In my last post I praised my new Epson SP1500W printer. The downside is the cost of ink. With the first set of cartridges I kept a tally of the number of prints made, ignoring the occasional document which doesn’t use much ink. The colours ran out at different times but the average was the equivalent of 20 A3 prints per cartridge. At nearly £90 for for a set of all 6 colours this works out at £4.50 per print, so I decided to investigate non-Epson inks. I was tempted by the continuous flow ink systems but they seem very complicated and I found a system of refillable ink cartridges from a company called Ink Express (www.inkexpress.co.uk). This cost £50 for the empty cartridges, syringes for filling them and 6 bottles (100ml) of ink, which is equivalent to over £700 of Epson ink.
So what are they like? Filling needs care but is not too difficult – surgical gloves are useful in case of spills. The colours are not a perfect match, I think the one with the biggest difference is the light cyan, which happened to be the one I changed first. Different inks ran out at different times which was inconvenient as I had to keep tweaking the colour balance of images to get correct prints. Now that all the inks have been replaced, there is a slight red bias, which shouldn’t be a problem once I’ve got printer profiles made, which is the next step. It remains to be seen how colour-fast the prints are.
Problems? The printer sometimes refuses to recognise the cartridge, which can usually be cured by removing the cartridge and replacing it. It happened once though in the middle of a print, so that print was scrap. There have been some teething problems which were more to do with the printer than the ink system. I managed to get air into the print head, which causes blocked nozzles, and then did too many head cleaning cycles, which caused further problems. It’s important not to remove and replace a cartridge until prompted by the printer, otherwise it doesn’t do its ink charging process.
Since buying these inks I’ve found an alternative supplier – www.marrutt.co.uk – which stocks 2 different ink brands, their own, and Lyson, which are claimed to be more long-lasting.
Footnote: I’ve had so many problems with these refillable cartridges that I’ve discarded them and gone back to conventional disposable ones. There’s a later post expanding on this.