Opinions on Precision Colors newer EV6 dyes?

[Ink stained Fingers]

you are right, those T26/T27xx refill cartridges look pretty similar to Canon cartridges with sponges. If you think there is a problem or handling/operating issue you may better discuss that directly with the supplier, the printer/printhead just needs to work 100% to get any good profiles.

 

[te36]

Just sent an email to PC. But i also got a cheap replacement cartridge set from ebay and they seem to have the same construction, aka: during operations in the printer three is just an open air vent above the sponge area, so the sponge can deplet into the printer, but the big reservoir area with ink has only an outlet at the bottom into the sponge area but no air intake. Same as when you operate the refillable cartridges following instructions (plug hole above reservoir while in printer).

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

This is the first Epson refill cartridge with a sponge inside I see since a very long time, prob. longer than 15 years. They probably want to get away from their complicated cartridge construction they used since then, patents may have become obsolete, or compatibles with simpler constructions work as well as their approach at lower cost or for some other reason e.g. moving cartridge protection away from mechanical details to a more sophisticated protection with more chip intelligence.

 

[te36]

I did not follow the technology a lot in the last decade, i guess to remember all those attempts to make cartridges so comple that rebuilding/refill was difficult. Until i guess the chips became cheap enough that you could just revert to the most cost effective well working cartridge design.

The latest generation of expression premium printers uses in the USA a cartridge/chip (T410) for which there is no ARC even though it has been out for a couple of years now already. There seems to be just one chinese vendor offering ARC for the european variant of those cartridges. The whole thing looks very strange - why would one region be cracked, the other region not.

Here in the USA, the last few Epson XP-820 with the older ARC capable cartridges are sold > $180, while the T410 cartridge replacement XP-830 sells new for $120. Guess why.

The main issue is stupid customers IMHO. There has not been any relevant hardware improvements in the last 5 years (print quality etc), its all only some stupid cloud software improvements. So you'd think people should understand that you could safely invest into a reliable long life printer with replaceable waste tank and print head. But no, instead i am sure reliability of products will continue to decline because customers fall into the revenue-by-ink model.

CISS printers are one answer because the volume for which they are designed hopefully mandates a more reliable overall printer constriction. But they also introduce an unnecessary level of additional failure points when the volume is not that big. And so far you can not even get CISS equivalents for many non-CISS printer models.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

there may be other reasons than technical ones why ARC chips would work here but not elsewhere, it could be legal, copyright, trademark etc specifics and their actual enforcement different in the U.S. than in other regions. Look to those patent struggles of smartphone manufacturers , it's technically the same model but claims are different in European to U.S. courts. Brother or HP had been trying to block or blocking imports of 3rd party cartridges already years ago into the U.S. but not in Europe for the same reasons.
So Chinese suppliers just adjust to it offering versions which are saleable in a particular region without too much risk of seizure for their dealers.
Epson ink tank systems are not more reliable than the base models, those L or ET tanksystem models are not more than modified base models, same printhead, same mechanics, just with the necessary changes to the firmware and the tanks attached. So I'm printing a lot, and I can't complain about the reliability of Epson printers at all.

 

[te36]

Pretty sure you're correct about legal enforcements being the reason why even chinese vendors these days may not dare to offer ARC for newer printers in the US region. I think the term customer advocacy has not been translated into US english yet.

Of course this does of course then beg the reason why someone like Epson would not resort to get rid of the region code and only offer US chip cartridges in europe to use the US legal pressure on china to also protect its margins in europe better. Maybe because there would then also be european/russian hackers interested in cracking the mechanism and therefore invalidating it everywhere.

Yes, many of the ET series printers look like CISS plugged onto base models. Maybe some of the Canon like G4500 are better.

Wrt to reliability:
My XP-820 failed after one week and 150 pages with "paper jam" for every page i try to rpint. No idea why, but epson declared it dead after it happened just copying a page and told me they will send me a replacement. Can not see anything wrong with it. Haven't tried to look through the 26 pages of the thread with pointers to service manuals if there is one for those expression premiums. I saw some youtube clips for older epson printers about some paper sensor becoming loose, but not sure if/when i'd want to go through the laborsome disassemble process to check if this model has comparable internals. If i could even find some way to enable a diagnostics that tells me the reason why the printer thinks its jammed (aka: because of which sensor).

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I don't think that the Chinese wouldn't dare to make such chips - it's a business decision if they can't find dealers, or dealers would be out of business quickly or shipments would be seized etc

 

[te36]

Just tested a set of ARC chipped refillable T33 cartridges with PC ink on a european XP-900 (A3 variant of XP-640). I have not found ARC chip for the T410 (US equivalent).

Those arc chips give me the full 11ml XL ink before they reset. They also seem to be somewhat better constructed than the PC ones because the opening between the sponge and reservoir is higher so the sponge got better refilled from the and i only got banding on A3 prints when the cartridge was maybe less than 20% full and i was brinting large areas of one color (like blue skye, not enough cyan ink flow). And they have a separate piece of denser? sponge that can even be removed (in case you mistakenly put a cartridge into the wrong slot that makes it easy to clean).

Aka: Not perfect but IMHO its just a few of these minor design details needed to make these cartridges work better.

Still does not solve the ink waste with every cartridge change, but with XL cartridges its down to eg: 20% ink wasted. But still just few set of cartridges before waste ink gets full (maybe 12). Next i am going to try an XP-960 where i hopefully can get externally resettable cartridges so i can refill a whole cartridge set at once and get 1/6th of the ink waste. Let's see...