Ok Last time I promise.. NON OEM INK

[Factoryphoto.com]

Ok guys first off let me say I have learned alot from you guys, i've been printing for 8 years at home and at the track and always used OEM Canon ink. Recently I found that test Neil did ... I read it a couple times actually and he seemed like he really liked the G&G ink from Inkgrabber.com.. So I gave it a shot.. I mentioned in another post that I print lots and lots of photo's from 4x6 all the way to 13x19 on a Canon i9900.. Today I printed 47 pictures from a race I shot last Saturday, at that race I printed about 75 pictures and then something went wrong. My pictures were coming out purple glare to them, reds turned pink ect.. I was stressing hard because I have people pay upfront for pictures and when I am done shooting photos I begin printing.. They are very long days and people were pretty PO'd that they had to wait or have there "at the track photo" mailed because my printer was acting up..
I never had issues with OEM ink but as much as I print I just had to try an alternative for ink.. G&G seemed to work fine the colors were very close.. I print lots of 8x10's and I use the costco Kirkland paper which I really like. But after this past weekend I started surfing the web trying to figure out what was wrong.. Well I had a bad black ink cartdridge, it was mixing into the red and making everything look pink/yellow.. I called INkGRabber and told them, they replaced them with no questions (I will ad there customer service is very good) I did deep cleaning cycle and started printing yesterday things were going fine then boom reds turned into pink again.. I did what Inkgrabber said about taking a Qtip and rubbing alchol and gently wiping the head..I started printing today again and things werew going fine for about 25 prints give or take and the brown dirt on the track was yellow, the trees were flourecent green looking.. I called them again, there sending more ink no question asked.

So what does this mean? Means I can't afford to keep having my printer go down.. I shoot pictures for a big night series for motocross and shoot for major magazines.. This will hurt my business if it continues. What do I do? What is the best prefilled BCI-6 cartdridges? Ive read so many different opinions on here I am just lost on which to use.. How often should I do a cleaning cycle? I live in northern California sea level..

I need help and I need to take care of this asap so i am ready this weekend.. Anything you guys can tell me feel free.. Im all ears here..
Thanks alot
Hoss
www.Factoryphoto.com

 

[CanonPhreak]

I use weink, but just their bulk ink supplies with which I've never had a problem. I asked them about their house brand cartridges and they said that they sell Tully Imaging brand which use the same cartridge type as the blanks I use in my kit with sensient/formulabs brand inks in them. John at weink said they did sell they G&G brand for a while but had too many problems with the cyan cartridges failing in the past few months, so they went back to their old Tully cartridges.

call them and ask for John, he may be able to address your problem.

 

[ghwellsjr]

I, too, have learned a lot from this forum. Thanks very much to all of you.

I have a couple 5-cart printers and used the G&G cartridges for almost a year, refilling them myself with MIS ink. I periodically had problems with some of the cartridges apparently not supplying ink, even to the point of a nozzle check showing almost no ink for one of the colors. This really bothered me because I had talked ten of my friends into getting Canon printers and letting me refill their cartridges for a nominal fee. I feared turning my friends into enemies if the same thing were to happen to them, but it never did. None of them go through much ink so maybe it has to do with the quantity of prints made. Since the ink was so inexpensive, I tended to do a lot of printing and experimenting.

Then one day, after putting in a new G&G cyan cartridge the night before, I was already out of cyan ink. When I opened the printer, I was shocked to see blue ink all over the place! The cartridge was empty. Furthermore, it had contaminated the yellow and magenta cartridges. Now I was really afraid of turning my friends into enemies! After cleaning up the mess and putting in new cartridges (eventually another yellow got contaminated), I did a little experiment with the two contaminated yellow cartridges. One was an OEM Canon and the other was a G&G.

I first cleaned the two cartridges by running lots of water through them and then I filled them with water (instead of ink, to keep the mess down). Remember, there was nothing wrong with these two cartridges except they had gotten cyan ink into their sponges. First off, both cartridges would drip water out of the outlet port if the plug was removed from the refill hole on the top of the reservoir. This is normal and simulates what happens when a plug does not completely seal the refill hole or when a cartridge is defective and has a leak in it right from the start.

Presumably, this is what happened to the new cyan G&G cartridge that dripped out all of its ink. The air comes in through the leak in the reservoir allowing the ink to drip out of the outlet port, down through the nozzles where it wicks up through the other color's nozzles and into their cartridges, as well as making a mess. You may wonder why the ink didn't leak out prior to opening the package and installing the cartridge, but it will not leak out of a solid closed container that has only one small opening in it. It did drip out as soon as I took the orange clip off and removed the tape over the vent hole, but I was too inexperienced at the time to see this as a warning of an impending problem. My only thought was to get it into the printer so I wouldn't waste any more ink.

After refilling the two cartridges with water (one OEM Canon and one G&G) and installing the plugs in the refill holes, I waited until the dripping stopped which happens very quickly. Next, I applied a tissue to the outlet port to simulate the demand for ink by the print head. The water would immediately saturate a small section of the tissue and I had to keep moving to dry areas. After a while, bubbles would appear at the bottom of the reservoir and flow to the top. Now here is the important point: In the Canon cartridge, the bubbles would appear as soon as I applied the tissue and stop as soon as I removed the tissue. In the G&G cartridge, the bubbles would not appear until I had blotted a lot of water from the outlet port, and then a mass of bubbles would appear and continue for a while even after removing the tissue. They would not start up again until a lot of blotting had occurred and continued flowing for a long time as before.

Keep in mind, that bubbles flowing into the bottom of the reservoir from the bottom of the sponge means that ink (water, in my experiment) is flowing into the sponge.

The main difference between the Canon and G&G cartridges is that the Canon has two pieces of sponge while the G&G has only one. You will note that the top of the upper sponge in a Canon cartridge is dry whereas in the G&G the entire sponge is saturated with ink. I have since learned that Canon's original cartridge of this type (called BCI-3 at the time) had only one large sponge. Later, they came out with the BCI-3e cartridges which had the two-sponge design. Why did they make the change?

I believe it is because with only one sponge, it is too difficult for air to get down to the bottom of the sponge so that it can form bubbles in the reservoir. No bubbles--no ink.

I next took apart the two cartridges to examine the sponges and the inside of the cartridges where the sponges reside. I also gained access to the filters at the outlet ports. I did a lot of research on this and other forums and learned that the upper sponge in the Canon cartridges repels ink--it likes air, whereas the lower sponge more freely absorbs ink (or water). There are groves along the lower half of the wall separating the sponge compartment from the reservoir. These groves lead down to the hole in the bottom of this wall. These groves start just below the division between the two sponges. These groves allow the air that is readily available in the upper sponge to flow down to the hole in the wall at the bottom of the lower sponge.

Unfortunately, in a one-sponge design, the ink has to drain halfway out of the sponge until the air can get to the top of the groves. And when the air finally gets there, it gushes into the reservoir until enough ink has resaturated the entire sponge.

It is my theory that any one-sponge cartridge will have problems delivering a consistent flow of ink for a long time. You are mainly using the ink that saturates the sponge.

To confirm this theory, I continued to use G&G cartridges in one printer and Canon in the other printer. Eventually, one of the colors (cyan) began to drop out. I switched cartridges and the problem went away and did not reappear in the other printer. It turns out that the problem only occurred with one print head and with a G&G cartridge. This illustrates why some people have no problems with any cartridge while other people do. It appears that some print heads are more susceptible to flow problems from certain cartridges than others.

I now use only Canon cartridges and vacuum refill them.

I think it would be very useful to you if people would report on which third-party cartridges they have had experience with, good or bad, and whether they had one or two sponges in them (or even spongeless, which I have no experience with).

 

[Grandad35]

Some reading material:
http://www.nifty-stuff.com/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=519#p519
http://www.nifty-stuff.com/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=530#p530
http://www.nifty-stuff.com/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=533#p533
http://www.nifty-stuff.com/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=769#p769
http://www.nifty-stuff.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=311
http://www.nifty-stuff.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=239
http://www.nifty-stuff.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=144

 

[Osage]

I have another question---given the fits created when a problem occurs in this i9900,
the clear disruption of schedule that creates impatient people waiting in line, and the sort of big bucks amount of business---why is this business totally dependent on one and only one printer---surely another printer as a backup, or working in tandem could cut through some of the backlog far faster.

 

[ghwellsjr]

Wow! Thanks for all those links, Grandad. They are like needles in a lot of haystacks. You are the one I owe my greatest thanks to for all the help I have received on this forum. You are so right--it's not about the money. I could have saved money and time by just buying another printer everytime a cartridge ran out of ink instead doing all this refilling stuff. But this is so much more fun.

Keep in mind that Hoss is not interested in refilling cartridges. He wants to know the best prefilled non-OEM cartridges. That is why I'm suggesting that people report whether their cartridges have one or two sponges when they give their experiences. It is very hard to tell by looking at vendors' websites whether their cartridges have one or two sponges.

 

[Factoryphoto.com]

Thanks for all this great info...
BUT I am interested in filling my own ink carts.. If I can save money doing it why not.. It does look hard at all.. MIS ink I found a website but cant figure out how to buy it on there page..

Another thing, yesterday I put a brand new G&G cyan in and this morning I just checked and it is 75% gone... This worries me.

 

[ghwellsjr]

Hoss,

I'd get that G&G cyan out of there immediately and check for contamination in your other cartridges. I would remove the print head and clean it and look for ink in other places where it shouldn't be. You will probably see a lot of ink on the nozzles. It sounds to me like you should continue to use Canon OEM cartridges while you are printing for customers and experiment in private.

One useful experiment you could do if there is still ink left in the reservoir of your G&G cyan cartridge is to see if it drips when you hold it in the air. See if bubbles form at the bottom of the reservoir.

If it does not drip, put a wadded up tissue on the outlet port and see if the remaining ink will drain and if it does, do bubbles form?

If ink comes out and no bubbles form (they may be very hard to see in ink), this is evidence that there is a leak in the reservoir.

 

[Factoryphoto.com]

Well I just printed another photo this morning , a simple 8x10 and I had to print about 6 to get the actual color.. I took out the cartridges and it seems like the black is leaking into the red and magneta.. This is a real bummer..
ghwellsir how exactly to you take out the print head? Im thinking of switching and just going back to OEm canon ink.. I can get them for $9.75 each.. I will have to raise the price of my pictures up a dollar or two but this is just ridiculous.. I appreciate the info guys this forum has tons of great information for people like me that just do things without knowing exactly what i am doing lol The G&G ink when it actually prints a picture and the color is right it is perfect but for reason something is happening here ..
Does the print head just pop out when you lift the grey plastic holder? i9900 I think you said you use that

 

[ghwellsjr]

On my printers, there is a grey handle on the right side of the black carriage that holds the cartridges. When you raise it up, the head can be easily lifted out the carriage.

Another thing you should consider about G&G (and maybe other third party cartridges), according to Neil Slade, they should not be used for archival purposes. You don't want your customers coming back in a couple years complaining that their pictures, which they have been displaying in their trucks, are beginning to fade. Every test and everybody agrees that Canon dye ink is the best in all respects except price.