dennis wrote:My wife tends toward the view that you get what you pay for & if I want Epson quality I should pay Epson prices.
There's probably a great deal of truth in this. Epson ink prices
are horrendous, but IMHO their ink is unsurpassed in quality (at least on Epson's printers), let's face it, the sheer quality of inkjet printing we enjoy today is only due to the innovations of Epson who have basically revolutionised inkjet photo printing, Canon and HP were only playing catchup until just recently. Interestingly, on my paper of choice the HP pigment inks are the longest lasting by a country mile!
I personally wouldn't consider buying third party inks for my printer and not because I was afraid of damaging the head, but because I believe the OEM inks are better. The reason for this I believe is that they spend millions and millions on research and development just on
ink, they're a huge company and can afford and justify doing so. Smaller companies like Lyson and Fotospeed et al have a far more limited ability in that respect. This doesn't mean I would consider their product poor quality, quite the contrary, but I do not believe them to be at the level of Epson and the other OEMs.
How close are they? That's the problem, we've no way of knowing, any evaluation is subjective as there are still no standardised tests. The closest we have is the excellent work of Henry Wilhelm and his institute (WIR), who perform independent longevity testing and have pioneered most of the methods of evaluating that kind of thing, most of which are now being converted into an ISO standard so these things can be reliability evaluated. Interestingly the OEMs (Epson, Canon, HP) have their inks tested by WIR (whether voluntarily or otherwise), and yet the third parties like Lyson and Fotospeed do not, this worries me. Have they something to hide? If their inks were as good as they claim surely they would submit them, the results from such tests would be a real feather in their cap. Oh and whilst I'm on the subject, be very skeptical of anything Kodak claim...
Lyson, to their credit,
do perform testing based on Wilhelm's methods, and they do publish those results, but they perform the testing themselves rather than by an independent body, and the results aren't really complete, their flagship pigment ink product is not included in the results, why?
Fotospeed claim 85 years permanence on their website, yet give absolutely no details whatsoever about how this figure was obtained, or any technical data on their inks at all. Suspicious.
Jet-Tec don't do pigment inks at all anymore, they only do dyes which don't have the same longevity as pigment, and on their website explain why they're not going to do the testing that other ink makers use because they found some lab in Germany which said they didn't need to. Very worrying.
To illustrate the huge discrepancy between OEM and third party inks ( albeit not high quality 3rd parties like Lyson etc ), an excerpt from a WIR test, using the same model printer, and on the same high quality paper :
- HP OEM ink - 73 years
Tesco ink - 0.9 years
Jessops ink - 4.5 years
"Ink Tec" ink - 2.3 years
I personally would be wary of any 3rd party products, if I had to have a CIS I'd look at Lyson over the others because at least they do the testing and publish the results, but that's just me, and I fully admit to being very geeky about printing...
If longevity isn't any issue then the dye inks work out at only£99.78 per litre.
