CIS for your printer, affects Digi Negs?

Hi all,

Am looking to purchase a printer to mainly do Digi Negs and wondering if anyone has CIS installed? What type of CIS do you have? The blocking range from manufacturers pigment/dye to CIS would be a definite factor.
Thanks
Jag2x

I have no experience with digital negatives, but you may find that many of the after market pigment inks have a smaller dot gain than the Epson inks, so you might see some banding. Also some of the printers do not have a strong enough motor driving the heads to haul the tubing, which again can show up as banding.

I have not played with any CIS for the new Epson dye ink printers, so I don't know if that ink is worthwhile, or how the printers deal with the CIS. I do have an Ink Republic CIS on my CX6600 at work, and it does a credible job with Image Specialists pigment inks installed. I've printed reams of paper, but mostly manuals for things, not photos. It does do a decent job on the few photos that I've printed even though it is only a 4 color printer (using mostly only 3 colors for photos).

Sorry I can't help with your question more than this.

jag2x said:

Hi all,

Am looking to purchase a printer to mainly do Digi Negs and wondering if anyone has CIS installed? What type of CIS do you have? The blocking range from manufacturers pigment/dye to CIS would be a definite factor.
Thanks
Jag2x

Click to expand...

What printer do you wish to use CIS on?

Don Bryant

Thanks for the info Greg.

Don, I rather get peoples experience on what printer they've used as I havent decided on any yet. Be it Canon or Epson, I dont think i'll be looking at the HP range. I used to go down the imagesetter route but my current printer company decided to get rid of their imagesetter, I used to output at 1200 dpi on their machine. Dont know how good a match it is today's modern printers.
Though I rather just cut costs if I can go down the CIS route instead of buying the ink cartridges from the manufacturer's.
At the moment the minimum requirement is that needs to be able to print at A4.

jag2x said:

Thanks for the info Greg.

Don, I rather get peoples experience on what printer they've used as I havent decided on any yet. Be it Canon or Epson, I dont think i'll be looking at the HP range. I used to go down the imagesetter route but my current printer company decided to get rid of their imagesetter, I used to output at 1200 dpi on their machine. Dont know how good a match it is today's modern printers.
Though I rather just cut costs if I can go down the CIS route instead of buying the ink cartridges from the manufacturer's.
At the moment the minimum requirement is that needs to be able to print at A4.

Click to expand...

It's been my experience that CIS systems are a pain in the ass, but I haven't tried the Ink Jet Republic's version which I understand comes highly rated by those that know (like Helen Bach - it's been my experience that if Helen recommends something you cab take it to the bank so to speak).

Also it has been my experience that non OEM have a tendency to clog sooner or later. so I think the best sttrategy is to purchase large OEM carts, suck the ink out and refill your own carts or transfer the contents to the ink bottles of a CIS system. Somewhere on Hybrid I posted a link to an interesting CIS system. You may wish to look for that link.

Don

jag2x said:

Thanks for the info Greg.

Don, I rather get peoples experience on what printer they've used as I havent decided on any yet. Be it Canon or Epson, I dont think i'll be looking at the HP range. I used to go down the imagesetter route but my current printer company decided to get rid of their imagesetter, I used to output at 1200 dpi on their machine. Dont know how good a match it is today's modern printers.
Though I rather just cut costs if I can go down the CIS route instead of buying the ink cartridges from the manufacturer's.
At the moment the minimum requirement is that needs to be able to print at A4.

Click to expand...

Epson now has refurbed 3800s on their N. Ameriacan web store for $995. This sounds like a good deal to me.

Don Bryant

You are not likely to find a "good" CIS for most Canon or HP printers. Te way the head is designed can make it very difficult to balance between working and dripping ink all over. The piezo heads in the Epson printers work much better for this.

The Ink Republic CIS is the closest thing that you can get to the way that Epson designs their large format printers without actually stepping on any patent issues, that is one reason why it works so well.

A few years back I set up quite a few epsons (1-2000,2-1270,4-1280 and a 1290) with the MIS CFSs (CIS). The quality seemed on par with oem, one printer was a 6 ink monochrome system which worked reasonably well and had no comparison other than wet and then not really. Ink savings were immense. At the time the systems cost ~200.00 v. 75.00 for a ful set of carts that were, id guess, about 1/50 the volume. The only down side was that the pig inks for the 2000 went bad (clumped up) if not in constant use (this may have been fixed) and the epson 1270/80/90's printers varied wildly in quality 3 of the 7 died early non ink related deaths, and two more died from too many cleaning cycles (if your 12x0 lives long enough it will ultimately die from this). I eventually found a Russian web site which had tools for hacking the epson's and allowed you to over ride the death by ink cleaning cycles and other issues.

One thing I never did with my epson conversions is make negatives.

In the future I will by a CFS/CIS for which ever printers I own work around any short comings the savings is simply too large to ignore. I may not buy epson though as their QA is pathetic.