HowTo? Ink usage tests: # prints to Low/Empty? How much ink refilled?

[l_d_allan]

I am curious how many prints it takes for a 9000-2 or iP4500 to get a refilled cart from Full to Low and then Empty.

Also, how much ink is involved to refill when the printer reports Low vs Empty?

FNO? (for nerds only)?

I've read many hundreds of posts on this forum, and don't recall seeing a thread addressing this. Did I miss one or several? What about other references besides this forum?

If a person were doing such a test, how would it be done to get consistent results? I'm sure the numbers would vary according to model. Refilling technique should be consistent, also. I do see comments that "such and such printer is more economical with ink than such and such printer", but they seem anecdotal rather than measured.

My preliminary thinking was to have 7 of the 9000-2's 8 carts be cleaning carts with either distilled water, windex+alcohol+distilled-water, or diluted ink at perhaps 1:5. The CUT (cart under test) might be Yellow. OCP ink is relatively inexpensive, but it ain't free.

Then print entire pages of Yellow. BTW, I think it would be interesting to compare the HSL of the Yellow with 8 ink carts, and the Yellow with 7 of 8 carts being distilled water. If they were very close, I would think a valid inference would be that it was mostly Yellow ink being used, and little of the other colors.

With the iP4500 and its 5 carts of Black-Dye + Black-Pigment + Cyan + Magenta + Yellow, I wouldn't think it would matter which color. The 9000-2 has Cyan + PhotoCyan, and Magenta + PhotoMagenta, and also Red and Green. That complicates things.

Based on several posts, I would be concerned about stressing the print-head:

Printing photos relentlessly is a bigger task than printing on plain paper. The amount of ink that must be ejected is much greater with photo paper. That means that the nozzles must heat the ink longer and faster....needs to work harder and needs ink to be delivered faster.
With wider paper, the duration of continuous printing is longer before it takes a rest and cools before it returns back in the opposite direction.

Mikling, I agree that Canon Pro9000 (I and II) require or demand that all cartridges are in absolutely mint working condition. The print head will be under tremendous load and pressure to print large number of prints in a short period of time.

I wonder if it would be easier on the print-head to use half sheets of legal paper ... 4.25" x 14" rather than regular letter size 8.5x11"? Or 4x6" be easier still. Use Standard vs High Quality?

Use of 4x6" sheets would provide a "higher resolution" of data, however. The results might be "I got an average of 100 4x6" per cart" rather than "I got an average of 40 4.25x14" per cart". Not that much difference, I suppose, and the variability of measurement error would be fairly high ... probably just one or 1.5 significant digits if I recall my Experimental Design class from Statistics 101 from 40 years ago.

Also, would use of cleaning carts that had distilled water result in the nozzle electronics/circuitry getting hotter than with ink? My speculation is that printing a page of Yellow would involve little or no nozzle firing for the other 7 colors, but I could be mistaken. I suppose a dimmer Yellow vs a bright, saturated Yellow would be easier on the print-head, but take longer to test and use more paper.

My speculation is that if the MediaType was set to "Plus Glossy II" but plain copy paper was used to lower the cost, the amount of ink would be the same as if "Plus Glossy 2" paper was loaded.

If these measurement tests were workable, and not "re-inventing the wheel", all kinds of FNO measurements come to mind. How about prints per cart for various Kodak-like test images? Different MediaTypes? Different printer models? Different ink brands? Use of Cyan vs PhotoCyan, and use of Magenta vs PhotoMagenta for various prints. Pages of Gray or Black?

Use of "ink" from cleaning cycles vs deep cleaing cycles? Standard vs High vs Fast Quality? Delays between prints vs a batch of 40 prints in the print-queue? Turning printer on and off? Power button on/off vs power cord disconnected? Others?

Also, the results from such a test might be useful for other related tests. I am curious about different cart refilling techniques, and it would be handy to have a technique that consistently and harmlessly emptied out carts without costing too much.

Feedback appreciated from forum members with lots more experience than myself, and more knowledgeable about printer internals and "inner workings" of the print driver. I'm really ignorant on how these printers work.

 

[ghwellsjr]

Yes, refill ink is cheap but it isn't free. Time isn't free either, even if you're retired. And your printers definitely aren't free. Your curiosity will lead you to spend more valuable time on satisfying your curiosity than if you had just purchased any printer and paid the high price of OEM cartridges. I might be an extreme example but I do speak from experience.

First off, I would not use any home-brew mixture for saving money on testing the amount of ink used by various cartridges. I would use a cleaning solution made by OCP. This also is not free but it is designed to work with print heads just like their inks are.

Secondly, I have done lots of testing to figure out how to print a page of one particular color and get only one ink to be used. On my five-ink printers that all use the same print head (the one in the iP4000), there is no combination of photo paper, print quality, and color adjustment that will allow this to happen. But it is possible for plain paper although I don't remember the exact settings right now. With printers that have more colors, it is impossible to do.

Thirdly, I would just say off the top of my head that the time it takes to go from full to low is about the same time that it takes to go from low to empty. The sponge holds a lot of ink.

Fourthly, the Canon print heads have a thermal sensor in them so that if you are printing so much that the heating elements are in danger of burning out, the printer will let you know and refuse to print until things cool down.

Fifthly, in order to do a valid test for any given print head type, you would have to repeat it for every combination of paper type, print quality and color adjustment to determine how many pages you can print for each color, even if you could come up with a way to control the amount of ink used by each specified color.

So I don't give you any hope for carrying out your dream test. What we do know is that printers that have photo cyan and photo magenta inks go through a lot more ink than those that don't have those colors, so you have to weigh in on whether the improvement on print quality justifies using one of those printers. And we know that dye black lasts a long time when printing on photo paper. I think yellow is used more on a printer with four dye inks.

I have always used the rationalization that every time I refill a cartridge, no matter what the cost of my refill ink or how much ink I'm wasting (when I do vacuum refilling or test prints), I'm saving so much money over the cost of OEM ink that it really doesn't matter if my savings is 90% or 92%.

 

[Redbrickman]

Ink costs are negligible when refilling, unless you are printing as a business and in that case it still shouldn't matter as you are making money. The real cost is attributable to the media, and there is alway room for searching out bargains.

Sadly I just missed one here in UK, where one web site was selling off all of it's Ilford Galerie Classic paper for a knock down price. Take a look at the prices for that paper in US, because Ilford are phasing it out, very sad as it is an excellent paper for dye ink.

So keep printing with the cheap ink and enjoy it

 

[fotofreek]

Do I recall that Granddad posted information years ago about the number of letter size prints he did per stated quantity of ink? If my memory is correct, perhaps he can recall the post and put the link into this thread.

I think I have a simpler approach that, although not absolutely precise, would give you a pretty good rule of thumb.
1) fill all the carts 2) Print all the photos you would ordinarily print, keeping track of the square inches of each image printed 3) at any time in the experiment (maybe when the first cart shows low ink), refill all the carts, keeping track of the total quantity of ink used to refill 4) run your calculation to project how much ink per sq inch of printing you've used 5) extrapolate from that figure what the ink cost per individual photo - 4x6, 5x7, 8x10, etc - would be.

The reality is that there are too many variables in each of these steps, Is each refill precisely the same amount of ink? You could weigh the carts at each step. Do all of the prints have the same coverage? How does the data from a four or five or six or eight cart printer relate from one to the other? With a large enough sample you could probably come up with as precise a figure as you need. You wouldn't waste a penny worth of ink or paper, and the time spent on this approach would be very little more than printing what you like, refilling carts, and doing a bit of record keeping.

My own curiosity took me only far enough to find the printers that can be refilled and the inks and papers that produce an excellent photo result with reasonable cost. Exchanging ideas on the Forum on refill and printer maintenance issues kept me printing and using very good aftermarket materials. I'll leave the evaluation of how much ink per page I'm using to someone else. Besides, I've been too busy searching for nearly new printers on Craig's list that use BCI-6 or CLI-8 carts to delve into the issue of specifically how much a 4x6 print costs me.

 

[l_d_allan]

Your curiosity will lead you to spend more valuable time on satisfying your curiosity than if you had just purchased any printer and paid the high price of OEM cartridges.

Perhaps.

However, it isn't just an academic curiosity. I may be printing 50 to 300 of the same group camper photo within the month, and then again this summer.



I have some idea of how long the printing itself takes, but I'm also trying to get an idea of the number of ink low/empty delays. Also, a "preview of coming attractions" and trying out a workflow to upload the pictures, minor post processing, and actual unattended printing.

I expect to be multi-tasking while the printer is grinding away, and about how often should I stop by the printer to refill paper and ink cartridges?

 

[fotofreek]

I am curious how many prints it takes for a 9000-2 or iP4500 to get a refilled cart from Full to Low and then Empty.

Also, how much ink is involved to refill when the printer reports Low vs Empty?

Too many variables, in my estimation, to get an accurate measurement. You already know that you will have less changes with the ip4500 as the PC and PM carts go fastest. In addition, the basic color composition of the photos dictates which colors, PC or PM would be used fastest. From a production point of view, therefore, the ip4500 would probably give you the least number of interrruptions and permit longer print runs as well. In that printer you know that the yellow goes fastest and the black least quickly.

Why not do relatively short runs until the yellow shows low ink, weigh or visually check the B, M, and C, and you will have a reasonably good idea of the relative usage before showing low ink in these carts. By having many refilled carts of each color you could replace all carts before each one shows low or empty and minimize both exchange down time and head cleaning time. Rather imprecise, but certainly one "down and dirty" way to solve your problem. That way you can use, as your "canary in the coal mine", so to speak, the cart that you know empties first and has been calibrated by counting the prints in several short runs that it takes to show low ink.

Also, the two pictures that you show would use substantially different quantities of the different ink colors. The one with blue uniforms against a grassy background would use more cyan. Since Yellow is the primary mixing color, the two pix would also use different quantities of yellow as well. I don't know how you can compensate for these differences. Short of using a printer that will work with a CIS system, the printers you mention are not efficient at long runs of unsupervised printing. You can, however, devise an imprecise system, a crude example of which I just described. Ultimately I think that you will spend less time working it out this way than the more involved approach you described with only one cart of ink printing while filling the others with a clear fluid.

The one thing the unattended printer will do for you without question is to stop printing when it runs out of paper. Ink is the only issue.

 

[Redbrickman]

Can't see too many refill problems if you prepare a few sets of carts, and as soon as a low light shows up just pop in a new cart.

At the end of the days printing just spend a few minutes refilling if you need to.

 

[fotofreek]

Can't see too many refill problems if you prepare a few sets of carts, and as soon as a low light shows up just pop in a new cart.

At the end of the days printing just spend a few minutes refilling if you need to.

His requiement to print lots of prints unattended won't give him the opportunity to see the low ink window mid-print run each time a cart has low ink. For that reason, I suggested that he first get a sense of how many prints he can do before the first cart shows low ink. That would probably be yellow, although it really depends on the color distribution of the photo he is printing. He can then limit his print runs to a few less than the number that he did when observing that cart usage. By visually checking the other carts when he runs his first test he can get a rough idea of the other ink usage. To run the largest number of prints at a time unattended, I would change all carts based on the first one to show low ink.

As you suggest, much easier to refill several carts at the end of the day and not worry about when each cart shows low ink.

 

[Redbrickman]

Printers print wonderfully well when you watch them.

Turn your back for 2 mins and they start misbehaving

 

[fotofreek]

Printers print wonderfully well when you watch them.

Turn your back for 2 mins and they start misbehaving

Only if you turn your back after you set up such a long print run that you run a cart totally empty and burn out the nozzles! Fortunately, none of our inkjets will make much of a dent in the cart's ink supply in two minutes -- or perhaps it would be more desireable if the manufacturers could speed them up to match the best laser printers outputs. This would never work out as the ink carts are so small.

The OP had described a very complex procedure for determining how many prints he could put in a queue and then "turn his back" without running a cart empty. Actually, the printer wouldn't have been misbehaving, the person operating it would if he surpassed the ink capacity in such a long print run.