Which brand of refill ink for BCI-6 cartridges?

[fotofreek]

Jane - Where do you live and under what condition do you store your bulk ink? I'm in San Francisco and the ambient temperature in my house ranges from 55 to 70 degrees with an occasional spike (last heat wave) to about 85 during the day for less than a week. Higher temp storage would undoubtedly increase any changes brought about by a microorganism. Most ink vendors also suggest a two year shelf life for their inks. I originally bought my ink in 2 oz containers and then went to 4 oz. containers for the PC, PM, and Y inks as they are used in much greater quantities in the i960. I decided that the large dollar savings over OEM ink I experience, even with purchase of 2 oz containers, was sufficient and I didn't want to end up storing large quantities of ink with potential loss of quality as you describe. In addition, these printers have a finite life and I didn't want to end up with lots of ink on the shelf for a dead printer. This wasn't a problem for lots of years as the bci-6 carts were used by several generations of printers. Now, with the avialability of printers that use the bci-6 cart drying up, when my printerd die I will have to replace them with the newer chipped cart printers and purchase a different ink set.

 

[Jane]

Fotofreek
Conditions are probably fairly similar to yours. I live about 60 miles east of St. Louis in Illinois. But, although we do get temperatures shooting up (currently in high 90's with heat index over 100) and down it is stored in heated and A/C'd space. Very, very, unusual form mine to get down to 55 or up to 85. 75 if fairly normal. And because of allergy probably have A/C on at times that others would not.

As I remember it, back at the time the problems came up it was in enough different places that the consensious (sp?) seemed to be a manufactures problem.

Jane

PS I am one that comes from the days of the switch from the 5 series to the 6 series in the 8200. Currently, I am using a S-800 with an almost new head. I also have a reconditioned 8200 on the shelf that has been pulled out at times for emergency use, really cleaned and put back.

 

[alchemist]

Grandad,

The solvents in the ink extract unreacted organic compounds that are in the foam. These tend to deposit on the surface of the foam cells and interact with salts in the dyes of the ink. This in turn slows the flow rate and the ability to take on a full load of ink with each additional recharge. The purging tends to clean much of this contaminate and prolongs the life of the cartridge.

Some OEMs and high quality compatible and remanufactured cartridge companies wash their foam with a solvent before filling to minimize this unreacted organic material from being a problem. This material canl also cause head clogging.

Regards,


Alchemist

 

[Grandad35]

Alchemist,

Thanks for the explanation of what is happening inside the carts, and why purging with hot water "fixes" it (if only temporarily).

In preparation for a complete purge cycle, I noticed that I will still have a lot of full carts when my first color runs out of refilled carts (PM - with 8 PM carts in my "refill loop"). To minimize wasted ink, I decided to refill about 15 carts of various colors so that most of my other carts will also be empty when the PM carts become empty the next time. As I have stated in previous posts, I have carts from Canon, "Wired Beans", "Old InkGrabber" (OIG - purchased in Jan '05) and G&G in my refill loop. Some of each cart design were refilled, and I did not encounter any real difficulty in getting any of these carts to accept ink into the sponges.

After the carts were refilled, plugged and allowed to sit in their clips for at least 10 minutes, I took the time to blow into the vent port of each cart to see how easy it was to get ink to drip from the exit port. For reference, after these carts were purged 14 months ago it was very easy to get ink to drip from every cart with this test - so much so that I stopped testing each cart in this manner before it was installed in the printer. After this latest refill, all of the carts required more pressure to cause a drip than they did previously. The Canon and Wired Beans carts showed only a minor increase, the G&G a moderate increase, and the OIG a large increase. This would support your statement that different cart suppliers take more (or less) care in how they process their foam and filter. It would also seem to indicate that OEM carts are one of the best for refilling.

Given that even the OIG carts weren't that difficult to refill, I suspect that the filter may be responsible for at least part of the blockage. Are there also unreacted organic compounds in the filter that need to be washed out?

 

[Smile]

What about http://www.inktec.com/ ink is it good ?

 

[ghwellsjr]

According to this link:

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1003&message=12198835

the inktec ink looks like it has the best fade resistance of any of the popular inks and maybe as good as Canon ink.