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Author
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Topic: CISS retrofit kits for consumer inkjet printers - any good or a waste of time and $$?
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 11-10-2013 09:42 AM
We've probably done quite a bit to boost the price of HP shares over the last couple of months, having guzzled our way through three sets of 951XL ink cartridges (at $90 a set) printing wedding pix for family and friends. As I do quite a bit of photography, and hence 10x8 printing, under normal circumstances anyway, my eye was caught by this kit, which it is claimed can reduce printing costs by up to 90%.
Cynic that I am, I'm thinking that there has to be a gotcha. I did try DIY cartridge refill kits for the older HP printer I had back in England, but the cartridges were of a fundamentally different design (these were HP 56 through 9), with all three inks in one unit and the print head built into it as well. The refill kit looked like a sort of mini-meth lab, consisting of hypodermic syringes, a suction device and the ink bottles. They worked fine for the black ink (in fact, when it ran out, I filled a cartridge with Parker fountain pen ink several times thereafter and it worked fine), but for the colour ones they were so useless that after a couple of attempts I gave up. One or more of the colours simply wouldn't work after being refilled, however carefully I followed the instructions. I'm guessing that poor quality ink clogged the head.
This printer works differently: the black plus YCM inks are in separate cartridges, and the print head is built into the machine itself (and as far as I can establish, cannot easily be replaced), not the cartridges. My experience with the last one leads me to suspect that there has to be a gotcha with a kit like this. If it's just that the ink fades a bit more quickly and/or takes longer to dry than the genuine stuff, then I don't mind - photos can always be printed again. But I am worried about the possibility that the ink in these things might clog the head in the machine, thereby bricking the printer; though from searching online forums and stuff I can't find anyone who has reported this actually happening. The bottom line is that I'm more cagey about experimenting with refill kits on this printer: on the last one, the worst case scenario was having to throw away a cartridge I'd have thrown away anyway, admit defeat and buy a kosher one. But in this case the print head is not in the cartridge, and thus I cannot (easily, at any rate) just start again with a new print head if things don't work out.
Has anyone used a kit like this, and has positive or negative experiences to report? Many thanks in advance.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 11-16-2013 12:17 PM
I have tried a few commercial digital photo printing services, but formed the impression that they only really make sense if you're printing a large quantity of small (e.g. 6x4) images, and from JPEG files. When I've finished editing my pics in Photoshop, I usually have either a NEF + XMP combo if the original photo was taken with my Nikon D3200, or a PSD file if I took it on film and then scanned it.
Some commercial printing services will accept the PSDs, but I haven't come across any that'll accept NEF + XMP metadata.
Furthermore, this doesn't even make economic sense if you like to print 10x8s. A complete set of XL cartridges for our printer costs around $100 and will print around 100 10x8s. HP Premium Plus paper is around $35 for a pack of 50 sheets at Office Depot. Costco do a box of 150 sheets of their generic brand for $20 that to me looks almost as good - a little bit too glossy for my liking, but in a side-by-side comparison the contrast and density is almost identical. The only real drawback with the Costco stuff is that you need to leave the photos to dry for 2-3 days before framing or filing them, or else ink will stick to the surface it's in contact with.
Add to that the depreciation cost of the printer, and I reckon that the overall cost of printing a 10x8 at home is around $2 using brand name ink and paper. If this CISS kit lives up to its claims, then using it with brand name paper will reduce the cost to around $1-1.20, or with no-name paper to 60-80 cents. Most of the commercial digital printing services charge around $3. If you order them in bulk (e.g. you're a tourist and tell them to print the entire contents of your camera's memory card when you get back from vacation), 6x4s can be as little as 10-20 cents each, and I can see that this makes sense. But for 'serious' / 'prosumer' photographers, my experience is that home digital printing both gives you more control over the color grading of the image, and is cheaper.
Anyway, I took the plunge and ordered the CISS kit, and will be installing it when the current set of cartridges runs dry. A friend who knows someone who uses one reports that you should be prepared to get a bit messy, and to put up with your printer telling you that it's out of ink when it isn't, etc. etc., but that if you don't mind that and do lots of printing, they do work and you don't take a print quality hit. Watch this space.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 12-25-2013 10:44 AM
Update: installed the thing yesterday in preparation for printing multiple copies of Christmas family photos for people. And just in case things did go catastrophically wrong, I waited until the printer was over a year old and out of warranty. So far, first impressions are positive.
The two gotchas were: (1) no instructions with the kit whatsoever, not even the now familiar combination of cryptic diagrams and Chinglish text, and (2) it was a very messy installation process - my hands looked like Hannibal Lecter's on a bad day afterwards. If I ever install one of these kits again, I'll definitely wear a pair of cotton or latex gloves afterwards (cotton would probably be better, as it would absorb the leak rather than transfer the ink to another surface).
Removing the caps and installing the air filter valves in their place caused a lot of ink leakage, probably because of pressure that had built up from the contents of the ink reservoirs shaking around while in transit, and/or expansion and contraction. But once that was cleared up, there have been no leaks since. From there on in, the installation was pretty much common sense.
Before I removed the genuine HP cartridges for the last time, I printed a photo, and then printed the same one, on the same type of paper, as my first print with the CISS. It'll be interesting to compare them for dye fading in a year's time.
Apart from that, the only annoyance is the constant "You are using counterfeit cartridges! If you think you've been sold genuine ones, you must call us, the FBI, Kim Jong Un and anyone else we tell you to" ... "Are you SURE you want to print using these cartridges? Selling your first born daughter into child prostitution would be less evil" popup messages that appear whenever I try to print anything. Thankfully this is only in Windows, though - I can print from Ubuntu without getting that crap.
Still, the first few prints with the CISS look to my eyes as good as the genuine HP cartridges, at around 8x the ink cost, gave me previously. Time will tell as to whether it's a success in the long term. But my overall impression is that if you're prepared to get a bit messy and do a bit of faffing, these things do what they say on the tin.
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David Buckley
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 525
From: Oxford, N. Canterbury, New Zealand
Registered: Aug 2004
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posted 12-25-2013 05:16 PM
Hi Leo, I've been using CISS systems for several years, with mixed results. In New Zealand we have what is almost a retail presence, Melco Technologies who have some guides and vids on their site. (no connection other than as a satisfied customer)
My current installation is on a Brother MFC-5840CN, which has been running CISS from new. Its now got a bit over 12K prints on the clock, albeit mostly plain paper rather than photos, and worked perfectly up till I let it run out of black ink, and despite much purging and things, its never been the same since. I think its time for a new printer.
Despite me saying it was working "perfectly", I think "acceptably" is probably a better term: the print quality isn't as good as it is with official Brother inks and cartridges, but good enough for plain paper prints, and for the cost savings over Brother inks.
This is the second Brother MFC I've used CISS with, the first was a late retrofit in its life, but it got chucked when I upgraded to a better MFC.
The Brother machines are good for CISS retrofit as they have fixed tanks in the side of the printer, so the plumbing is simple, and neat(ish), and doesn't involve getting covered in ink. Pic below. The other CISS was a retrofit onto the daughters Cannon something or other, which has moving tanks on the head, and never worked at all well.
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 12-26-2013 07:22 PM
For work I would rather advice to get some machine from Xerox or Kyocera. Those machines are expensive (and are available in lease), but at least you pay reasonable prices for the consumables. For home, this is obviously overkill.
But, if you have a girlfriend that does all kinds of graphic design at home, like I do, you're going trough freight trains of ink cartridges... I also considered such a CISS "retrofit" a while back, but seeing this, I'm happy I made another decision: I've bought an Epson C1100 color laser printer for home. While this thing is rather bulky, I didn't regret that decision:
- It's a simple LAN printer, so no wireless printing or even cloud printing crap, just hook it up to a real Ethernet connection.
- The printer isn't some 500 Megabyte colossus that comes with all kinds of bells and whistles nobody uses.
- It prints on cheap multi-purpose paper (ink jets need special paper so your ink doesn't bleed).
- Toners do last much longer than those ink cartridges and there are decent third-party toners available that cost the same as I would normally pay for a single color HP ink cartridge.
If you want to print high-quality photo albums, then a high-end inkjet, together with some premium photo paper will probably get you better results, but I'm rather happy with the results I'm getting.
There is just one small catch: After about 20k pages your printer starts to claim that photoconductor is no good anymore. That can be solved with a "reset chip", available on eBay for a few bucks. We've probably done another 20,000 prints since this "reset" and the same photoconductor is still producing crisp prints. And if it finally gives way, there are replacement drums available for a fraction of the price that Epson wants for it.
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