Here is the problem with 3rd party ink.
I was an Epson Authorized Dealer and Service Center from about 1985
until we closed our stores in 2001. We were the largest Epson Service
Center in Texas for many years because of our volume. I had companies
ship me pallets of printers that their customers had brought to them for
service. For a long time, I was doing the Epson printer repairs for
CompUSA.
Ink is ink is ink... Wrong. When you print there are several things that
have to happen. Ink must freely flow from the cartridge to the printhead
and out the nozzels of the printhead. Once the ink is on the paper, it
must dry quickly so it will not smear when the next sheet hits on top.
When using specialty papers to print photos, you want them to look just
like a real photo. If you use 3rd party ink, who knows how the pigments
will look.
Epson uses piezo electric printheards. It heats the ink until there is a
bubble that basically bursts making the bubble leave the printhead and
hit the paper (something like 1440 dots per inch...real tiny bubbles ...
.Don Ho). Epson does two things in their ink. They add a drying agent
and a lubricant. That is why you never clean a printhead with alcohol.
Alcohol is not a cleaner but a drying agent. I still have a quart of the
Epson cleaning solution to unclog printheads. Most of the time it works,
sometimes not.
When you purchase 3rd party ink, you get what you get. Sometimes very
little lubricant, sometimes too much drying agent. Who knows. You use it
at your own risk. The manufacturer does not want to replace printheads
all day long when people use the wrong ink. So, they have had to get
creative... the chip. I do not know how HP, Canon, Lexmark, etc
formulate their ink. Epson gets 55 gallon drums of it and then fills the
itsy bitsy ink cartridges. I am sure that the 55 gallon drum costs
peanuts compared to the price of the ink that is in the cartridge. In
fact they probably make as much on the cartridges from one 55 gallon
drum as most of us make in a year from our job.
Inkjet Printer Ink 101 :-)
73...bruce
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