Need advice on cli-8 cart printers

[RMM]

I need to update my profile as well. I've got well over 15 printers now. Its an addiction. I have to stop checking the local classifieds and online sites ... there are "irresistible " deals almost weekly. Very dangerous!

Ha ha I'm not going to buy any new printers for a while. I promised the wife!

 

[fotofreek]

Oh, and by the way, you need to update the signature on your profile. Look at mine and consider that I own multiple printers of each type (average of more than three).

Shouldn't I only list the printers in current use in the signature? I'll probably clean the printheads and store the printers until my bci-6 printers give up the ghost. So far, in using inkjet printers for around 12 years the only failures have been printheads. That is why I will probably spend the roughly $50 and get a new backup printhead to store with the printer.

At this point I only have three stored on the shelf - a new unused ip5000 with an extra printhead, the virtually new ip4500 I just picked up, and an ip4300 that I bought last week. My wife is starting to wonder about my strange behavior -- well, I should be more specific as she has wondered about previously displayed strange behavior as well. My addiction to fly-fishing and the assoicated fly tying, doing my own car repairs, etc.

 

[Tin Ho]

Storing print heads is not without risks. I have an i950 (same for i960) print head that failed after storing only for a few month. I flushed the print head before storing it in a Ziploc bag. When I used it again a few month later it was badly clogged beyond salvage. I still don't know what I did wrong. That's a $100 loss to me. Sigh!!!

 

[Bertil]

Cant understand why you call storing printheads a problem.Of course you must clean them thoroughly first.With my printheads I used isopropanol and after wards destilled water.Put them in a flat bowl with two millimeters of the the fluid to just cover the bottom part of the printhead.Change the fluid a couple of times.Drop a little fluid on the pads and extract it by pressing soft household paper now and then.Finish it off with destilled water and let it dry.I have stored my printheads for Canon 560 for years dry and when I used one of them the other day it worked wonderfully.

 

[Harvey]

You can go all the way with the IP4500, it is a beautiful printer, very fast and has an excellent printing quality. I have owned one of these for a few years now, it is like the first day, sometimes it is used several times a day and it never fails. I have refilled it since
Ive got it with HC inks, no complains until this day, with clogs or something, just make sure you have a nice set of OEM carts.

 

[fotofreek]

I was at a friend's office last week and saw an i960 (bci-6 carts) sitting on a shelf. The receptionist said that they weren't using it and that they were looking for a smaller printer due to desk space issues. They gave me the printer, which I installed, opened the cover, and found no-name aftermarket crap ink carts - all totally empty. They had run it dry and put it on a shelf. The inside and outside of the printer were absolutely clean, indicating very little use. It actually looked new.

I put newly refilled carts in, did a few head cleanings, and got a terrible nozzle check print. Just a few tiny faint marks on the paper. At that point I figured that the printhead was DOA. If I hadn't been an avid participant of this forum I would have discarded the printer as there are no more i960 printheads available anywhere. A few hours of work with lots of windex, however, and I got a nearly perfect nozzle check, but it had a very small "chunk" chewed off of a corner of the cyan block at the bottom of the nozzle check print. I ran an 8x10 test print of colorful fishing boats at a dock with a very pretty sky in the background (with several shades of blue) and the print was excellent. With the print quality set to the highest, the printhead movement must overlap the path of the nozzles to cover over whatever small nozzle defect the nozzle check showed.

Since the i960 is my favorite photo printer, I really lucked out! The ip4300 and ip4500 that I just bought on Craig's list will have to be stored until my bci-6 printers die. As was mentioned by several participants who have fallen into the printer collection addiction, my wife couldn't believe that I acquired three used fully working Canon printers in the last two weeks when the two that we currently use are working perfectly.

 

[l_d_allan]

list for the next generation of printers that use the pgi-5 and cli-8 carts

I'd be interested in (and appreciate) seeing a list of Canon printers that use the CLI-8 cartridges. On some webpage, I found such a list, but haven't been able to track it down again. IIRC, it was a pretty extensive list.

More directly, I have a Pro-9000-2 that I am very happy with, except it is quite large due to its 13x19 capability. Are there smaller CLI-8 printers that have a limit of letter/legal paper? I'd think such a printer could be significantly smaller/lighter. I can envision situations where I'd want to take a printer along for a day or three to a project, and the 9000-2 seems ill suited to that.

Or have a smaller CLI-8 based printer at an evening event where I am taking pictures, and want very quick turn-around that evening of 4x6's, 5.5x8.5", and/or 8.5x11's. Take pictures from 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm, print frantically ... probably as part of a team of 2 or 3 or us ... and have them ready to give away at 8:30 to 9:00 pm.

My uninformed impression is that the previous/earlier generation of printers to CLI-8 based printers used a cartridge that is very similar to the CLI-8, but without the chip. Was that the BCI-6 cart? BCI-3e? BCI-8? I think a printer using those carts would be very suitable for what I have in mind. I have a chip resetter, so I probably have a preference for a CLI-8 based printer, but that may be uninformed on my part.

 

[ghwellsjr]

Prior to the CLI-8 was the BCI-6 dye-based carts and the BCI-3eBk pigment black cart.

If you are looking for speed, you should compare the number of nozzles. And I would get one with four dye-based carts (instead of six or eight) because you will be forever swapping out the lighter versions of inks (photo cyan and photo magenta).

I would suggest the iP4000 with 1536 dye ink nozzles which Canon says can print a 4x6 borderless print in 36 seconds.

You will find faster printers that use the CLI-8 carts because they have more nozzles. I would suggest the iP4500 with 4096 dye ink nozzles which Canon says can print a 4x6 borderless print in 21 seconds.

I would suggest using multiple printers and multiple computers and multiple cameras and multiple memory cards and lots of refilled carts at an event where it is very important that you produce results in short order.

 

[l_d_allan]

I've been blessed to stay with the unchipped BCI cart printers, but I am now on my last few of these "golden oldies."

The impression this refilling newbie gets from reading a number of recent and older threads is that unchipped cartridges were/are preferred by many. I perceive there can be a minor/moderate/major amount of annoyance with Canon for implementing chips, as part of "planned obsolescence" and/or making life difficult for refillers.

I'm thinking of getting a backup printer, and whether a CLI-8 based printer would be advised, or one based on the previous generation of carts.

I'm curious how the older non-chipped printers detected low/empty. Once you put in a refilled cartridge, do you have to keep over-riding the printer which thinks it is empty? Disable warnings? Keep monitoring ink usage so you don't run out and possibly harm the print-head?

I've got a chip resetter for my Pro-9000-2, so it is perhaps moot. It seems to me that there are enough advantages to a chipped cart like the CLI-8 that the expense of having to get a chip resetter is justified.

Of course, it would have been a much different situation when the CLI-8 based printers first came out. My impression was that resetters didn't become available for quite a while. Ouch.

 

[ghwellsjr]

The older printers that used unchipped cartridges relied on the optical sensor which could detect an empty reservoir--and that's all. Whenever it went from a non-empty reservoir (which could be full, partially full, or no cartridge at all) to an empty reservoir, the printer would issue a yellow low warning and then start counting down nozzle squirts until it thought the sponge chamber was emtpty at which point it would issue the red empty alert. Whenever the optical sensor went from empty to non-empty, it would reset the level display to full and start a count down (and cue a print head purge prior to the next printout). At some point it would display half-empty and stay there forever until the empty reservoir was detected. If you continually refilled before the reservoir was empty, the display would continue to display half empty but it was easy, if you had any empty cartridge to put one in momentarily and reset the level back to full if you cared.

I really miss the feature of the optical sensor in the newer chipped cartridge printers because if you have an air leak in a cartridge and all the ink drains out of the reservoir, you will never know unless you actually see ink inside your printer or you remove the cartridges to look at them. I don't know why Canon disabled the optical sensor in these newer printers, even though the cartridges and the printers have all the hardware to make it work.