Canon Ink vs. Arrow / alotofthings.com and "USA Ink Cartridge"

[ocular]

Quote from alotofthings.com

"Australia is not one of the countries that we currently have resellers in.
This is primarily based on the fact that the shipping from here to Australia
is too expensive."

This explains why there is no reseller here, because of the shipping cost presumably having to absorbed by alotofthings when supplying an overseas reseller

However I will ask them if they will ship directly to me with the buyer paying the shipping cost?

 

[BlasterQ]

Ocular, I'm a filipino working in Saudi Arabia, and going home on vacation to the Philippines by the end of this month.
Since alotofthings don't ship outside the USA, I had a friend of mine order it for me, His sister is coming home this month and she's bringing the inks for me. I'll get it when I arrive there. I save shipping cost.
I'm sure you have friends in the USA who travel back and forth to Australia, why not have them buy it for you?

 

[BlasterQ]

The only problem I see with alotofthings is this:
They sell the inks and cartridges in sets. I see myself printing more photos than text, with the ink cartridges I ordered, 4 bc3e blacks, 2 bci-6 blacks, 2 bci-6 cyans, 2 bci-6 magenta, 2 bci-6 yellow, I have more pigment based blacks than my color carts. If I keep ordering sets, I'll end up with too much unused pigment based blacks.
I hope they start selling sets of each color, like, 6 cyan carts, etc.

 

[BlasterQ]

I know this is a stupid suggestion, since we really don't recommend refilling a dye based cart with a pigment based ink and vice versa.
But the only solution I can think of, to avoid bleeding when a printing in regular paper, is to remove the pigment based cart entirely, and replacing it with a dye based cart. this will avoid the problem of black ink bleeding when printed right next to dye based colors.
Text printing quality will sacrifice with this, but if we're not too worried about laser-quality text, then i think this is the only solution.

 

[Grandad35]

I have also seen bleeding of heavy black into adjacent colors using a DYE based black when the paper is "slow drying". For example, Ilford's Classic Pearl makes a great print and is claimed to have improved color stability (which is why I use it), but the price for the color stability is that it can't be used with pigment based inks and it is slow drying. See the note at the bottom of ("http://www.ilford.com/html/us_english/prod_html/galerie/pdf/554_en.pdf") for a short writeup about its color stability being equal to conventional photos.

I suspect that bleeding is strongly related to how long the wet ink stays on the surface of the paper, and that pigment based inks aren't absorbed into the micropores or swellable layer of even "fast drying" papers quickly enough to prevent bleeding with heavy laydowns of black pigmented ink.

BTW - the Classic Pearl isn't a problem on "normal" photographs. It also helps to select "Glossy Photo Paper" (as Ilford recommends) so that the printer makes more printhead passes and lays the ink down in thinner layers to incraese the drying time in the printer. Once the print is allowed to dry for an hour, the ink is completely dry and does not smudge, etc.

 

[BlasterQ]

That's maybe the reason why the newer pixma printers have some kind of problems with regards to pigment black and dye based colors bleeding together.
These printers are fast, and maybe it is too fast for their own good. Of course, selecting 'fine' mode is slower and eliminates this problem.

 

[Nifty]

Update: I just did a first run test on the WiredBeans cartridges and also a set of OEM cartridges vacuum refilled with Image Specialists ink and BOTH sets of carts provided good color reproduction (disclaimer... I'm not a color purest) but most importantly neither exhibited the black bleeding problem I had with the alotofthings carts.

If someone else has these alotofthings carts with a pigment BCI-3ebk, can you run the tests mentioned at the beginning of this thread? Make sure you print the color test pattern in standard mode, regular paper setting! I'm trying to determine if:

1) I've got a bad set of carts, maybe from a mix up in the ink at the China assembly as mentioned before. This is the most probable explanation since my brother and I had this problem, and the carts were ordered at the same time.

2) I've got a problem with my printer. This is unlikely because the other companies inks work fine.

If another i860 or i560 can reproduce the tests it will answer a lot of questions.

 

[fotofreek]

from whom did you buy the Image Specialist inks? Which firm identified their product as Image Specialist??? Neil's suggested that MIS was Image Specialist, but there is no mention of it on their web site.

 

[Nifty]

I know someone who has large quantities from them and got some ink from him. I don't know why the big manufacturers don't at least have one dealer who could sell their ink directly.

Maybe we should all go in on a buy and get a few gallons of ink directly from the source!

 

[fotofreek]

Considering that I only have a "four or six ounce per color" habit for a year's printing, we would need 20-30 similar users and someone who would handle the purchase of small containers and mailing boxes, parcel out the inks, pack them up and schlep them to the post office! If the stuff is really, really cheap by the gallon it might be worth a shot. I don't know the shelf life of these inks, but I read somewhere that it is around two years. I used to get catalogs for empty containers - I think the firm was Consolidated.