P600 Aftermarket Inks and Refillable Carts?

[Greatwhitewing]

Hi all, new to forum and have a question about third party inks and carts for Surecolor P600 printer.

I have done some research (and have minimal experience) on this, other forums and websites and I see several major players for quality aftermarket refillable cartridges and inks.

The things that are important to me in no particular order are as follows.
1. Very close match to OEM color or readily available profiles
2. Storage, I don't print a lot as many of you do so printer may sit a while
3. Cost, not a huge driver but if it wasn't I would use the very expensive OEM cartridges but I realize quality costs money and good quality is good value
4. Ease, I would like my system to need minimal "nursing" including timely customer support if needed

Inkjetfly.com, inkjetcarts.com, Conecolor (injetmall.com), Inkrepublic.com, Inksupply.com

If you could please be so kind as to relate your experiences for or against the suppliers above or any I may have missed. I had less than optimal history with one of these suppliers I won't mention (yet) with my now dead 1400 since I want to be open minded.

Thanks in advance for your help
John

 

[Greatwhitewing]

I also found recently "precision color". Appears to be middle of the road pricing and a very good website but cannot find any commentary on that ink/printer combo

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I got good service and products from PC, but I'm not ordering there regularly. The P600 inks from a recent buy perform very well and give a very good gamut. They offer profiles for their inks when used with their papers, I recommend creating and using your own profiles, Epson profiles may or may not be the best overall and only suit Epson inks on Epson papers, there had been some issues with those in the past. Keeping a printer idling for a longer time is a delicate subject and not only related to inks.

 

[Greatwhitewing]

I got good service and products from PC, but I'm not ordering there regularly. The P600 inks from a recent buy perform very well and give a very good gamut. They offer profiles for their inks when used with their papers, I recommend creating and using your own profiles, Epson profiles may or may not be the best overall and only suit Epson inks on Epson papers, there had been some issues with those in the past. Keeping a printer idling for a longer time is a delicate subject and not only related to inks.

I don't know your name so I'll call you Mr. Fingers out of respect. Are you saying PC also sells their own paper? I don't see it on the website or am I not understanding you? I can easily see you and jtoolman are very experienced users and you both seem to like PC and Cone but I only see a CISS from Cone which is overkill for me and also one the costlier inks. I am leaning towards PC right now and sticking to Epson papers for now since I have some currently and PC offers profiles for them already. Inkjetcarts is also looking like a finalist in my selection process.

Thanks again

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

Look for the P600 inks here and the custom profiles for the papers they recommend under the 'Custom ICCs' tab
http://precisioncolors.com/P600_bulk.html
It's not 'their' papers but papers they support with their icc profiles. You may use other papers , there are plenty more good papers on the market, but then you need to go for your own profiles - either done by yourself or a third party. I have seen companies offering one free profile if you buy inks and papers from them. Please be aware that every type and sort of paper needs its own profile, using generic profiles should only be the last choice.
Actually I like to test and experiment, I have used inks from Cone and PC but they are not my sole sources, I like to find ink/paper combinations with a very good performance e.g. gloss, bronzing, lightfastness, but I look as well for budget type combinations still with good performance but at a much lower price, so inks from China via Aliexpress are not specifically excluded.

 

[Greatwhitewing]

Ah, I get you now. Yes even in my newbness I know about profiles. Early on in my venture I will stick with an ink supplier that has profiles at least for Epson papers and optionally others just like PC does.

Sample packs are in the plans a bit down the road.

With my 1400 I did have a 3'rd party create a profile for me and I stumbled through the settings well enough to get results I was satisfied with. I did calibrate my laptop LCD with a Datacolor spyder and but the prints came out dark. He adjusted the profile, resent it and it was better but still darker than what I saw on the screen. I know a good monitor would help but this laptop is family communal so tethering it down with monitors won't go over well.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

and it was better but still darker than what I saw on the screen. I know a good monitor would help

You are raising quite a typical question, and I like to turn it around - why isn't the monitor as dark as the printout?
Both the monitor and the printer, and the printout , are color output devices with their own performance characteristics, and both don't know about each other at all. Both can be calibrated and profiled to adjust them to a standardized output behaviour, but there is one variable left out of that process, the actual brightness of the monitor vs. the printout viewing conditions. I assume that your monitor is placed somewhere away from direct light - sun - other strong lamps, the white of the monitor is brighter than the surrounding light. Just do one thing - turn down the monitor brightness , the white level to match the white of your photo paper, and you directly see how much perceived contrast and color saturation you are loosing. When profiling a printer you are typically not considering the actual viewing conditions for your printouts, the profiling software does not know this. Some profiling software allows you to do some of such changes, but it is recommended to do such adjustments at the time of printing, e.g. by adjusting the gamut. With all this explained another monitor will not fix the problem that printouts get darker than the images on your monitor, it could get even worse if such a monitor gives you more brightness, you are not changing anything at the printer. A new monitor for photo work may have other benefits - a wider gamut - better saturated colors , a better black for a wider overall contrast, or higher resolution, or a wider screen than your current monitor - enough reasons to get such monitor nevertheless.

 

[Greatwhitewing]

Great points
Although obviously not successful I was attempting to view the prints in the same lighting conditions as the monitor and when I was editing and printing. I tried to stay in subdued light with the monitor not very bright, maybe less than 1/2 way up based on the spider calibration. I was attempting to do things right according to what I was reading on the dpreview forum.
My 1400 printer always seemed to be funky or flakey. Hard to explain but behavior seemed to change never getting consistent results for long. Probably a lot to do with not printing enough. I got a little disillusioned and stopped printing. I did get a few prints I was quite pleased with. I think I killed the print head trying a cleaning procedure from youtube. Maybe the printer was salvageable but too late now as it's gone into the smelly truck that comes by once a week.
I am certain it was the dreaded "1-D-IOT" error (idiot). That's why I am here to try to rectify the errors.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

professionals would use a light box with a stable and calibrated brightness to judge and evaluate printouts - colors - contrast . Just view your printouts at bright light/sunlight , color saturation goes up and you see more details in the darker areas than under dimmer light. I'm using Qimage to print, and this software allows easy adjustments at the time of print which I do for the assumed viewing conditions of the prints. It's not clear from your descripions what the real problems were with the 1400, but o.k. it's gone.

 

[nrdlnd]

Hi,
I know that the question was about replacement inks for the P600. I looked on Precision Colors site for inks to the P800 and they no longer deliver kits for this printer. They say:
"The P800 chips are no longer compatible with the later shipping P800 printers in North America and possibly worldwide. The intial set of chips were tested to be compatible with very early P800 machines in Asia. After shipping, they intially worked and stories surfaced about being unable to reset but my testing actually goes beyond that. Even replacement chips are not being accepted. The P800 is now equipped with a strong memory buffer system that appears to remember both the chip type and ink level and will not reaccept a similar chip even with a higher ink level. The reset process does not even come to play in this scenario. The chip designers are working to trying to get around the problem. When a solution appears, any previous purchaser should contact me for replacement chips which will be provided free of charge."
I don't know if it's the same for the P600