Couple of basic refill questions

[Calculon]

I have a Canon ip5200 which I'm pretty pleased with and recently started refilling the cartridges with Hobbicolors ink following recommendation from this forum. I've now done about 5 refills with no problem and all seems great.

My first basic question is, if I wanted to change to a different ink supplier, say MIS, is there anything special that needs to be done to the cartridge before refilling with ink from a different manufacturer?

And my second question, which is one of them how long is a piece of string type questions but, I suddenly find myself printing a lot of full colour a4 photo prints, about 100-200 a week. So I'm wondering is there a rule of thumb for estimating how long a printer should operate successfully for before needing either a new printhead or a new printer?

Cheers
Mark

 

[fotofreek]

Canon rates the service life of their printers, but I don't know what it is. I think it is quite variable as some people print thousands of photos, fliers, etc before their printers fail. The way I look at it, refilling is so cheap that you save a ton of money and purchasing a new printer is not so painful when yours fails. Some people suggest using new virgin carts when you change inks or purging them with Grandad's backflushing technique. Even if the inks are compatable with each other your color balance won't be predictable until you are using all one manufacturer's inks. That said, I just added MIS ink to the OEM carts when I started refilling and had no problem with color balance even though I had mixed the two inks in individual carts and had MIS inks in some carts and OEM still in others.