Get our Latest Finds
Subscribe to our RSS feed or enter your email address below to get the feed delivered to you by email:
Follow Gizmo
Using this Site
Top Rated
Gizmo's Freeware is Recruiting
We are currently looking for people with skills and/or interest in the following areas:
- Rootkit Scanner and Remover
- Web Browser for Android
If this sounds like you then click here for more details
Continuous Ink System (CIS)
I have had my continuous ink system for well over a year now for my Epson Stylus PHOTO R240. The results are excellent and the running costs are peanuts. Installation can be a bit awkward and following the instructions is essential or you will have one hell of mess on your hands. The system I bought was from that wonderful site 'EBay' and it was from Hong Kong. It came with full vessels of ink and at that time cost around £50 (aprox $99). They seem to have grown now in popularity and the prices seem to have fallen and their availability has increased along with top-up inks.
You can see the tube/ribbon running along the carriage way to the cartridges
This offers a closer view
The outfit came with the 4 cartridges linked together and attached to each cartridge was a tube system in a ribbon, which was attached to a plastic clear vessel with 4 inkwells and colors. You have to ensure that the tube/ribbon can run freely across the carriage (this has to be ensure that the tube/ribbon) without snagging and the instructions show you where to place certain stick-on-clips inside the printer. Once it is all in place and you've managed to negotiate the carriage problem just turn your printer on.
Epson and the other printer manufacturers like to ensure that you buy there inks! So of course the main obstacle is to ensure the chip that is attached the ink cartridges keeps renewing itself. It does this very well and in Epson's inevitable spirit of ownership it will so often ask you if you really want to use the junk ink as its not a proper Epson ink cartridge. “Yes, I do, as yours is too dam expensive, my pocket doesn't allow me to spend £200 ($396) in 6 months on inks!” I just think its an outrage that I should be told what inks I should buy, I know the reasons why and I know the expense! I am not sure how the law stands in the UK or the US about the legality of making chips that work with Epson and other manufacturers printers or how this information is obtained by ink manufacturers, but if I just make an assumption that I doubt it pleases them. I bet that someone will enlighten me in the comment boxes below. Do the ink companies buy the rights to the chip information? After the Epson alert I then ran the head cleaning mode, did the alignments on the printer heads and it worked!
Here are the inkwells. I left them nearly empty to show the colors and sizing better.
Nothing to it, or so I thought. This is where I had trouble, I couldn't understand why my ink was running away without using it. Within a day my inks were practically empty. After a few emails to the seller in Hong Kong we established that I had the inkwells too high and gravity was just letting the inks poor out and the bottom of the printer was soaked! Problem was resolved by putting the inkwells at the same level as the printer, on the table. Not where I wanted it, but it had to be and after that it has been running like a dream.
I run a village Photography club and I produce several prints once a month and these are not to be put on a wall or prints for professional show, just printed for that occasion. I also make my own cards, print loads of letters, the occasional email and take information from the internet by the bucket load, especially recipes. Just as an added note the best recipe book you will ever have now is the internet. These inks are not very permanent, therefore photographs only last for about a year before they get too faded. If I need something more permanent then I will get a company to print them for me, but that is rare. You can obtain more expensive pigment inks that will give you that permanence. So, if you are printing a large number of images for more longevity this is still an excellent system that can reduce your costs considerably. I am talking pennies/cents here. I bought 2000ml of refills from Ebay at £32 ($63) and haven't touch much of it despite the large amount of printing I do.
There are more professional CIS systems out there and inks. Which is the best one would take a lot of research, buying and trying. I am willing to do this if someone is rich enough to buy me all the equipment. --- No contenders then? But, if you are looking to bring down your printing costs this is an excellent way to achieve it. I haven't regretted it.
There is a snag in this and that is if the printer is new, you don't use the proper inks and you do install the CIS your guarantee becomes invalid. The paperwork you get from the sellers tell you to keep the original ink cartridges for this reason. Also there is no guarantee that a CIS system has been made for your model of printer, this must be due to chip problems I guess. Shop around and do your homework before buying. Do you want cheap or professional? I know I have to go cheap and this does the job very, very well. The last comment I will make is that the inks are in a clear plastic container and I put a box over the inks to stop the light bleaching the colour out. That is a tip I hadn't seen on the piece of instruction from the seller, but I did it instinctually and found out later that I was right to do this. There is one big bonus, that is you will never run out of ink because you can always see the amout you have left.
If you have a CIS on your printer let us know about it and your experiences. Mine is only one experience and I know that there are some different ones out there good and bad. If you can give the information of where you bought it and costs it would help others.
Tony
5th April 2010 - This is a PS as this is still here and so is my printer and CIS. It is still going strong and I paid for a load of inks back in 2008 and have yet to use half the amount I paid for as you can see from above how much that cost me.
September 12th 2010
Alas my Epson has given up the ghost and that is very sad. A brilliant printer that NEVER let me down until yesterday. I have now got to look out for another printer. But at the moment money is tight, therefore, it shall have to be put on the back burner. I still have half a box of inks left and the CIS is still working well. The carriage has broken and as all things in the modern age its cheaper to replace it than repair. Its a stupid attitude the modern society has when the environment is more important.
When(?) I get my new printer I certainly shall be looking for another CIS because its is dam cheap to run. Anyone that doesn't have one has too much money to burn. The environmental impact is less on the CIS as well.
Has anyone else put a system in because of this editorial? Would love to know
- Article type:
Printer-friendly version
Comments
I Have just installed a CIS on my HP Photosmart B109n.
I have found from my beginners perspective it is rather tedious & difficult.
I purchased new cartridges and used these to test the printer was working correctly.
I then installed the CIS which came with an installation cd but wasnt relevant to my model. Youtube helped me here, as i only needed to install two clips, & totally ignore the long bar supplied.
The system prints ok but there are two issues i cannot for the life of my resolve.
1. The ink in the CIS must be different from the HP ink, and doesnt like my photopaper. If i tell the printer to print to photopaper i get my picture behind what looks like a smoke screen. If i tell it to print to plain paper i get the best print i have seen on plain paper but it lacks definition due to the nature of the print. I am loathed to purchase a variety of photo paper only to find my assumptions about it being the paper are wrong.
2. Large amounts of skin tones in any picture will develop lines starting half way down the page and get worse until the end of the page. I have tried head cleaning, manual cleaning of the head, raising and lowering the supply tank. Sometimes the page will finish yellow, other times green.
its frustrating as i'm a computer engineer and service dot matrix & laserjet printers often!
any help appreciated
R280 printer Winsow 7 OS.
Just installed CIS.
At first showed no ink.
Lots middl nite hours b4 declared defeat.
As normal manual not be Enlish fluent person.
However viese on line video & online text instructiosn several times.
Next morning tech walked me thru process not included anywhere else.
Then ink showed.
Unfortunately hour or so later discoverd wouldnt print yellow or black, only red or blue, even tho CIS cartridge showed ink.
Too late to recontact tech until tomorrow.
Otherwise cidnt seem complicated set up.
I am planning to buy Epson Arisan 50, currently unavailable, I guess bcs Japan disaster.
Have been advised, best to use original ink b4 changing to CIS, which plan to do.
Has anyone else encountered the problem of some colors not printing ????
82 year old female, been into computers since first 1981 TI which barely more than a toy connected to TV. Very little software then, it was type line by line.
I enjoyed your comments on your experiences with a CIS system and completely agree with what you said about how much better cost wise and even quality wise it is to install a CIS. I run Epson printers and bought a 1400 model refurbished for my wife sometime ago. We paid $149.00 for the printer from Epson and liked it so much we sent for another as a backup. So far her printer is putting out gorgeous full page color prints and we have yet to need a cleaning cycle as my wife prints daily, sometimes 40 or more prints a day. Needless to say we could not afford to do this as a hobby buying the twenty dollar cartridges from Epson. We have found that the "damper" type CIS systems works the best in our opinion and I found two good sources for the inks and equipment. The first I tried is called Ink Republic and the one I finally went with it called InkJetCarts. Both are fine and supportive sites and people but the latter one is also the most cost effective selling a 120mil bottle of "Claria type" dye based ink for just $5.50 and it works beautifully. Both sell the same damper type CIS and also "refillable damper type Cartridges. I like Epson inks but see little if any difference in the resulting prints and the cost difference is amazing! Personally, I think Epson would be smart to adjust their ink costs closer to something more inline with reality and especially in these changing economic times but thats just me I guess! Right now I'm helping my daughter with an Epson C88+ printer she has so I have my windex and cleaning tools at the ready! I really like the peizo non thermal print heads that Epson makes, they seem to be really forgiving of goof ups and more durable than the thermal heads. Running a thermal head dry is begging for a burned out head and usually means a trip to the store for a brand new printer as you know but is just a temporary glitch with an Epson! I try to learn what I can about printing with these amazing tools and it helps me support my hobby and my wife's artistic bent. She has been what is called a fine artist in all mediums for over 26 years. Thanks again for your venue, I have enjoyed reading the other comments. One more thing, we have found the Costco Kirkland photo papers to be really a good combination with the set up and I was surprised at an experiment I did with a photograph. I heard that the dye based ink would run if it got wet so one day just to see what would happen I took a print that didn't come out as I wanted and put it in the sink and not only ran water over it but took a paper towel and scrubbed the print as the water flowed over it. Nothing happened! That print dried perfect and was as good as it was before! It taught me the importance of using the right papers as well as the right ink. I hope my comments have been informative to the others in the venue! Regards JJM
For an excellent all-round printer, the Epson Stylus C88+ has served me well for over 9 years. It uses 4 colors (Bk,Y,R,Bl) so photographer purist may want a printer with more colors. Right after buying my printer I installed a CIS auto refill system. I agree with an earlier post that you want the cartridges to be sponge free. I have had absolutely no problems with this system and I use my printer for college, printing photos, and daily letters, etc. You will save a ton of money using a CIS!
HI, I wanted to share my experience.
I have an Epson Artisan 50 fitted with a continuous ink system made by KingJet (www.king-jet.com). The system was fitted professionally for me by the store that sold the printer (I bet Epson don't know about THAT).
I have been running the printer for about a year now. About once a week, the printer thinks it has run out of ink in one or more of the cartridges, and tells me I need to replace it. I do this by pressing a switch on top of the CIS system in the printer, and then save myself (all figures in Canadian dollars) $24. By this reckoning I have saved around 24*52=1250 dollars, compared with the cost of the CIS system which was $70. The cost of a years supply of inks, 6 half-litre bottles, is around $100, so I reckon I've saved around $1000 dollars on printing costs. That's not peanuts. Incidentally, even on bulk inks, there is a huge variation on price - savvy computer stores buy the big bottles, fill small bottles, and charge you ten times the bulk price - it STILL LOOKS CHEAP COMPARED TO MANUFACTURERS CARTRIDGES - shop around - easy on the internet.
The system is NOT without problems:
(1) I find that during the periods when I need to be away, I have to set up a program to print at least one sheet a day in order to keep the nozzles clean. (I use the free software "MIS Autoprint" - www.inksupply.com - , which comes with purge-patterns for different styles of printers).
(2) I also have to run the "Head Cleaning" utility much more often (almost daily) than if I was using the original cartridges, but as the ink is so cheap, that doesn't matter.
(3) As the system has aged, I find that I am suffering from air in the print cartridges, which means they sometimes stop printing altogether. This is easily cured, by using a syringe to withdraw air from the top of the cartridges, but it is annoying.
So my verdict is that a system like this WILL save you money if you print a lot. However, it is not trouble free, you will have to invest time in keeping it running smoothly.
Incidentally, I was greatly helped in diagnosing and fixing printer problems by a free booklet written and distributed by Arthur Entlich. This doesn't appear to be available by download, but Art doesn't mind people emailing him and asking for help - his email is "e-printerhelp" then an "at sign" and lastly "shaw.ca"
Hope this is of some help.
Ink-Rat.
This is a PS to item (3).
This was my own fault. I had punctured one of the plugs in the ink head. Once I sealed the leak, no more weekly problems. (cross fingers) the systems been running very smoothly for around two weeks now.
It's a pity printer manufacturers aren't required by law to have 'built-in' continuous ink systems. It would help the environment as well as the consumers wallet. It's seems ridiculous that they are allowed get away with it. How would it be if people had to put new oil in cars every 10 miles? What a racket they have going.
i've been wanting to buy a CIS system for printing grocery coupons(yes, sounds silly but you wouldn't believe how much free or almost free food you can get)....only thing is i don't know which brand or model of printer to buy because i don't need a high-quality photo printer that uses a ton of ink, just need an efficient wireless printer that does a decent job...
does anyone have any suggestions?
I have not seen one of these gadgets but it sounds good. I will be looking for something like that myself.
I found ebay the cheapest. Don't get anything with sponges, it has to be a direct feed
Thanks for your comments hallie, I just took out the advertising you left. But you are right it is more eco-friendly
Tony
I would be more eager to try this new continuous ink system, it was about time for this new feature to show up. Besides lower costs, it is also more eco-friendly as you don't have to replace the cartridges on your printer, you just have to supply the ink.
Post new comment