Comment by dylan604
7 days ago
uh-oh, did you just anecdotally confirm that buying first party inks is the better decision? careful, you might just confirm to the makers that their DRM policies are legit.
7 days ago
uh-oh, did you just anecdotally confirm that buying first party inks is the better decision? careful, you might just confirm to the makers that their DRM policies are legit.
I always say the same thing. HP and Xerox run their (ink and toner) labs for a reason, and their ink might be expensive but it's high quality and dependable.
I seldom print photos with my entry level HP inkjet, using HP inks. Even though my printer uses dye based color cartridges, none of the photos I print have faded even though they are framed and displayed 7/24/365. Ink is not colored water.
If you print/read/shred in two days, 3rd party ink and lower quality paper is OK, but if you want to be able to read or look at that thing after 10+ years, you need better quality paper and inks.
I use fountain pens a lot, and difference between ink quality becomes much more evident there. There are writing inks, there are archival inks (which are not Indian inks), and they behave totally different.
Third party ink is crap. On various forums you will read stories about people who attempt borderless printing and have terrible inksplosions. Quite often they are using third party inks and get no sympathy from people who are serious about inkjet printing.
Inkjet manufacturers put a lot of effort into ink formulations and often these are better in terms of VoC and other parameters. Sometimes you find certain first party inks are not at all lightfast (like the ink for the Epson ET-3750 which I found fades badly in less than six months) but there is very little independent testing of ink performance. If there was there might be a market for ink that performs better than first party ink.
It's a bit of a pity because the printer makers have been trying so many scams that their actual valid selling points are also assumed to be a bamboozlement.
But also, it's a fairly niche requirement to have a non-photo printed document need survive sunlight for years. I'd guess 95% plus of pages that get printed on a normal office printer have minimal need for colour precision, use crappy paper and go in the bin within the year or end up in an archive box, likely never to be seen by human eyes again.
If I remember correctly, HP produces pigment based color inks for their more serious inkjet lines, and these systems generally use 4 or more cartridges.
However, even though I balk at my 4515 for having dye based color inks, their fade resistance is astonishing.
HP always uses pigment based black inks on every inkjet, so text is always at archival quality on good paper.
I still like the tank so I upgraded to an ET-8550 which uses mainly dye-based inks except for a pigment black. Photos and art reproductions I print from that still look OK 2.5 years later of being on display, even in a south-facing room in my house which seems to be a good "accelerated aging" environment. Epson makes an Pro ET line which uses pigment-based ink, but when I tried to get one during the pandemic I couldn't find one so I got the ET-8550.