Canon iP4000 black ink cartridges?

kurtn

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I bought my nephew an iP4000 for his hs. graduation and I see it has 2 black ink cartridges - BCI-6bk & BCI-3ebk. I know he will be printing alot of reports in college so I would like to get him another black ink cartridge but I don't know which one. Does anyone know which black ink cartridge is used when printing a page with just text?? - or which one is more likely to run out first??

thanks
Kurt
 

kenban

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The BCI-3ebk is what your going to want to pick up. The BCI-6bk is used in photos.
 

Nifty

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Welcome to the forum. I've got a bit of info here:
http://www.nifty-stuff.com/difference-canon-bci-3-bci-6.php

For sure the BCI-3ebk, the pigment cartridge which is bigger and for text printing and pretty much any other black in regular paper setting mode, will run out before the BCI-6bk which is dye based and for photos.
 

panos

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From my own, limited experience, the 6BK photo black cartrdige is the last to run out (compared to all other cartridges).
 

BlasterQ

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The BCI-6K will run out if you print mostly photos and graphics on high quality.
Printing mostly text, the IP4000 will use the BCI-3e Black.
But from my experience, with that kind of printer, it would be very hard not to print photos. Your nephew would probably be printing a lot of photos, especially his girlfriends, at his age. ;)
 

Nifty

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BlasterQ, from the tests I ran on my i860 at the link below, it seems that the quality setting doesn't effect the cartridge used, but changing the paper type does change the cartridge used.
http://www.nifty-stuff.com/difference-canon-bci-3-bci-6.php

I also agree with panos that even when I print a lot of photos, the BCI-6BK is the last to go of all 5 of my cartridges.
 

tyamada

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I just ran a photo on plain paper test on my iP4000 (it's new, my S600 started acting funny so instead of fooling around with it I replaced it ), if you use the plain paper or the envelope setting the BCI-3ebk will be used if any other paper setting is used the BCI-6bk cartridge will be used. When I used the plain paper setting to print a picture I got an enormous amount of pigmented black which took about 3 minutes to dry, also got bronzing in the blacks (shiny), The picture didn't look bad, it was darker than the transparency setting using plain paper (used this setting to limit the amount of ink used).

The iP4000 is a good printer, does a better job printing photos as opposed to the S600. The S600 used to use the Cyan, Magenta and Yellow to make black, this used to print photos with a yellowish green black which is not good for photos. It really makes them look funny.

The reason I bought the iP4000 is because of the BCI-3ebk pigmented ink cartridge for text printing (use it as a dedicated text printer). It takes a lot of text to use all the ink in the big cartridge. I only used two (2) BCI-3ebk cartridges in five years with my S600, printed thousand of pages of text.
 

BlasterQ

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Yeah, yesterday I made my first refill for my yellow cart for my new Canon IP4000. And I checked the other carts, sure enough, the BCI-6Bk still has a good amount of ink compared to cyan, magenta and yellow. Since I seldom print text, my BCI-3e Black is still almost full.
 

websnail

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Right I'm resurrecting this thread (there were a few candidates to choose from :))...

I'm confused about why the Canon figures for the BCI-3eBk show only 330 pages @ 5% compared to the BCI-6BK which show as 440 @ 5% again.

Now, from what little info I could find the former has a greater capacity of 30ml, while the latter hold a puny half at 15ml... Could someone turf out the actual figures (for Canon branded please) and let me know what they are for real because this little nugget is spoiling my nice new spread sheet of comparisons...

Cheers
:)
Martin
 

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