In a production environment, you will find that the topfill method will allow a higher number of prints per refill cycle. This will translate into signficantly lower cost. If you look at the cost of ink per mil, versus the extra downtime for a refill cycle, I think you may come to the same conclusion.
Here's why ( and I will point to Grandad35 who hardly comes around anymore hope he's ok). In a topfill, you can safely overfill over the OEM fill amount a bit. I have not measured how much but it is easily doable and in fact most people do it without knowing. That is a project that someone can do. Grandad once stated he purposely oversaturates the sponge a bit and that gives him more prints before the cart is empty and that was on his BCI-6. The identical thing happens on a CLI-8/42 because remember once the ink gets to a certain window of chip level, it will actually freeze and then look for the optical sensor to get a real reading on how much ink is really left. Now if you overfill it too much or keep topping up without reset, the chips will suspect something is wrong and trigger the low and then empty quickly for safety of the printhead. In normal cases, even with a slight overfill, the optical sensor will trigger the chip low warning normally.
Now contrast this with the German method. To overfill, you will need to inject into the sponge directly after withdrawal from the reservoir side. I'm not sure how foolproof this is going to be because the ink remaining in the sponge might be harder to predict depending on how empty the cart is. And more importantly how quickly can you oversaturate the sponge uniformly without having to wait for the sponge and the ink to migrate. In the topfill, the physics of the fill, takes care of this aspect for you naturally and the visual feedback is all is necessary. The migration of the ink back into the sponge occurs at the START of the refill, thus by the end , the sponge is saturated. In German refills, it is the opposite. The oversaturation of the sponge takes place at the end. If you do oversaturate at the start, then you risk bubbling and forcing ink back into the vent.
Let's do math this sh_t up. With the 16oz ink bottles, each ml of ink will cost $0.046USD per mil approx. Suppose you spill, 1/2 ml per cart during refill, you will lose .046x8x.5 = 0.184 A little over 18 cents worth of ink.
Now suppose you can put in an extra 1 ml of ink into the cart. I suspect this will add approx a 10% reduction in the amount of refills. Thus the minimum savings you will have will be at the legislated say $11.40 per hour and say it takes 4 mins per set = 0.76 Or a little over 75 cents. So you save 75 cents by overfilling versus the ink savings of 18 cents. So you save more than $0.50 by wasting a little ink but saving time. What we have NOT added as yet is the extra productive time the printer is making you money by saving time i.e less downtime. AND then there is the fewer purge cycles due to overfilling.
It's not even a contest. Topfilling works for production environments.
Now the information presented is excellent by Cymark because he has run these machines to the end consistently and we see 25,000 prints as a life using the top off all and reset method. To a normal user just how many years use does this represent? Interesting.
Well, suppose we printed 50 prints per week. 25,000 prints equates to 500 weeks. There are 52 weeks per year. That is like approximately ten years of doing this every day and every year. I am sure after ten years you'd WANT a new printer. Sheesh, I will probably pass away before the waste ink pad tops off in my current Pro-100 at my current useage.....and I have another one and a ton of other printers. This should bring perspective back to the home user. With Canon printers like the Pro-100, if you top off and reset all, you can forget about the issue of waste ink pad. In a production environment...this is an issue but after 25,000 prints.......the ROI is not just fantastic, it's hilarious. You should be loading up on these machines in a storage facility.
OK, what's the catch in the above example.....25,000 continually printing. Switching on and off consumes ink and this goes to the pad. So the result might be down say 50%. So you'd really have to print,10 print per day, for 5 days per week, each and every week for 5 years continually. Can you see yourself doing that? Not me. Waste ink pad, what? me worry?
