Ink sources?

[pbromaghin]

It seems the manufacturers have a tight enough grip on the market that there isn't really all that much difference in price from one retailer to another. Ink goes through my Canon 9000 like beer at a frat party, but I don't know enough to trust any 3rd party ink. Where do you find ink at a reasonable price??

 

[jtk]

It seems the manufacturers have a tight enough grip on the market that there isn't really all that much difference in price from one retailer to another. Ink goes through my Canon 9000 like beer at a frat party, but I don't know enough to trust any 3rd party ink. Where do you find ink at a reasonable price??

I buy direct from Canon. Free shipping perfect service. The saving is no $ for shipping.

 

[pbromaghin]

JTK - thank you. I'll check that out.

 

[Patrick Robert James]

Precision Color makes inks that you reload yourself. If you go that route you can save a bundle. Personally I always cringe when I turn on the printer and hear it whirring away, knowing that moolah is getting flushed....

 

[pbromaghin]

Precision Color makes inks that you reload yourself. If you go that route you can save a bundle. Personally I always cringe when I turn on the printer and hear it whirring away, knowing that moolah is getting flushed....

Thank you. I just checked out the Precision Colors website. How messy is it to do, and what level of tools/kits do you use or recommend? What about flushing the cartridge before refilling? I see people online say that the colors are a good match for for the original Canon, but do you have any idea how well the ink lasts/fades?

 

[Mainecoonmaniac]

I use this vendor for my Canon Pro 100. The colors are different than my OEM inks, but once I got my printer calibrated, it's pretty good in.
https://www.precisioncolors.com/

 

[jtk]

Famous 3rd party pigments killed two pro epsons and wasted weeks of time, many times.. thats why I switched to Canon Pro10 (pigment). I've ignored it for many weeks in the dry Southwest and done a grand total of one simple cleaning cycle in five years and that was years ago. No wasted pigment, no grief, no downtime.

I don't mind paying for the real thing.

If I ever need a bigger printer it sure as hell won't be an Epson...only a Canon pigment machine and only OEM Canon pigment.

 

[jim10219]

I throw the cheap, 3rd party inks in my tiny, desktop printer. They often fail (say they're out of ink before they are) and have ruined print heads before. On a tiny printer, it's worth the gamble for me. Especially if you're not printing serious photography. At 1/3rd the price of the real deal, the savings is pretty significant. And those tiny printers are cheap. I got my current one for under a dollar (thrift store find). It's not even that old.

On my large format printers, I won't use anything but the real stuff. Those things are way too expensive and delicate to risk on cheap ink.

A Canon Pro 9000 is kind of on the boarder for me. If it were old enough that I could afford to lose it, then I'd be willing to try some cheap ink in it. I can't recommend a brand, because every time it seems like a brand works for me, I go to reorder and find that the new ones don't work like the last ones did. So I wind up constantly switching brands looking for one that is cheap enough and reliable enough to make it worth while.

By the way, if you think your ink is expensive, my Epson P9000's ink cartridges costs over $2,500 to replace all of the ink cartridges! That's 10 cartridges at a little over $250 a piece (for 700ml). Granted, they last forever.

 

[pbromaghin]

Oh, gee. What a mess.

 

[jtk]

Oh, gee. What a mess.

It's a miracle.