How well do your refill inks hold up vs. the 25 yr inks the oems are providing?


I couldn't give an estimate on the longevity of the inks. I'm not in that field. I'm sure the tests have been ran, hell, I KNOW they have, as I've played with the tools, but I just wasn't interested enough to remember. I've got enough on my plate without worrying about those.

Concerning the quality of the inks, I use them personally. But I'm not going to give anything more than my personal impressions. Color matching is very important, but I can't claim 100% perfection. It's 98-99% in my opinion. The ONLY way to get that is to use the exact same formulations as the OEM's... and that is not possible due to patent issues. And you can be certain that they are NOT going to license it to ANYONE. One of the better ways around that that is being explored (as well as getting around the chips on the epson carts) is alternate drivers. Most of the drivers that come with printers get stripped down pretty well. Plus they aren't updated as the newer printers come on line. We've been working with some people that produce a heck of a lot better driver than the older drivers that are out there. That allows for a color matching to PANTONE standards. Plus, based on the early driver I played with, it allows a better print quality on older printers. For example, I've also got an HP 660 that printed 'ok' in photographic mode. With the new driver instead of the HP one, it's ALMOST as good as my 990. With the OEM HP driver, it's not even close. It's in the interests of the OEM to keep you upgrading the equipment.

A cool example in the Linux world is the Turboprint.de guys. Ghostscript and GIMP can give a pretty good image, but when you look at the quality coming out of their print engine, it's a fair amount better.