Any news on compatible CLI-8 carts/chips?

[canonfodder]

The company Armor, in France, will release its solution to the CLI-8 chip soon. I have placed a "pre-order" for the Kit which includes an adaptor and cartridges. I don't expect to receive the order until sometime in January.

So, January has come and gone and the company in Canada which stated that they are a distributor for the Armor company of France, took my "pre-order" but kept postponing, so I cancelled my order. The big reason which caused me to cancel was knowledge which I gained by poking and probing which revealed that Armor's "solution" to the chipped Canon cartridges was to defeat the Canon chip and put their own chip on the cartridges which they, Armor, would sell. Yippee! Big deal, huh?

Well, they put a reasonable price on their adaptor kit, and they put a price below Canon's price on the carts. Their cart price is low enough to attract a lot of business, but not mine. You get a break on price, but it is Armor's ink, and not a really low price. Armor is really big. They sell lots of ink (but not bulk, only in carts), and so should come up with decent ink, but I want to use my choice of ink and I don't want to pay about 10$ per cart when the thing is still only worth about $2.50.

To see a news write-up which gives plenty of detail to understand what Armor is selling, go to:
http://www.americantonerserv.com/company/news/pdfs/pr/lyra.2006.12.pdf

 

[canonfodder]

rdsmith,

I think Lilla hit the answer when it was suggested that you might have mixed the chips. They are specific to color. If you did not know that, and pulled all the chips before putting them on the compatible carts, you had good odds on mixing them up, and the printer's errors would be as you reported.

Some very careful trial-and-error work will straighten them out. Of course if you damaged one or more, you need to start over.

I would not try putting a cart in another slot, because you will contaminate the wick material and have some bad color for awhile.

Better to take out the carts that indicate errors and pull all their chips. Then take one cart, put on a chip, and plug it into its correct slot and see what the printer says. You might stick the chip on with something temporary, like tiny pieces of double-sided tape. If good, leave it in and continue as before. If bad, change the chip, keeping track of the chip that did not work for that cart, and with another chip, try the cart again. You get the idea. Keep it up until you have all the chips on the correct carts. Good luck.

 

[Defcon2k]

A german site reviewed the solution from Armor (France, blue adaptor)/Geha (Germany, red adaptor):
http://www.druckerchannel.de/artikel.php?ID=1784

To sum it up:
- The carts function nearly exactly like the Canon carts. You retain the ink level indication, but you can only use Geha/Armor carts from now on
- They had trouble to put the adaptor in an iP4200 and had to use some force. It was also a little problematic to fit the carts in there. Armor said this is because the print head of the iP4200 is 0,5mm smaller than other Pixmas and that they will change the form of the cartridge so it will fit better. So Druckerchannel tested an iP4300 and it worked fine.
- The ink produces prints that are good/very good (pics). It is comparable to OEM ink. It is more highlighter resistant than OEM ink.
- They could print exactly as many pages as with the OEM carts.
- When the Printer said "cart empty" and stopped working, there actually was 1/3 ink left over in the tank, so there is quite a reserve.
- The article doesn't mention if the Armor chips are as strongly encrypted as the OEM chips.

 

[rdsmith]

Thank you - your suggestion of taking out all the suspect carsts and replacing them one by one identified the cyan as unrecognised and a new OEM has things working again with the refilled compatibles being satisfactory.
It still doesn't explain why the cyan should die whilst previously printing but then I suppose the chips can just fail.
Thanks, again, for your help. This experience may now be of help to others.