OCP Black and Green Inks are Driving Me Insane

[PeterBJ]

I think this was the post by mikling, so I didn't remember quite correctly and it might not be relevant here?

 

[fotofreek]

I don't remember making a post on that subject, but I seem to remember that @mikling posted something on that subject a few months ago.

Sorry to say that I didn't delve into either viscosity or text sharpness issues with black dye based inks either.

 

[PeterBJ]

Sorry to say that I didn't delve into either viscosity or text sharpness issues with black dye based inks either.

Thanks for your comment. I guess this was the thread I vaguely remembered.

 

[qwerty42]

Hi all,

Another update to this thread, with some very good news!

I mentioned last time that after diluting the OCP black ink fairly significantly, it was working great. Well, after some more printing I found that that wasn't true. It was still having the skipping issue occasionally (though to a MUCH less extent), and the diluted black had a bit of a gloss differential that became obvious in large patches.

Here's the good news: I emailed R-JetTek about the problem, mostly out of frustration but not really expecting anything to come of it. David Bauer replied to my initial email, and said that he'd passed it on to OCP. David soon emailed me again, asking me for the batch numbers of the black inks that I had. OCP checked their records for those batches, and said they measured OK, but suggested I try a bottle from a different batch to see if I had the same issue.

David at R-JetTek sent me another bottle of the black from a different batch, free of charge, and I gave it a try. It was doing the exact same thing as the other bottles I had. Seeing that this was clearly an ink chemistry issue, I made a detailed summary document that showed exactly the issue, and exactly the circumstances that caused it to happen, and emailed it back to David, who then passed it on to OCP.

In about a week, I got another response from David saying that OCP had made a special test batch and wanted me to try it. R-JetTek again shipped this to me immediately as soon as they had it on-hand, and much to my delight, it worked perfectly. I ran it through all of the repeatable tests that caused issues with the old stuff, and the new stuff looks just as good, with NONE of the flow problems.

So, since I originally made this post ragging on OCP ink, I wanted to follow up and say that (1) the folks at R-JetTek are fantastic, very responsive, and genuinely pursued my issues and made sure something was done about it; and (2) I was also thoroughly impressed that OCP listened to me, despite their batch measurements being good, and whipped up a corrected batch of the ink in a ridiculously fast time.

R-JetTek is replacing their stock of the black OCP ink for the Canon CLI-8BK cartridges with the reformulated batch. So if my post scared you, you can be sure now that the OCP ink will work great.

Another note--why did I waste so much time chasing this issue? Well, I have since tried other brands of ink for my Pro9000 MkII, and though they were completely reliable, I could never get the same color performance out of them. When I profile my papers with OCP ink, I get a larger color gamut, particularly in the oranges and in the very dark brown/copperish tones, and this translates to a very real and noticeable difference when I compare OCP prints side by side with other inks (especially on skin tones or dark brown hair in shadow). I've found nothing that does better than OCP when profiled, including OEM Canon ink.

Oh, sorry, one last thing: I originally mentioned I was having issues with the green ink too. I think this issue was due to the age of the green bottle I had on-hand. The new stuff I got from R-JetTek seems to be working fine, but I'll keep an eye on it and let you all know if I see it misbehaving in the future.