If you would switch to a printer like the G550/650 tank system printer you have all the information visible about the ink status, and refill is only necessary at a much lower frequency and can be planned ahead, and you lower the printing cost significantly at the same time with OEM inks. Similar printers like the Epson ET-8550 for A3 or the XP-15000 with a chipless firmware mod + a CISS would give you a similar functionality.
https://www.printerknowledge.com/th...one-to-replace-the-pro-100.14262/#post-123843
I'm not too worried about lowering print costs if it sacrifices print quality or paper handling.
I also do have the XP-15000 and set it up chipless, but am refilling the individual cartridges (not an issue for me doing it that way)
I prefer the print quality from the Pro-200 over the XP-15000 as I find the lighter shaded areas are more "grainy" like on faces for portraits for example.
And paper handing is far superior on the Pro-200 which is almost seemingly perfect in loading and printing paper.
With the Pro-100 I had before it went defunct I was ordering full sets at a time and would always burn through the Greys, PM, and PC typically and others would vary, so I usually got left with alot of extra cartridges of various colours.
So I just decided to order an extra two sets and then on top of that two extra cartridges of PM, PC, and the Greys and Ill just have to see what I end up using and then stockpile accordingly.
I just wonder how hard it would be to make a website that you upload an image to and tell it your printer or inks and it outputs an estimation of ink usage overall and colour breakdown. That would be really cool to kind of have a guess of how much ink and what colours a job would use overall.
Something like this website,
http://www.coolphptools.com/color_extract#demo
It allows you to upload an image and choose the amount of colours (no controls on what colours tho which is what would be needed) and we have an estimate of ink usage per square foot for some printers from other sources such as Red River which sites a cartridge usage of .00052875 cartridges per square inch, which would be 0.0423 cartridges per 8/10 with 95% coverage (Ill be it not with perfectly equal usage of colours but this is the best sources I could find)
So if that website tool had a way to break up the image into the 8 colours of the Canon Pro-200, then it could output the most used cartridges and approximate usage of the cartridge?
It would definitely need tweaking and testing but I think it could be something that would be useful to the general printing community.
But tis a dream
But it's fine I'm just going to have to keep track of it all my own way for the files that I'm printing and the paper I am printing on, and then just adjusting what I will need to be ordering and keeping on hand.
