Soon: big test of refillable Epson Pro 3800 cartridges + resetters

[pharmacist]

An update today: finally after 17 cleaning cycles over a period of 36 hours I managed to have a almost 100 % complete nozzle check (some minor ones in the magenta/light magenta but I don't think this will influence printing negatively).

Not sure what is causing the behaviour. I did not shake the bottles heavily before I fill the cartridges: just swirling the bottles lightly. I agree with Irv Weiner, this has to be improved. Leo Chang says 3-5 cleaning cycles should be enough to flush the lines enough and get it properly purged. I ended up with more than 3 times as much cleaning cycles. Happily the auto reset chip on the maintenance cartridge helped to alleviate me the need to purchase another waste ink tank, as the massive amount of cleaning cycles would have filled up the maintenance tank completely.

I think for the smaller Small Foot cartridges to be reviewed by Irv Weiner should have the refill hole on the top, combined with the always full indicating chips on top of them, it would making refilling much easier. You will not need to remove the cartridges to refill, as the repetitive insertion and removal of these rubber based ink outlet valve cartridges will impair its longevity negatively.

A most important claim of the Inkjetfly system is the quality of its IMA 24/36 pigment ink, which should yield a larger gamut compared to other refill inks, including to the original Epson K3 ink. This is quite a claim, so let's have a look at it. Before doing this, I created dedicated profiles for my favourite cheap glossy photo paper: Aldi's SihlX 280 gsm high gloss photo paper.

I already made profiles for this paper for the original Epson K3 inkset (in my early days, when I was still using the original ink), the first refill ink I used: Image Specialists IM-K4 and the Inkrepublic IRK4-nano. So I will compare these inks.

So this is the result combined with the online ICC viewer website: www.iccview.de (german/english).

Original Epson K3 versus Inkjetfly IMA 24/36:

Image Specialists IM-K4 versus Inkjetfly IMA 24/36:

Inkrepublic IRK4-nano versus Inkjetfly IMA 24/36:

Conclusion: Inkjetfly's claim having a larger gamut compared to any other refill ink and even to the original Epson K3 ink is true. Very well done indeed for an aftermarket refill ink. Image Specialists IM-K4 also has a very good gamut, but the problem with this is ink is the lack of gloss, giving the prints a rather muted impression, especially on glossy papers. The 3 other inks are much more glossy. Inkjetfly IMA 24/36 and IRK4-nano have similar gloss and the best gloss is still the original Epson K3 ink.

The differences with Epson K3 as basis (100 %) are for Image Specialists IM-K4 +0.84 % better, for Inkrepublic IRK4-nano -2.61 % worse, Inkjetfly IMA 24/36 + 3,20 % better. Despite the larger gamut of the Image Specialist IM-K4 ink, the Inkrepublic IRK4-nano ink yield better and more pleasant prints to the eye, due to the much improved gloss level and better Dmax for the photo black (see earlier posts) which helps to increase contrast and thus the perceptual quality of the prints.

What about the neutrality of the ABW mode printing true black and white printing ? This mode will use the 3 blacks and includes Light Magenta, Light Cyan and yellow to counter the warm glow of the K3 inks. The interaction of K3 (3 blacks) and the lighter colours is very critical and also depends on the paper used to yield the most neutral B&W prints. This is the most important litmus test if an aftermarket ink manufacturer has done his job well.

Have a look at the picture below, shot with a gray card as reference to compare the neutrality of B&W print.
There are 3 prints, printed with the following inks on the same paper: Aldi's SihlX 280 gsm and the ABW-mode (setting: neutral, tone: dark) for picture 1 and picture 2. Picture 3 is done by first processing the image to gray scale and printing with the Inkjetfly IMA 24/36 inkset with dedicated profile with gray ramp correction (Colormunki 3 sheet profile).

1. Inkrepublic IRK4-nano (ABW-mode)
2. Inkjetfly IMA 24/36 (ABW-mode)
3. Inkjetfly IMA 24/36 (colour mode, image converted to gray scale, printed with dedicated profile with gray ramp correction)

As you can see: the Inkrepublic IRK4-nano has slight greenish cast on the prints (as stated by the Inkquisitor website, but not as heavily), the Inkjetfly IMA 24/36 definitely a purplish cast and the most neutral and the best to my eyes is the 3rd version printed in colour mode with a dedicated profile, albeit with a slight yellowish cast. When I used the Image Specialists IM-K4 inkset I also experienced the same purplish cast with the ABW-mode as with this Inkjetfly IMA 24/36 ink set. Is is this a problem: yes if you insist on neutral prints, but one can use the colour wheel in the ABW mode to counter the cast with the opposite teint. Please note: the ABW mode is optimized for Epson own proprietary papers and might not work well with other brands of photo paper, so using the colour wheel is obligatory to counter these types of colour casts.

So this picture at the end, that a well created profile will give you very similar prints with different inks. On the left: Inkrepublic IRK4-nano and on the right: Inkjetfly IMA 24/36.

I hope others (Irv Weiner) will pick up this topic and write down his experience with his small foot system.

 

[stratman]

Outstanding work, pharmacist. Thank you.

 

[cds]

GREAT work, pharmacist. I actually have been following your report and picked up InkRepublic's iRefill system & IRK4-nano inks, I must say, they have the best working system and inks to my eyes. in my opinion, you can't beat InkRepublic for iRefill product, inks and customer support. In the market for good inks? Look no further. They are amazing. My IRK4-nano's gamut number based on my setup can reach more than 68K which is closer to Epson's inks. I guess different papers might give youe slightly different numbers.

Have you noticed that InkRepublic's ink has a very pleasant smell? what about others? inkjetmall? image spec? Epson's has some ammonia smell. IRK4-nano is also 100% pure carbon pigment so it's great for years of storage. The gamut numbers from Image Specialists and InkRepublic's make more sense for me to believe they are pure carbon pigment.

again, GREAT work for all tests, pharmacist!


cds from u.k.

 

[RogerB]

Great stuff pharmacist - as always!

Your findings regarding the IJF ink are similar to mine - excellent gamut and good gloss, albeit not quite up to OEM standard for gloss. I have found that setting the colour density to +20% for Harman Gloss Baryta (before profiling!) gives me the optimum gamut and Dmax. For Ilford Smooth Pearl and Harman Crystaljet Elite I find +10% is optimum.

Like you, I found that in ABW the "neutral" setting gives a magenta bias. I find that setting the colour wheel to -12 (Horiz) 15 (Vert) gives me very nice B&W on my favourite Harman Gloss Baryta. Beautifull prints with no discernable bronzing and negligible gloss differential. In ABW mode I also find that increasing the colour density gives optimum results.

The performance on different papers, as for any ink set, can be rather different. The gamut volume I find on the Harman Gloss Baryta is marginally greater that that on Ilford Smooth Pearl, but the extra volume from the Harman is in the extreme shadow regions, and the Dmax is visibly better on the Harman. This does make the Harman prints visibly "richer" than any RC pape rthat I have tried.

I do not have any experience of the IRK4 inks, but I would say to cds that a pure carbon ink set will not give a black density close to the Epson K3 inks. The Epson PK, and I suspect the IJF PK, is not pure carbon, but has a dye element to give the best black. Cone's black inks are pure carbon, and as Jon Cone admits, they cannot match the Dmax of a carbon/dye combination.

 

[pharmacist]

Just an update: leo Chang of Inkjetfly contacted me and told me the real problem of the excessive cleaning cycles is caused by the fact these large 280 ml Big Foot cartridges need at least 150 ml's of ink to perform well the first time when the cartridges are be primed by a few cleaning cycles.

He explained to me that due to the large capacity of these cartridges, the amount of air so large one has to fill these cartridge at least 50 % or about 150 ml to counter these types of problems. The pressure pump is programmed to pump a certain amount or pressure inside the printer and when it does not reach this amount of pressure, due to these large cartridges having so much air, the printer will perform suboptimally, sometimes giving a 1404 error on the display panel (pressure pump error). There were some colours mixed up, as a bottle of VLM and VM were included, which happens to be used only in the Epson Pro 3880 printer and I only put 1 bottle (100 ml's) in these large capacity cartridges. If the amount of ink in the cartridges is too low, this could cause the need of executing excessive cleaning cycles to force out the trapped air. Yes, unfortunately I suffered from this problem and should not have to do this, when I had put more ink into the cartridges.

For RogerB: Do you know for the Inkrepublic IRK4-nano inkset in the ABW-mode I have to slide the colour wheel exactly +12 horizontally to make the prints neutral. That is: the opposite of your H -12 setting for the IJF. I will try this later on. I can confirm your problem with the gloss: very good but not as good as the original Epson K3. The Inkrepublic IRK4-nano yielded a slightly better gloss compared to the original K3 ink. Gamut is slightly worse however. I discovered the strength of the Inkjetfly IMA 24/36 inkset is density of the two magenta's (M and LM). It could be that this causes the magenta cast in the ABW-mode and the smaller gamut of the magenta's of the IRK4-nano causes the slightly greenish cast in the ABW-mode. The ABW-mode uses the K3 (3 blacks) and the light magenta/light cyan and yellow produce neutral B&W prints. That is, when these colours are well balanced. A stronger or weaker magenta will give the end result a colour cast. Maybe we should mix the Inkjetfly IMA 24/36 LM and M with the Inkrepublic.com's IRK4-nano LM and M on a 50/50 basis to make the most optimal colour strength.

Dmax of the Photo Black is similar to the PK of Inkrepublic's IRK4-nano ink. The latter one however has slightly better gloss. I just read the LAB value of the black with my Spyder on a print of both the IRK4-nano and the IMA 24/36 on 2 types of papers. Both are between 4 and 6. Whether or not the PK has a dye component in it. If it is well formulated and the dye molecules are attached on the carbon particles and coated/shielded it should be very archival. Pure carbon always has a warm brownish glow, not a pure black and as you have said it is almost impossible to create the Dmax of a carbon/dye combination.

I am not sure why you increase the amount of ink on these papers to increase gamut. This way you can not tell about the relative gamut of diferent papers. It works out greatly on dedicated papers, which can handle this amount of ink per given surface, but this way it is very difficult to compare different refill inks. The gamut comparison is done by putting the same amount of ink on a given surface on different papers. One can put extra lower gamut ink on a paper and say it is as good as a higher gamut ink, which might be printed with the normal ink density.

Next weekend I hope to update the test, as the printer/Big Foot system now seems to work without problems. I should have filled the carts with more ink and according to Leo, this should have prevented the need of excessive cleaning cycles. Maybe Leo should mention this fact explicitely on it's website, to prevent customers to experience the same types of problems I have encountered.

 

[RogerB]

I am not sure why you increase the amount of ink on these papers to increase gamut. This way you can not tell about the relative gamut of diferent papers. It works out greatly on dedicated papers, which can handle this amount of ink per given surface, but this way it is very difficult to compare different refill inks. The gamut comparison is done by putting the same amount of ink on a given surface on different papers. One can put extra lower gamut ink on a paper and say it is as good as a higher gamut ink, which might be printed with the normal ink density.

I take your point, but the settings I use are not intended to give like-for-like comparisons between different inks - they are optimised for my normal everyday printing. I found in my initial tests that the Harman paper would take a higher ink load than the standard Epson setting, giving a better Dmax without any problems of non-linearity or ink bleeding. The Ilford paper will also take a bit more than standard density with good results.

Unfortunately putting down more ink does not always improve the Dmax and gamut. I have found that some papers will become non-linear even at the standard ink density. The Innova FibaPrint IFA-09 works best on my printer at -10% and increasing the ink load above this does not give any increase in density; in fact the density tends to decrease at higher ink loading for this paper. And, of course, some papers will simply not absorb the ink, even at normal density. For me, finding the optimum for a particular ink/paper combination is an important step.

 

[pharmacist]

RogerB,

anyhow: a interesting thing to know if I want to improve print quality by increasing ink density on papers, capable of absorbing higher amounts of ink to tweak gamut/D max results. I think it is a bit of emperical wisdom by experimenting a lot.

 

[RDoc]

Just an update: leo Chang of Inkjetfly contacted me and told me the real problem of the excessive cleaning cycles is caused by the fact these large 280 ml Big Foot cartridges need at least 150 ml's of ink to perform well the first time when the cartridges are be primed by a few cleaning cycles.

He explained to me that due to the large capacity of these cartridges, the amount of air so large one has to fill these cartridge at least 50 % or about 150 ml to counter these types of problems. The pressure pump is programmed to pump a certain amount or pressure inside the printer and when it does not reach this amount of pressure, due to these large cartridges having so much air, the printer will perform suboptimally, sometimes giving a 1404 error on the display panel (pressure pump error). .....

This all sounds very odd to me as on the Inkjetfly site the Bigfoot cartridges are only sold with 100ml bottles and there is an explicit warning that similar cartridges from Alibaba will produce 1404 errors. If the cartridges won't work with 100ml of ink, I wonder why they are sold that way.

It also makes me wonder what happens if the ink level falls below that level and the printer isn't used for a week or so. The cartridge surely can't maintain any pressure over a long period of time so I'd think it would be in exactly the same state as when first under filled. Perhaps it's necessary to keep the ink level in these high all the time.

 

[stratman]

It also makes me wonder what happens if the ink level falls below that level and the printer isn't used for a week or so. The cartridge surely can't maintain any pressure over a long period of time so I'd think it would be in exactly the same state as when first under filled. Perhaps it's necessary to keep the ink level in these high all the time.

An intuitive point that seems to highlight a potential illogic of having such large capacity cartridges in the first place that won't perform below a certain fill level.

The logic as presented by Inkjetfly is once the cartridges are filled and the printer is primed then ink levels can fall below the approximated requisite refill level and work fine. Otherwise... bad product. If they do work... great product.

 

[mikling]

Does someone have a service manual for the 3800/3880? If so, can the functionality of the air relief hole on the cartridge be confirmed? That would factually reveal a lot about the problems encountered.