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

[The Hat]

I have in the past loaded up my printers while using CISS and left them to run over night
unsupervised for periods of 5 hours and more and then only to remove and load up paper again.

Occasionally that could last for 3 days or more nonstop to complete a particular job.
The maintenance was done solely by the printer alone with cleaning cycles and rest periods.
The only intervention on my part was to fill the reservoir bottles when they got low on ink.

These inkjet printers are remarkable sturdy and can take a lot of punishment but little abuse,
just give them what they need and they just go on and on..

 

[l_d_allan]

I have in the past loaded up my printers ... and left them to run over night

Something I've wondered about ... the 9000-2 print-driver has different selections for
Maintenance + Custom-Settings + Ink-Drying-Wait-Time.

The default is in the middle.


For a long, unattended run overnight where I expect the printer to run out of an ink color or paper, it seems like there might be an advantage to have the setting at "Long" instead of the default of in the middle. This would seem to slow down the printing so that the stacked prints would be somewhat drier on top of each other. There would be more time before the next print was stacked on top of it. Perhaps also set the Quality to High instead of Standard?

So instead of the 30+ prints taking 30 minutes, it takes 120+ minutes (guestimate). I won't be there until next morning anyway to get the "gears grinding" again.

If I'm trying to minimize the print time of perhaps 20+ while in attendance, I'll use Quality:Standard, and try to pay enough attention to keep prints from stacking on top of each other. Depending on how much room is available, I'll have 4+ stacks, and shuffle the emerging print from the printer to different stacks. I suppose it might go faster to have the "Ink Drying Wait Time" set to "Short", but I haven't played with that setting and done timings.

Ok, or do I have a flawed understanding? With glossy paper like Kirkland, is the print dry enough to not worry about them stacking up on top of each other? Seems like ... all other things being equal ... the print will have somewhat higher quality and less likely to smudge if each print gets to be on the top of a stack for 3 to 5+ minutes rather than just 1 minute.

 

[ghwellsjr]

A longer print drying time will solve the problem of ink from a previously printed picture showing up on the backside of the next print but if you don't have that problem then you don't need that solution. It already takes a very long time between prints that generally it won't matter. Where it will matter is when you are doing double-sided (duplex) printing but that is generally not the case with photo papers.

The higher quality settings are only going to actually produce higher quality photos if the normal settings have a problem caused by clogged nozzles or uneven paper motion. What they do is more passes of the print head with a smaller incremental advance of the paper. This will help mask any random clogged nozzles but otherwise the printer is not trying to actually do a better job at printing. If a printer could be made that would advance the paper by an exact amount every time and the print head could put its drops down exactly where it wanted, and if it had a sufficiently high density of nozzles, then it could produce the highest quality printout in one pass of the printhead and do it bi-directionally. But to compensate for these otherwise less than perfect capabilities, it resorts to advancing the paper by a smaller amount and overlapping the output from the print head so that any imperfections of some nozzles are masked by others.

Maybe you ought to print some photos with the different quality settings and see if there is any noticeable difference or at least a difference that is worth the extra print time.

 

[Redbrickman]

My comment about it misbehaving when your back is turned was a bit tongue in cheek :|

I don't have any experience of long photo print runs but plenty with documents and inkjet/laser printers.

It is sod's law that you watch a document print and it works fine. Go away for two minutes and come back to a jam, two pages printed together or worse still a bad page when you are doing a 100 page duplex document :/

But maybe that was in the days if my Sharp JZ laser or HP 870 CXI .....LOL

 

[l_d_allan]

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.

Thanks for the suggestion. I concur ... the OCP ink is relatively inexpensive. This stuff? Rinse OCP Nozzle Rocket?. Is this what you used for "invisible ink" in some of the tests you've mentioned in other posts? The R-Jet Tek webpage mentions it is for cartridges with integrated print-heads, but would it be suitable for Canon printers with BCI-6, CLI-8, etc?

It seems to be not unreasonably priced at ~5.15 per 16oz. Would this be a better solution to use than the d.i.y. windex-based solutions for clogged print-heads?

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.

I've read several threads where you've mentioned tests involving invisible ink, to figure out which inks are actually used and not used with different media types. Did you ever "publish" the results of those tests?

I did put together some test prints with pure color patches. This was straight-forward for Red, Green, and Blue:
Red: 255,0,0
Green: 0,255,0
Blue: 0,0,255
For Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow, I put in 100% values in the Photoshop color-picker, and then checked the RGB values:
Cyan: 89,147,224
Magenta: 170,67,116
Yellow: 235,238,75

I would think that printing a sheet of pure green would hit the green cart pretty hard, if the MediaType was correct to allow Green to be used with an 8 cart 9000-2. But maybe not. Or perhaps a sheet of pure yellow? The green would seem be a good candidate to use up in tests since it seems to be rarely used, and I expect a 16oz bottle to last so long that I'll end up throwing most of it away.

There are times when I would like to have an empty cart to try some method mentioned on this forum, or something that occurs to me. For example, I speculate there are refinements to the top-filling method to make it less messy. Or seeing if I'm really getting 12 to 13 ml of ink into a cart that reports Empty?

Rather than just waiting for a cart to get low/empty, or making a bunch of generic Kodak-like test prints, I think it would handy to be able to make ## solid green sheets and figure on having an empty green cart to play with.

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.

Interesting. I wonder if this is applicable from overheating from clogs or overheading printing with an from empty cartridge? I believe that I've read in many posts that the circuitry for an individual nozzle can be damaged if that nozzle is clogged. I suppose the sprayed ink from a working nozzle cools off the nozzle by carrying away heat used to make it bubble, and a clogged nozzle doesn't get this cooling. Correct ... more or less?

Similarily, I've read that if a color cart is allowed to get empty and printing continues ... for instance yellow ... then the yellow nozzles could overheat and be damaged if the low/empty detection is ignored or over-ridden. This could also happen with a CLI-8 based printer when you reset a nearly-empty cart so that the chip thought it was full.

I beleive that you have written that the Empy/Low detection logic in CLI-8 based printers is strictly based on sophisticated counts of nozzle sprays plus cleanings. There is a prism in the cart, but it is ignored. My experience agrees with this.

But are you saying that this thermal sensor provides protection in the above situtations? I suppose this thermal sensor would be for the overall print-head temperature, rather than individual nozzles.

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.

I'm really only interested in PlusGlossy-2 MediaType, which is what I use for Kirkland Glossy. I may be making 300 prints of the overall camper group photo from last year, and break it up into batches. I'll do counts at different settings, and try to be careful on keeping track. However, that image may not be all that representative of a photo as far as ink usage, but it seems decent in that respect.

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 don't expect to get all that accurate of data ... just ballpark numbers that are better than a guesstimate. One significant digit of estimation to be roughly +/- 10%.

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%.

Certainly agree. The purpose of my tests isn't to shave my costs from a 90% to 92% factor. Granted, some of it is curiousity (which killed the cat and may shorten my printer life ...), and to better understand what is going on with inkjet printing. My rationalization is to have valid information to influence my printing workflow at the upcoming Kids Camp.