Legacy Inks : How to proceed?

[websnail]

This is something of a commercial post of sorts but bear with me as I'm trying to avoid a sales pitch (as I hope will become apparent).

We've just had a substantial clearout of ink stock for inks that are what I'd now call "legacy" items such as inks for the i9900, iP4200, etc... Some of them are still very much active to a degree but looking at sales and the stock we've pulled from the shelves, it's become apparent that the current stock & pray approach isn't working as it's deadweight that's got to be written off.

Now, an obvious option is just to abandon these inks but I'm aware that there is always someone out there who still wants some of these antiques, so, rather than abandonment I'm wondering if there's any mileage in organising or at least offering "buying clubs" of sorts where I organise a subscription list of some kind and announce a quarterly/bi-annual buy-in. Club members would commit to purchase, put down their money, and then I buy in an appropriate amount of stock to cover the buy-in orders with a bit extra for the "Oh, did I miss it?" types who dithered.

As to cost, that would be based on the stock order plus a margin to cover bottling, processing and dispatch.

This is just an idea but I wonder if it would have legs at all or would it be best instead to identify replacement inks (eg: newer magenta 6121 instead of the 6053 formulation) and just offer those in place?

Opening the floor to suggestions...

 

[turbguy]

Can "newer" inks still be utilized (with expectation of "color management") in older printers,such as an i9900??

 

[websnail]

Can "newer" inks still be utilized (with expectation of "color management") in older printers,such as an i9900??

Presumably they would work fine... We've done it with Epson and Claria instead of the earlier dye formulations. Just trying to gauge how vital the 'original' third party formulations are and whether it's worth taking that route... By the looks of the replies, possibly not so much...

 

[SkedAddled]

I don't know how 'vital' the Canon 225/226 inks are to others, and I understand
they're somewhat recent, and your primary counterpart here in the US offers
similar inks...

...but if my own country's prime supplier should drop such inks for my MG5300 series,
I'd certainly be interested for as long as my printer may survive.

 

[palombian]

Can "newer" inks still be utilized (with expectation of "color management") in older printers,such as an i9900??

Color management is one of the measures used by printer manufacturers to discourage refilling.
No idea if older printers need particular physical/chemical ink specs (as lead addition in old combustion engines).

Now that the 3th party versions of these "legacy" inks have matured, they risk to be scrapped for inventory reasons .

I am testing to replace 1 color of my PRO9500 inkset by a more recent formula and already a few questions arise.
Instead of being proactive, maybe the best approach is stock enough of the old inks and write them off in case the printer breaks.

 

[The Hat]

As I still have some of the older machines mentioned which currently use these inks, I would have been very interested grabbing some of these "legacy inks", “BUT” always comes to the fore first.

I don’t print jobs for clients anymore therefore I’m using very little of my current ink stocks up, so it would be pointless acquiring any further supplies, couple that with me moving away from dye ink use to pigment ink as a better alternative.

I still use old stock like 6053 magenta and 2032 cyan dating back to 2010 and I only ever used one of each colour ink in my 3 - 8 colour printers, it takes a small bit of adjustment to make each printer output the same colour using the same inks.

To use individual colours for each cartridge type BCI-6, CLl-8, CLl-525, CLl-551, HP-4837 was impracticable and would have required me to hold more than 6 standard colours which would inevitably have led to refilling mistakes...

 

[websnail]

I should probably clarify one thing...

The inks I'm looking at here are the following era:

6053, 1008, 7006, 2043, 6061... (BCI6)
KMP PGI-5

Most of the oldest Epson dyes were retired in favour of the Img Spec' (STS) Claria anyway... and pretty much replaced the older Img Spec' pigment inks with Inktec K3's as the latter just don't clog.. but we still get requests for the R1900 and R800 specific inks.

I'm definitely not looking to retire the inks in the 2032, 797, 6121, 1120, 1128, 244, etc... realm but we have found that demand has gone down quite a bit so they're ones for future years.


I can see this thread might take a different tangent so just to cover all the bases that up coming up.

1. I've always been happy to source in inks (where I can) when other sources have stopped making them available (eg: OCP to the USA) or they're not otherwise available in the UK easily (eg: Paul Roarke component blend components) so I can see that continuing.

2. My key thrust with the post was not to threaten removal (as if!) just to explore solutions that balance business case to customer demand. For obvious reasons it makes no sense to have stock that never sells or sits for too long that it becomes a potential liability with biocide expiry, etc...

Ironically I can see that one of the issues is marketing but I don't want to get into that on here, that's not what I've ever wanted my involvement to be on this forum.



Anyway, does that help clarify for anyone who is suddenly worrying that their iP4500 is no longer going to be supported or whatever?... Happy to answer specific question via PM, emaill whatever but as I said... the key thing I was after with this thread was some idea of options to consider so nobody is left on a proverbial desert island with their printer yelling "WILSON!"

 

[palombian]

… My key thrust with the post was not to threaten removal ...

Sadly enough there are sellers who cut us of from ink supply .