Non OEM Ink for Epson 1500W

[Neal_T]

Hi All,

I have just setup my new 1500w to print images for personal use and hopefully sell.

Eventually I will want ink and looking at various ink suppliers in the UK I have no idea what is worth buying other than the OEM products which aren't cheap.

cityinkexpress, farbenwerk and octoink look promising with their refillable ink cartridges, can anyone suggest other suppliers worth looking at ?

Thanks
Neal

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

There have been several threads about inks for the 1400/1500W and similar

http://www.printerknowledge.com/threads/which-pigment-ink-for-epson-1500w.9323/page-8#post-82336

http://www.printerknowledge.com/thr...nt-inks-on-gloss-paper.9891/page-2#post-82048

If cost is your first reason to use 3rd party inks you would get decent inks from the suppliers you mention

if longevity /UV/light resistance/stability is your main concern you either need to continue with
the Epson Claria inks which are pretty expensive, or as an alternative ink normally used on Fujifilm Drylab foto printers which has been tested extensively recently and reported here

if you are planning to use or being interested in pigment inks you may get some information from the
threads quoted above as well.

And please be aware that you should consider getting icc profiles for color correct print outs, those icc-profiles need to be generated for every ink/paper/driver settings combination you are using.

 

[cls]

more or less all suppliers buy their refillable ink cartridges from the same manufactures out of shenzen China mainland
also Do I,
there are either only cosmetic differences such as the labels on the carts itself.

Latley the 1500w with the NEWEST Firmware has issues recognizing refillable or 3rd party cartrdiges
so please never update your firmware, epson claims it will solve uncertain wireless lan issues but it will render the CSIC Board which detects the ink chips with a newer firmware too so you will have a bad day with almost ALL cartridges on the market.

I printed over 20 Liters of ink with various 1500W/ 1400 Variants trough me printing career most of the print where batch jobs for customers
and sold alot of ink and supplies too

select a reasonable and reliable ink source
buy 1-3 set of refillable cartriges
buy a manual resetter to manually reset a complet Set to Full

dig yourself into the "color profiling" mechanics you will sooner or later require good solid paper profiles upon the ink and paper you will be using
otherwise with "canned" epson profiles or various other "out of the" box ICC profiles you just wont have the maxium coloroutput you could have

my lastest submission is a PX650 that requires serious attention it was left for over 2 year with depleted 3rd party carts in it and I have to clean the print head, cleaning assembly , waste ink box and some of the encoder stripes, realign every thing with the service adjustment software and then another astonishing printer is ready to go "refurbished" into my shop

the 1500W is also a reliable machine with pigmented ink if you know what you are doing, the native printhead cleaning cycle is not design to clean pigment residue of the printhead gasket and surface. It will require a weekly maintenance with some cleaning solution but the 1500w is a pretty dang cheap printer (260 € in germany < sell the OEM carts for about 60~80€ = 180€ base printer unit)

also worth menition the easy to install external waste ink kits from octoinkjet, you can install it with very few steps without no permenant modification to the printer and every purge and printhead cleaning wont be dumped into the printers base plate where the purous pads are located but into an external connected by tubing box

I personally sold and installed four 1500w within the last eight weeks with a CISS plus external wast ink box at various customers.

One architect, two graphic designers shared offices and one mechanical engeneering student in his ? 5th semester
all of them require "cheap" prints on both matte and glossy papers
all of them dont want to fiddle around with syringes and stuff like that

I made a base service licesence agreement for one on side service within 4 weeks if they encounter any difficulties
explained the base functions to them (such as CD DVD printing)
and even one of them bought QImage as a printing tool (a graphics designer obviously) after he saw the programm running on my "on side service notebook"
he was thrilled it didnt cost a whooping amount or even a monthly fee (such as other big brand > adobe charges)
only downside with qimage is : it runs on windows only > BUT he had been running paralells and a virutal machine on his Mac Pro anyway for various acounting software application so it was no biggie

that my input

cheers
Serhat

 

[Neal_T]

Thanks to you both for your advise.

I have seen the YouTube guides on fitting the CLS and the waste take prior to purchasing the printer, Currently I do not have the space to safely have external ink laying around but I will look into purchasing these later on. Hopefully the printer hasn't updated itself to the latest firmware when it was installed yesterday.

My knowledge of ink types is still very limited and unaware of the benefits of pigment inks other than being more expensive, I am also thinking of possibly moving into heat transfer printing where I believe the dye inks are more suited?

Many thanks
Neal

 

[cls]

Heat transfering inks to fabric or cloth will require a ink that wont perish if the target substance is washed
since dye ink would immedeately disolve in water and solute this is NOT a preferable option

Heat transfering ink requires also to cut the ready print at its images edeges AND any other parts that are not covered by ink otherwise it will be transfered WITH the image to the target substance

BUT
there is "dye sublimation" this method is used to heat transfer ink to Polyester based or polyester coated subtances such as ceramic (mugs, plates) and of course all kinds of garment (shirts, bibs, socks, hoddies etc)
Dye sublimation require a tremendous amount of pressure and heat to work
the target substance is then "dyed" on a molecular level, so basically you wont be transfering any image to the shirt but you will DYE acctualy the fabric itself.
The image is printer mirrored onto a special sublimation paper and then when pressure and heat comes together the ink will sublimate from solid to gas into the poly fabric or poly coated surface itself,
since there is no support material required you wont "feel" the print its practialy embeded into the target substance and wont come of even after 100x washing the shirt over and over again
however this will ONLY work for 100% poly garment
if its a mix with cotton you will lose a fair amount of color saturation after the first washing, since the sublimation process wont effect cotton fabrics it will only "adhere" to polyester or other synthec fabrics

Often times sublimation will require an inidiviall color profile for EACH sublimation target you choose

note: sublimation is works with an color additive method
so you can only achive full color space on pure White target materials
if you would use a faint yellow shirt all "yellow" colorspace from your image will get "lost" due to the fact that the material itself is yellow
you cant use sublimation on "black" garment
sublimation is perfected by the industry check google images for some examples
here an all over shirt
http://s3.amazonaws.com/assets.jakp...sub/all-over-full-color-best-illustration.jpg
you would need at least a2 size for that

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

Yes, heat transfer with dye sublimation requires a special process, the right materials, a press and special dye sublimation inks. You can print with the regualr dye inks into the transfer sheets but that is amateurish and will not last very long. There should be plenty offerings by companies for this type of business.

 

[Mags]

Dye sublimation only works on Polyester garments, if you are using cotton or a dark garment then a pigment ink onto a material like jetpro Soft Stretch, this ideally should be cut out through bleed to give a nice finish, this actually does last a very long time without fading but the transfer paper is expensive compared to sublimation.