I love CISS

[qwertydude]

It's funny how useful and grin inducing having a nearly unlimited supply of cheap ink is. One of my friends needed lots of different colors of construction paper to make some paper projects. And her jaws just dropped when I said don't bother buying any I'll just print what you need, I have some heavy thickness paper and I'll just print whatever colors you need, even if she wanted leopard print which I ended up printing anyways. It's amazing how much of a stranglehold printer ink has on peoples' perception. By her reaction to me printing page after page of solid colors you'd have thought she was thinking I was burning $100 bills. I told her my printer needed the exercise anyways since it's been almost a week since I printed anything. I had to show her the CISS in the back of the printer that made it all possible. She wanted one too but I told her they were too fiddly and require regular maintenance, and just recently I had to reprime mine cause I was uncomfortable with the amount of air in the cartridges. So I told her it probably wasn't a good idea to just go out and buy a CISS unless you're really dedicated to printing.

 

[Nifty]

Fantastic story!

You're spot on regarding perception. What's funny: even with all my printing and refilling / cost saving background I still squirmed a little bit thinking of printing solid color on white paper to use it as "colored construction paper". I guess old habits are hard to break!

Yet, I understand how people feel. When you look at the cost of ink when you buy it in cartridge form being $2,000 - $8,000 a gallon, it makes sense that people would tend to be a bit conservative when it comes to color printing.

 

[qwertydude]

After all was said and done, I ended up resetting my cartridges twice. I checked around back and it went down about 1/8 of the ink reservoir level. It was quite a bit of ink I guess if you tally the cost with one whole reservoir refill being right around $20 the whole stack cost $2.50 in ink and $2.00 in paper. So for the 70 sheets or so printed that's a total cost of 6.5 cents a print. Not too shabby and on par with the best monochrome laser printer but with the ability to do color the value savings is immense. I do know you couldn't buy some of the colors of construction paper I printed, especially the animal print patterns. Just the gasoline needed to buy the paper would have been more than the cost of the paper.

 

[printfan1138]

Yep! Tis wonderful I ordered 6 colors for an Epson 1400 and each bottle holds 240 ml of ink so that is a total of 1440 ml of ink right? Epson cartridges hold about 12 ml each so the bottles are holding the equivalent of 120 cartridges and at about $18 ( more in some cases) each, the 120 OEM cartridges cost would be $2160.00 and the bottles of ink cost is a little under $60.00, a savings of a tad over $2100.00. Thats almost as good as finding a gold mine!