Soon: big test of refillable Epson Pro 3800 cartridges + resetters

[diody]

tlet valve:

Just an update about priming the Big Foot cartridges. Sofar the cartridges seem to work very well indeed. I was bit reluctant because of the rubber ink valve, but it has been functioning very well indeed and ink flow is excellent. The only slight problem is the 1404 error code which each time jumps on your display when it is powered on, when ink level is beneath 100 ml's. Nothing to be scared off, but you have to power off and power on again to get rid of this error. The reason is because the cartridges are so huge, which is good if you want alot of ink in your cartridges, the pressure pump cannot cope with the large amount of air in the cartridges the first time powering on, so you have to power it off and on to remove this error. The more ink there is in the cartridges, the less this "problem" will occur.

Now about the priming of these cartridges: since you cannot push the ink valve to have the static amount of air removed from the cartridges, because can damage the rubber sealing of the ink valve. Instead you can do this by shaking the cartridge to get rid of the air in the serpentine tubing near the ink outlet valve:

This way the initial need of flushing the ink lines to get rid of any static air (bubble) in the ink tubing system will be reduced dramatically. Unfortunately I did not received these priming instructions, which would certainly had prevented the execessive amount of 17 cleaning cycles I had to perform over a period of 36 hours to get rid off the air pouches/bubbles in the tubing system/print head.

Ink quality of the IMA24-36 V3 inkset is excellent, same glossiness as the Inkrepublic.com IRK4-nano inkset, same nice print quality when properly profiled, but with a larger gamut in the reds/magenta's. As previously stated in my review concerning the different refill ink the IMA24-36 V3 indeed yielded a larger gamut compared to the original Epson K3.

I hope Irvweiner will report back about his experiences with the small foot system. At this moment both the Inkrepublic.com Pro 3800/3880 I-refill system and the Inkjetfly Big Foot Pro 3800/3880 are valid and good refill systems for this fantastic printer. The only thing I would like to see is that huge handle sticking out as a column to be reduced drastically to make it more compact. This will likely reduced the amount of static air in these cartridges (error 1404) and make it more elegant. I was pleased with the always staying full chipset of the Big Foot system and you only need 2 original OEM chips (PK and MK) to drive the system and the autoreset chip replacement of the waste ink tank, which is unique indeed.

@pharmacist Hello, where is the rubber sealing of the ink valve, which can be damaged, please(in cartridge or in printer? And how i can 100 percent eliminate this risk?