Canon Pixma Pro-100S Cleaning Cycles
BruceW77:
Quote from: admin on July 05, 2018, 02:09:46 PM
... my research indicates there is about 13ml of ink in each CLI-42 cart.
Based on the fact that only 9.5g of the 13g is used (ie. 3.5g is thrown away), your 9 months drops back to just 6 months for the 120 hour purge timer.
Similarly the 480 hour timer would give you 12 months.
Bruce
dannac:
Quote from: BruceW77 on July 12, 2018, 11:24:06 AM
Sorry dannac, I just realised you probably wanted an answer to your post.
I don't think the powering on and off makes a lot of difference to the ink used. Without looking at the power consumption specs, I doubt the printer uses that much power in standby.
If I were you I would probably spread the printing out so that the printer does not go longer than say 2 weeks without a purge. In fact I would probably build up to that by starting at 8 or 10 days and send a nozzle check or purge sheet to initiate the purge and confirm no clogged nozzles.
Thanks for the reply Bruce.
I will try something similar.
admin:
Quote from: BruceW77 on July 13, 2018, 03:31:39 AM
Quote from: admin on July 05, 2018, 02:09:46 PM
... my research indicates there is about 13ml of ink in each CLI-42 cart.
Based on the fact that only 9.5g of the 13g is used (ie. 3.5g is thrown away), your 9 months drops back to just 6 months for the 120 hour purge timer.
Similarly the 480 hour timer would give you 12 months.
Bruce
Right. And based on those numbers, each 120 hour purge uses 2.5% of each ink cart. So translating this to what happens when printing...
If you print frequently, producing many prints each week, the purge cycles won't have much of an effect because by the time you get to a purge cycle, you may have already printed several dozen prints. Meaning that... the "ink loss" for each purge is small relative to what you are actually printing.
If you print infrequently, let's say one 8x10 per week, you'll get one purge cycle followed by one 8x10 each time. That works out to 0.25ml from each cart for the purge and .125ml from each cart (on average) for the 8x10 which uses approx. 1ml of total ink (divided by 8 carts). So printing one 8x10 per week (assuming you print around the same day each week) would result in .375ml of ink being used per cart. At 10ml of ink per cart before the cart starts complaining it's low, that gives you 26 8x10 prints over 6 months before most (if not all) inks are showing low if you print one 8x10 per week. In reality, likely less before at least one ink color is showing low because your 8x10 prints will likely use more of some colors and less of others.
If you print infrequently as above (four 8x10 prints per month) but you decide to skip a week and print two 8x10 prints every 2 weeks instead of one per week, you'll get one 120 hour purge cycle and two 8x10 prints each session. That's 0.25ml of ink per cart for the purge and 0.25ml of ink per cart for the two 8x10 prints (again, a rough average assuming equal distribution of colors in the print) for a total of 0.5ml of ink per cart for the two 8x10 prints. In this case (printing two 8x10's every 2 weeks instead of one per week), you'll get 40 8x10 prints over about 9 months before each cart is "theoretically low".
In these examples, printing one 8x10 per week gets us about 26 prints out of a set of carts (max) while printing the same number of prints but skipping a week between each print job (two every two weeks) gives us 40 8x10's. We've gotten 1.5 times the number of 8x10 prints out of a set of carts just by skipping a week between printing sessions. So where does this leave us? Does it mean we should all wait and batch up as many prints as possible per job? If we do that, might it be prudent to print a nozzle check before printing each time and making sure that is clear before proceeding since we are printing infrequently? If we print when we want with no "schedule" nor do we want to keep track of it, should we still print unclog/purge sheets, particularly if we use third party inks? I think these are the bottom line questions and since I don't have the answers, I'll leave those answers to the hardware guys like Jose. :)
For me, at the moment, I'm still printing unclog sheets every 2 days because I use third party inks and the ink cost is negligible to me. And I don't know if third party inks tend to clog faster than OEM so being safe seems logical: I don't want to be printing with clogged nozzles because my third party inks have developed a clog that I didn't notice before the next 5 day purge: that could ruin the print head.
Now if I was using OEM inks and wanted to make sure I get the most out of the ink, honestly I might do away with the purge sheets and just try to batch up my prints when possible. I don't think it's worth "going anal" over personally: I wouldn't keep a tight schedule or worry about when the last purge happened; it's just not worth the effort. Instead, I'd probably just batch prints when convenient. For example, if I know I have a print that I want to hang on the wall or show at a club meeting at the end of the month, I might not print it now if I don't intend to hang it right away... or I might wait closer to the end of the month (closer to the club meeting) because by then, I might have a couple more new ones to print and I can print several in one batch.
Suffice it to say, if you really want to get the most (prints) for your ink, just batch print when convenient. I know I've printed one 13x19 knowing that I'll hang it or frame it when I get time... and knowing that will be some days later. With this new knowledge about purge cycles, if I was on OEM ink, I would not print piecemeal like that: I'd wait until I have the time to actually do something with the prints and by that time, I might have two or three new ones I also want to print and I can do several in one batch. Of course, if you use your Pro-100 as a "workhorse" and you are also printing receipts, online payment invoices, and other documents on a regular basis, this all goes out the window because those will "wake up" the printer to print and cause purge cycles in between your photos. So in a case like that, when printing is unpredictable, I'd be tempted to not worry about the purge cycles at all and just use the printer. :)
Mike
BruceW77:
I have a crazy idea, which could potentially save OEM ink users a some cost in ink:
What if we save our empty carts until we have 4 empty carts for any specific colour. That means we have 4 x 3.5ml of stored OEM ink.
We then extract the ink from 3 of those carts, using a modified plastic clip like Jose uses to clean OEM carts for refilling. This extracted ink is then injected into the 4th empty cart. Assuming we can get as much as 3.1ml out of the 3 carts we get:
- (3 x 3.1) + 3.5 = 12.8ml. In the long term it works out less than 4 carts because the refilled cart also yields 3.5ml to be refilled again.
I think I will run this past Jose. One issue may be that the Canon instructions recommend using a cart within 6 months.
Sure it's a bit of messing about but it looks to me like a viable option to encourage those who want to use OEM to continue doing so.
The only additional cost would be the chip resetter and the plastic clips and syringes.
Bruce
BruceW77:
An improvement to the above idea:
When your cart gets to a figure of say 70% full, reset it and fill it with the 3.1ml from the previous empty.
That way the ink is not going to hang around for as long, with heaps of empties to store.
The exact refill point needs some experimentation if relying on the print driver advice about ink level. Weighing will give a good indication.
Bruce
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