There's no substitute for these inks!
Epson offers a very specific, high quality ink product and though it may seem expensive at first, really isn’t when you do the math. Consider the fact that these inks resist fading and general color degradation for 200 years or more, (providing the image be kept from direct UV light and in a controlled temperature environment).
They’re produced carefully and under strict, precise, color and tone consistency, matching each color for each printer’s requirements, and maintaining that consistency from one batch to the next. I have used Epson inks that had ‘expired’ over 5 years earlier and still get great results!
I’m not in any ‘printing business’ and a 350ml cartridge can last me 4 to 6 months. Therefore, I’ve created a scheduled calendar reminder, which opens once every 3 months, reminding me to remove and shake each of my 350ml cartridges. In doing that, I insure that the various ink formulas comprising each color, won’t possibly ‘settle’. I have no idea if this actually helps or is even needed but I rationalized that it certainly doesn’t hurt anything, so why not?
Each picoliter, (one trillionth of a liter), in each droplet dispersed by the printer head must be in the tolerance of exact requirements for the specific medium selected.
Think about it, if you print on a gloss, semi-gloss, luster, and/or satin paper, you don’t want the same dispersion and bleed characteristics that you would get when printing media with a matte surface. Then you also need to consider the media’s make-up; Cotton, polyester, cotton & polyester, canvas, fine art photo-rag, transparencies, etc., etc.!
All this information is included in the tests and years of development that the Epson engineers put into these inks to get results that we see in the K2’s K3’, H3’s and many more Epson releases. I think I recently read that the H3’s boast a 300 to 400 year resistance to fading and color degradation!
I find it incredibly hard to believe that a 3rd party ink manufacturer would put in anywhere near that kind of effort to create their inks. If they did, they’d probably have to charge more than what Epson charges in order to recover R&D costs. If so, then that begs for the question of why buy their ink at all?
Sure, if you’re printing real-estate advertisement signs or various ‘hit-n-run’ advertisements that need to be changed every week, then you may not be so concerned about precise color reproduction requirements and therefore, can live with inks from a 3rd party.
But it seems to me, if I were doing that kind of printing, I’d probably buy a much less expensive printer made by a company that’s more concerned about creating low or mid-level resolution, production printing because the lower the resolution, the faster the printing.
Epson is the leader of some of the best printers available today. Their inks are a main ‘player’ and at least 75% responsible for that esteemed position. The level of importance that the ink quality contributes to the image should never be underestimated.
If you’re like me and spent thousands on a camera boy, thousands more on lenses and all the equipment the art requires, (not to mention the cost of the Epson printer you’re using), does it really make sense to bring all the results that the equipment produced to a finally using an inferior ink to save a few bucks? I think not.
You own an Epson Stylus Pro, then buy Epson inks.
Rich
Verified purchase: YesCondition: Pre-owned