I have now received the bottled Canon OEM CIS inks, and am now testing them in a Canon MG5550 printer. For photo black I use a Canon OEM CLI-551 BK cartridge. I used compatible PGI-550/CLI-550 cartridges for the Canon OEM inks. After having drilled a refill hole in the top of the cartridges I flushed the compatible cartridges using tap water and treated the sponges with pharmacists conditioning fluid. After refill I seal the drilled hole using
aluminium tape. Ordinary tape should not be used. I transferred the ARC chips from the refillable cartridges to my cleaned single use cartridges.
Normally you should not refill compatible cartridges intended for single use, but their quality appear better than a set of refillable PGI-550/CLI-551 cartridges I have tested.
When refilling the cleaned cartridges I noticed the magenta ink looked a bit weak like photo magenta, and I expected photos to have a green cast. They did when printed on Canon Glossy paper 501 using the MG5550. But setting magenta = +15 and intensity = +10 in the printer properties produced a nice photo with neutral greys. For colour corrections
see this.
I will do a fading test using UV light. I will compare the inks to Canon OEM CLI-8 inks, the compatible IS inks for CLI-8 and CLI-226 cartridges and a cheap no-name set of PGI-220/CLI-221 cartridges. I think the fading test will take a couple of weeks. I will bring the results in a new thread.
Canon might have used some chemical tricks to prevent the use of these inks in other printers, see
this thread and
this post, so use the inks at your own risk.
See this warning packed with the ink bottles:
Here is the result of test prints. The top is without correction and the bottom is with M=15 and I=10 correction:
I look forward to see the results of the fading test. Maybe we have now got a reasonably priced and reasonably fade resistant dye refill ink for Canon?
