Canon Pro-2000 PFI-1700 refillable carts and ink experiences?

[Mcm30114]

Ok, dangerous question here.  I’ve searched the forum with no hits, so I gotta ask.

Any One have any experiences with refillable cartridges and non-Canon ink?  Is the fidelity there? Any reliable resources? I see references to sites with “American made ink” (??) and the obvious searching on Amazon / EBay / Alibaba gives some interesting hits for refillable carts, chips, and ink.

Carts seem to be somewhat generic and easily purchased.  Other than the chip in the cart, there does not seem to be any other special sauce there. (Correct me if I’m wrong please)

So, base question is — is there any non-canon ink that you have found to be reliable, not harmful to the printer, quality made, and would use for test prints if not production prints?

Same question for the Maintenance Cart?  (Seems like an expensive waste catcher to me).

Thanks in advance

Mike

[John Nollendorfs]

Mike:
Rather than mess with 3rd party inks, which there is no reliable data for, why not buy the inks in carts for the larger Canon printers, and then refill into your smaller refillable carts?  That is if it's worth your effort and mess and time to do.

[Mcm30114]

John,

Thanks for the reply.  When you mention “larger print cartridges”, which ones are you referring to? The PFI sets (160ml, 330ml, 700ml) are for the 2000/4000/6000 printers.  Are there larger ink carts to consider?

It seems that anything outside of those three commercial sets is not being supplied by Canon ( as expected ).

My experiences with non-OEM ink for a more domestic (home) printer that was a typical CMYK printer was that it was sufficient for “scratch” work, but was noticeably off color when used. This was over 10 years ago.

  I would expect that photographic printing would need a more “dependable” and “to-spec” ink for consistency. It may be the case that the non-OEM ink manufacturers will have formulated something much closer to the OEM spec — given that this is several years later (again, in my experience).

I like that Canon did not go through major contortions on their ink supply carts.  It seems you can get the refillable ones (slightly translucent) for a decent price from offshore manufacturers. (Still, $25 for an empty plastic bottle is expensive, but cheaper than a full PFI-1700 cart).  Now, its a question to see what the risks are in using non-OEM inks (damage to the print head? Clogging of pumps? Color fidelity of the pigments?)

So, any direct experiences (good or bad) are welcomed.

Thanks

Mike