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Added on: 5/6/2009 13:56
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    Beware of Third Party Inks

    So, the other bank holiday weekend I spent some time trying to fix a problem with my Epson Stylus Photo 950. Clearly it isn't a current model, and it had been out of use for a significant period of time, spurred back into life by my new camera and desire to print piccies I'd taken with it.

    After struggling a fair bit to get the ink flowing properly again, everything was fine. The prints it made where still stunning, so no point replacing it just yet. Combined with the fact I could get official Epson inks off ebay for not far off the same price as third party ones, my desire to keep this going for a while has been high.

    But it wasn't perfect, intermittently at the end of any edge to edge print, whether it be 6 x 4" or full A4, it would do a nasty horrible black smear suddenly rendering the entire thing useless. So I tried a few things, like placing toilet paper underneath the printer head and lowering/raising it to remove any excess stuff sitting around there. It didn't help.

    So I found an official service manual somewhere on the net, downloaded it, and spent a good few hours carefully following the steps to dismantle pretty much all of it just to get to the print head. At that point I cleaned all of that area, making sure it was free from ink, then put the whole thing back together again thankful that it all still worked seemingly as well as before I started.

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    Only the smear problem still existed, which after downloading and reading the manual, I found out might be due to the paper thickness and was easily fixed by adjusting the paper selector to the envelope setting. Which worked, since then no smears, so I guess the lesson here is obvious. If the Internet offers no solution to your problem, perhaps the reason is because all those with it read the manual before asking for help.

    Still, I now know far more about how my printer works if it ever does go wrong. Still, the other half also has an Epson printer, I forget which model but it too is an individual inks model (maybe they almost all are now?) which does CD printing and edge to edge stuff, but perhaps not the things like paper cutting, roll feeding, front feeding and other stuff I haven't actually ever used, that mine is capable of.

    So we decided to compare the quality of the two, mine with the official Epson inks I have only ever bought, comparing them with the third party somewhat cheaper versions on offer, as used for years by someone who never printed out much photographs so didn't see the point in spending £15 a time on what is in all seriousness a ridiculously tiny amount of ink for the money.

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    After some fiddling, using third party paper with the third party inks as that worked best, we came to the conclusion that they were actually very good quality wise. You'd be hard pushed to tell the difference from looking at the output. But I had read that third party inks fade quicker, so for a long term investment, which is after all the point of printing anything out in the first place, may be a false economy.

    Enter our ad-hoc test, which involved taking printouts of a test image for both the third party and the official inks, placing them by the french windows where one of the brightest weeks of the year so far would stream sun onto half of each example. As a mask we used the A4 box of photo paper to obscure 50% of each print, thus beginning the experiment that in all honesty I thought would take weeks to show any results.

    Shockingly, a mere one week in the sun was enough to fade the third party print to such a noticeable level that nobody would find it acceptable. The official Epson inks had not faded at all. Proof below, Epson inks are the first one (obviously).

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    I guess the lesson here is, if you are printing photographs out to keep, then stick with the official inks and get yourself a Cartridge Re-setter that will let you use them until they are really empty, rather than until Epson's gadgetry claims they are empty. And any you have printed with third party inks already, keep them well out of the light if you want them to last.


    This Week's Videos



    Firstly an amazing CGI short entitled Fallen Art, which ticks numerous boxes such as bizarre, twisted, dark, humorous, sad and funny.



    And secondly, who says you need a proper drum kit to make a good beat. Which reminds me, one day I really must go and see Stomp.

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