FCI carts and Canon MG5150

[pixmarmite]

As I await the latest addition (Canon mg5150) to a procession of shiny boxes (ip4000, ip4200, ip5200, ip4600, mp460) each of which my inability to spend 500 a year on ink variously and inevitably turns into a useless toxic sump that I can't give away - not even to the dustman - I am thinking of returning to the poison chalice of the compatible cartridge road to ruin.

What prompted me this time round was the thought that current user recommendations at an accredited site might point me in the direction of a workable sponge and an acceptable ink interspersed by the occassional cleaning cycle with the OEM carts.

With this in mind I wondered if anyone has experience of FCI and Moreink carts on Canon printers using the new PGI525/CLI526 based setup.

 

[pixmarmite]

So in the end I find myself answering my own question having gone ahead and purchased a set of FCI carts for the Canon MG5150 at 17.99 from Amazon, arriving in the post on the 2nd business day after ordering.

First let's set the scene for the test, which is on a brand new machine.

The OEM cart set that came with the unit were loaded during installation without any problems or excessive tank priming and was used just once to print the OEM image used in this test.

The OEM set was then taken out and sealed in an airproof bag as a backup in case of future problems.

The FCI cart set was then installed with as few problems or use of the pump as the OEM set had been and was then used to carry out the same scan/copy procedure as with the OEM set.

No special settings were used in the test. The image scanned was the glossy cover sheet that used to come in the paper pack supplied with HP printers - quite useful to see how the opposition's choice of example tests a printer without covering up its weaknesses or exploiting its strengths. The scan was carried out at 300dpi using the Autoscan facility to process the scan according to the kind of paper detected and printed at standard resolution on plain paper - Kodak 80gsm A4 Office Paper - taken from the bottom paper tray.

Nifty Stuff has allowed me to upload three reduced overviews of the scanned images, ORG, OEM and FCI, rotated right to avoid site reduction and three sections of the original scan at 300dpi copied from the same part of the scanned images.

CONCLUSION
My impression from comparing the physical copies is that the OEM copy is a little bit too magenta and the FCI is a little bit more too yellow with the same degree of loss in detail owing to the standard resolution copy, the step down in paper quality and the ommission of head alignment.

For the present I'm prepared to give the FCI carts a chance. The colour result shows that printing will have to be done with colours on manual whether I choose FCI or stick with OEM and more accurate work will require a little more than reliance on CNBJPRN3.icm in Color Management (Control Panel/Printers And Faxes/<printer>/Properties/Color Management). However, so long as the chips are accurate enough to prevent the printer attacking them with its purge unit, at 17.99 a set this is probably a viable way to go for an occassional use regime.

Image Overviews:

Selected Detail For Comparison:

CONDITIONS OF THE TEST
These prints were made before the printer was installed, so they were not influenced by any software adjustment or head alignment. Once the printer was installed the glossy original, ORG, and the plain paper copies using the OEM and FCI cart sets were scanned onto the hard disc in lossless BMP files.

In processing the results no intermediate compression or enhancement has been applied to the images until they were prepared for uploading. The nifty-stuff board only accepts JPG, PNG or GIF images and reduces any images over 80k to 640x480pixels, so the upload images were saved using Irfanview 4.3 in non-progressive JPG format at 100% quality using chroma color subsampling. The 1113x1630 overview images were reduced in size, preserving aspect ratio, to 437x640 in Irfanview 4.3 using Lanczos resampling and then rotated right 90 and saved using JPG at 100% quality.

 

[panos]

Why don't you use a purely digital image for your test instead of a scanned one ?

 

[pixmarmite]

@panos
I was trying to get an image of what the two sets of ink looked like after being produced by the same process. Once installed software started to handle the process I felt I would have lost control of that. I was just trying to keep it as simple as possible. I still think there's information in my post that wasn't available before.