Bad refill quality

[Number21]

Alright, another question. If I buy "pigment black" MSI for HP printers from inksupply.com, will I be able to use that in my Epson printer? (CX9400) I just noticed today it's almost out of black, and I've never refilled it before.

 

[tigerwan]

Always use ink made for the cartridge it's meant for, Not all ink is the same.

Also, if you bring in an empty old dried out cartridge to a commercial refiller, they will assess whether it can be refilled, if it can't it should be sent away to be recycled another way.

 

[Ken_CW_Honolulu]

If it's an HP cartridge with integral print head I doubt you will ever be able to remove dried ink from the print head. I used to use HP 56-57-58 cartridges which preceded the 90 series carts and was never able to reclaim a dried out cart.

Fooey. I'm just curious, what do the commercial refill places do if someone brings in a dried cartridge? (must happen all the time!)

Speaking as a tech from a commercial refill place, I would simply accept the cartridge for recycling in the interest of maintaining our world class customer service. As for the technical side of it:

The only thing stopping us from refilling an inkjet cart is an electrical failure in the circuit. A horribly dried cartridge with it's sponge and nozzles contaminated with crappy ink can be injected with a wide variety of foul smelling chemicals (which we heat up to increase the vile odor), this will dissolve the dried ink. Then the ink and chemicals will be flushed out with hot water in our cartridge flushing station (which I personally built, in a cave, with nothing but a box of scraps). After flushing, the cartridge will be centrifuged and possibly injection dried with heated air. The cartridge is now ready for vacuum fill. This has NEVER failed to produce a clean inkflow no matter how clogged the nozzles were.

And yes, ink cartridges/inkjet printers often require specific inks, (for color consistency, surface tension, viscosity, solubility, evaporation rate, and many other annoyingly complicated technical specifications). Using cheap inks will get you cheap results. Failure to match the specs will produce inferior print, print defects, leaky carts, etc etc. Sounds like your ink viscosity and surface tension was too low (it was too thin and watery for your printer) thus producing bleeds and/or micro-spatter (your 'Magic Marker" defect).

 

[Number21]

Sounds like your ink viscosity and surface tension was too low (it was too thin and watery for your printer)

Yeah, that's about right - the cheap ink looks like black water. Does better ink actually have some viscosity to it?

 

[nche11]

The ink's viscosity, surface tension and boiling point are critical characters of a compatible ink. They need to be very close to the OEM ink in order to work like OEM ink. If not very often you get leaks or clogs. This is very critical aspects of a compatible ink. The other aspect of a compatible ink is in color performance. People ofter focus their magnifier on this when looking for compatible inks. But viscosity, surface tension nad especially boiling point of ink are really more critical. For example, if the boiling point of an ink is too low the print head will develop clogging sooner or later. This is why some compatible ink are reportedly more pron to clogging than some others despite they perform well in terms of colors. The boiling point is affected by the ingredients of the ink. So ink fomulation isn't quite right if such an issue exists.