink in pre-filled carts. Please see my site for a total evaluation versus bulk inks and Canon OEM http://www.neilslade.com/Papers/inktest.html

HOWEVER-- I have recently noted a problem with ONLY ONE of their carts-- the Canon 3eBK cart -- no other colors or carts- but since I am sure many people use this cart replacement, they should have the scoop on it. Otherwise, no problem with any other G&G ink that I have run extensive tests on, all the other colors for Canons.

By the way, I did try the new 8CLI carts by G&G, and they work fine-- but be careful removing the chip on the Canon carts to place on the replacement G&G carts-- inkgrabber has posted my specific instructions for this process

Anyway, this week I have passed my findings onto G&G via one of their distributors (inkgrabber) and hope to have an update soon. Until they solve the problem, I recommend that the 3eBK is not used in any of the Canon printers that use the LARGE PIGMENT BLACK cart, i.e. the 3e carts.

I would suspect that every third party manufacturer makes the same mistake and puts photo black in these after market carts, and IT DOESN"T WORK CORRECTLY. On the other hand, if you refill- MIS does in fact make the proper PIGMENT INK that belongs in the 3e carts, and that's what I use to good effect.

SO-- for 3e Carts, either go broke using Canon carts, or refill with MIS pigment black for Canon refills, or refill your after market cart (like G&G) with pigment ink, and not the regular photo black DYE ink.

Here's my run down and letter to G&G

Please pass this on the G&G as this is a major issue with the 3eBK carts and it must be resolved.
Please have them contact me or get back to you when they have feedback on this.


I've continued to look into this issue with the 3e carts (large black for ip3000, ip4000 and others that use the big cart

MIS DOES in fact put pigment ink in the bulk refill made for 3e Canon Carts, and that's what I've been using to refill my carts-- thus, I haven't had any problems until I started using the virgin G&G carts in my ip4000. This explains the satisfactory results with refilling the carts or using MIS ink in CIS systems.

TODAYS TEST:

Okay, so I put in one of my G&G 3eBK carts yesterday and left in overnight in my ip4000 (two blacks), and their was no leakage under the print head-- that's without using the printer. HOWEVER, and I think this is significant- as soon as I printed 2 pages and inspected the cart, there was significant leakage of black on the print head immediately after printing, and this should not occur at all. Its not just a little bit of black, but a lot. I then repeated the test in one of my ip3000 and the exact same thing happened, i.e. poor printing and significant leakage of black on the print head nozzle side.

I repeated These carts should not be sold in my opinion, and will screw up anyones printer- whether they immediately recognize it or not- and ultimately cause all kinds of problems.

A) Poor printing (blurring of text and lines and edges) on plain or matte paper. Use on photo paper is not an issue since photo paper absorbes the ink differently)
B) Leakage on the print head- that will then cause really screwed up prints in all colors in which the leaked ink covers the nozzles.
C) Migration of the black ink into other color carts.


This is a BIG DEAL and needs to immediately be addressed by G&G. Obviously once a person has problems from G&G carts you and they will permanently lose a customer for ALL colors and inks-- and it may all boil down to this one cart.

Now that I think about it, when I was using G&G 3e blacks in my ip3000 (I've been using the CIS black for maybe 6 months now) I had to make large MINUS adjustments to the black, because all of my prints were showing far too much black bleedage on my label prints. Now I understand why.
My printer color profiles all have had reduced black for the ip3000 printers, all using 3eBK carts.

Every Canon printer that uses the 3e carts MUST use pigment ink- because the printers are set up to use this kind of ink, which applies very differently than the photo ink (less pigment is needed). The dye black ink will run and bleed when used in the 3e cart slot.

I will be issuing a cautionary note about using these G&G carts until such time that G&G starts using the proper ink formula, and I will discourage their use. Otherwise, it will completely taint both the reputation of G&G as well as my own.

Bear in mind, this is ONLY an issue with the 3e carts. It does not apply to 6BCI carts since these are supposed to be photo black

 

[Tin Ho]

The problem is in the dye ink you are using. It probably does not have a correct viscosity formulated in it. G&G is not an ink manufacturer. It is one of the largest 3rd party compatible virgin cartridge manufacturer in China but they do not make a single drop of ink. They buy ink from suppliers in China to fill their ready filled cartridges. They should have the ability to qualify the ink they use. But apparently you are having a problem now.

Weink used to sell a pigmented ink with something like 20/80 dye and pigment mix. Many 3rd party ready filled 3ebk cartridges are filled with dye black ink. I use alternately between pigment black and dye black filled 3ebk cartridges and have no problems with dye ink in my bci-3ebk. In fact I use it most of the time. It actually gives absolutely no problems to me.

The smudging you are seeing is a problem of ink and paper combination issue. If you print on high quality plain paper you will not have any smudging and you will really like it as it is as dark as you can expect. The text will be as sharp as you will like. HP has a number of patents in their black pigment ink. Their ink is really crisp even printing on cheap copy paper. I am sure Canon ink has something fomulated in it that it is crisp too on cheap plain paper. But when I demand quality text print I will use quality paper. It makes no sense to demand high quality pigment ink but print on cheapest paper. If I use such paper then it really matter not if it smudges a little. The paper is not too great anyway.

The problem you see is probably an ink issue. Have you tried dye black ink from a different supplier? You may see a totally different result. Give it a try.

 

[websnail]

Have to agree with TinHo.. It does sound like an ink rather than a cartridge issue.. If it were the latter you'd be seeing leakage when the printer was doing nothing so that rules out an air leak, etc.. (although those tend to affect CIS's more). That said I've just picked up on your points about the ink migrating to the other carts.. IIRC that usually only happens is the ink is really quite thin and can seep across the printhead to the other nozzles.. Worth checking the actual printhead isn't flooded but that'd be my SWAG (as Grandad calls it)

I have heard of people using dyebase black instead of pigment purely because of reduced cost and because their usage was minimal they wished to avoid potential clogging with pigment insk.. As far as I'm aware they've done so with no ill effects..

 

[ghwellsjr]

I will be issuing a cautionary note about using these G&G carts until such time that G&G starts using the proper ink formula, and I will discourage their use.

The problem is in the dye ink you are using.

It does sound like an ink rather than a cartridge issue.

Sounds like everybody agrees.

 

[AlienSteve]

My wife is using an old BJC 6000, I have been refilling her carts with all dye inks. First with a refill kit I bought at a close-out store, now with generic dye ink I removed from 3rd party Epson 3000 tanks, all dye including black. I've not had these problems.

Of course the dye black will run and bleed if I get it wet, but otherwise it's fine.

I'm refilling OEM cartridges.

This does sound more like a potential bad fit of the cartridge. Maybe just good enough so when the head is not moving, it doesn't leak, but shaking during printing moves it just enough to leak.

 

[neilslade]

Dye ink (as probably put in these carts erroneously by G&G- although I am waiting to hear from them)- will work. But it works POORLY.
I've run multiple tests in both the ip3000 and ip4000, and there is a significant degradation of the definition of the printing on regular paper using the carts. This does not occur with MIS pigment ink, or Canon pigment ink. If anyone doesn't understand this, please re-read my initial post.

1) The ink runs out and puddles on the nozzle side of the print head
2) The prints bleed making blurrier text on plain paper
3) This can risk contamination of other colors in adjacent carts

I printing thousands of pages each month. I immediately noticed the poor results in my book text printing.
Months ago when I was using the 3eBK carts (I switched to MIS refilling shortly thereafter), I also noted that I had to make adjustments to the black ink level-- didn't understand why then- now I do.

In the image below, you can see that the definition of the dye ink middle sample is not good. You can really see the difference when you print out either graphics or a whole page of text using the proper pigment ink and compare it with dye ink in these printers that use the 3eBK cart. It is not acceptable.

Again, bear in mind, this is only applicable to the pigment black, and otherwise, all of the other colors work fine, including the smaller photo black cart which should contain dye ink.

 

[Tin Ho]

Neil, try to print the same text but setting paper to high resolution paper without changing anything else. You will be surprised how crispy the text is printed. In this case the text is printed by the BCI-6 bk zolles. You may be shocked how much better the text looks.

You will understand that the smudging you are seeing is a result of bci-3ebk nozzles bing at 600x600 resolution. The ink droplet size is 5 pico-liter. It is no match to the 1 pico-liter droplets from the BCI-6bk nozzles at 9600x4800 resolution. It is normal to see such smudging when you put dye black ink in your BCI-3ebk to print text. But if you get leaking problems then it may be the ink that is too watery. OEM pigmented in or any 3rd party pigmented ink do smudge too but in general print crispier texts because pigments are solids and are not as mobile as dye inks. They do not smudge as bad as dye black ink. If you use the right paper, usually expensive paper, your text printed with pigmented black ink will be as crisp as you should expect.

In fact the smudging of dye ink is not really that bad. I have to use a magnefier to see how bad it is. With naked eyes you should not see much difference. Considering the paper I use are always the cheapest buy it only when they give a huge discount. It doesn't make too much sense to demand crispy text on crapy paper anyway. Most of my text prints get shreaded in a few days I actually benefit from using dye ink in my 3ebk. For my printing needs they are problem free completely. Never ever got a clog.

 

[mikling]

Pigment ink costs a lot lot more than dye based inks ( try multiples). Look at the intended target market for prefilled compatibles and determine if 80% would care if it was pigment or not. Hmmmmm.

 

[neilslade]

I think people want to see GOOD LOOKING PRINTS. And anyone A/Bing the dye ink text pages next to pigment ink test pages will see the difference without any problem at all. Its READILY and EASILY apparent if you compare.

You CAN use dye ink and the standard 6BCI cart in a printer like the s900 or i950 or i960 because they were designed to deliver nothing but dye black, and they create exceptionally good looking prints, and crisp and perfectly clear text.

But these printers also print text pages at HALF THE SPEED of the ip3000 and ip4000-- and this is precisely why I now use these printers instead of laser jet printers for printing large volumes of text pages.

Put the right ink in an ip3000 or ip4000 and the text is still, perfectly crisp and clear.

Put the wrong ink in these printers, and you get FUZZ.



Why is anyone defending this? Good lord.


I am not interested in using the miniscule 6BCI cart to print text pages. I am able to print exactly TWO BOOKS (with a little left over) (260 pages) using one 3eBK cart. That would be about ONE BOOK PER 6BCI cart.

That's a joke.

When the proper ink is used in a printer, it should print fast, clear, defined, on the default settings.


<b>You are absolutely incorrect about the smudging due to the 3e cart-- when either Canon or MIS pigment ink is used in the 3e cart, it prints perfectly</b>, and I've been doing it for months, printing tens of thousands of pages. Look at my picture. All of these samples were printed using different ink/carts in the exact same 3e slot.

Its the ink.

And it is that bad,. It SUCKS. There is no excuse for putting dye ink in 3eBK carts except laziness, or money saving-- except for the fact that if you buy pigment ink from MIS in bulk, it costs EXACTLY the same as dye ink. Hmmmm.

I print and sell books all year long-- as soon as I put a dye ink cart in (the G&G 3e cart) I IMMEDIATELY looked at the pages and went "WHAT THE HELL?!!?" It was apparent without me even expecting to see something wrong.

They look like crap, and do not look first class- and anything less than this is unacceptable to me, and should be to anyone else.

Not only is the text blurry, but the graphics pages will show a million little dots in the background where there should be nothing but clean white paper.

If this is okay for you or anyone else, fine, be happy.

For me it is unacceptable, and there is no reason to accept it when I can put pigment MIS or other proper pigment ink in a 3e cart.

G&G has erroneously (and I would suspect probably every other cheap ink company) put dye in in these carts, and it doesn't work the way these printers were designed to work. EVen MIS recognizes that you are supposed to have pigment ink in these carts. Incidentally, MIS charges exactly the same for pigment ink bulk bottles as they do for the photo dye black.

 

[mikling]

Neil, MIS sells pigment ink for the same price as dye ink in small quantities only. Just like myself. MIS and I happen to get the ink from the same source. However, if you look at the larger containers you will notice that the pigment black is priced higher than the DYE black because the loss in profit would be too much. Pigment black costs over two times what dye black costs. The Table is misleading. If you place an order into their cart you will see the real price. The table shows $85 for a gallon but the real price in the cart is $132. Up to a pint, the price is the same. Then the hurt is too great.

What has been mentioned here numerous times by others and you should tell others that use your site as a guide is that refilling is one sure way to control and maintain consistency in their workflow or printing habits. With the cheap compatibles you are never sure what you are getting as they state no standard as to exact color matches. One batch may be different from another depending on low bid. Your readers should keep this in mind. A proper ink compatible supplier should list the formulation sold. this way, once you have your setup running smoothly, you can reorder the same formulation and KNOW you won't have a problem with printing consistently. That will never happen with compatibles because the breadth of stock required to do this would be too great.
Beyond this, there are many variations in the shades of DYE black used within the Canon line. If they are doing this with Pigment, I wouldn't be surprised that they are using the same dye black amongst all the cartridges. The dye black from the newer CLI has a distinct different shade from that of the BCI. It might be interesting to do a comparison and you might return to refilling as you once did.