Some cool Ink Refill Kits images:
CISS – Day 304 of Project 365
Image by purplemattfish
16/06/09
A few weeks ago I bought a continuous ink supply system (CISS) for my new Epson PX700W printer. I have used many different ink systems for years, ranging from refill kits to primitive CISS systems. Back then they were messy prone to air locks and I seemed to spend more time priming the system that actually printing with it!
This is a slightly more modern system, it comes with around 100ml of ink in each colour, that’s the equivalent of about 20 cartridges in each colour or 120 cartridges in total! I would like to pretend that I purchased this entirely for environmental reasons but it’s really a cost saving exercise. The system consists of a piggy back cartridge set, this goes inside the printer where the cartridges would normally go. There is also a set of much larger reservoir tanks that sit on the desk by the side of the printer. The two parts are joined by a length of silicone tubing that joins each of the cartridges ( 6 in this printer) to the reservoir tank.
Fitting is fairly simple, I opted to cut some plastic off the printer to get an almost perfect fit, otherwise the printer lid sticks up slightly more than it does in this shot.
Today I ran off about 300 full colour A4 pages for a customer, using Epson ink that would have used 4 black cartridges and at least 1 of each colour. Based on current market prices that would have cost over £90… which is almost twice the cost of the CISS system! Plus I’ve used only a fraction of the ink in the system. I have now printed about 2000 pages with the printer, 500 or so full colour (photos and very ink intensive stuff) the rest is invoices and customer letters with a colour logo or red final demand letters 
Problems that I have seen with non genuine ink systems are mainly print quality and colour problems. If the ink is not mechanically the same as the genuine ink this can lead to over inking, ink starvation or blockage of the print head none of these is pretty! So far this system doesn’t seem to have any of those problems. Colour can be subjective and varies from printer to printer, but overall the colour is very similar (for my purposes) to the genuine ink. The black ink seems to bleed slightly more than genuine ink, but that could be more down to the print media I’m using.
I have a couple of prints on the windowsill to see how the colour fades in uv light, but after a couple of weeks there has not been much change.
Here ends my opinion on this subject ;D
Lightroom: autolevels, saturation +12, sharpen, save to JPG
Inks, Stamps, More Embossing, embellishments
Image by Shopping Diva
Where most of my inks and current stamp sets are kept.
