I have read many articles on refilling ink cartridges and have concluded that the minefield that Canon have implemented for preventing this is for the purpose of quaranting further income.
And your point is?
The IP4000 does not suffer from this problem, the ink containers are easily filled, I know of no other Canon printer similar.
The iP4000 was a decent, but slow printer from the last generation of Canon inkjets without chips ... the BCI-6. There were
at least a dozen such printers, and yes, they were relatively easy to refill.
Does anyone out there have any info on printers that can be readily fiffed without this chip.
I consider
any printer with CLI-8 cartridges to be just as non-difficult to refill as the earlier BCI-6 based printers, after a significant learning curve,and a non-trivial investment in resetter, ink, syringe(s), virgin empties, hand soap, ink remover, etc.
Does anyone know what this chip does, it must be very smart because one would have thought that removing the power plug from the printer would have removed the supply from powering such a chip, does it have an internal battery?
Once resetters became available at reasonable cost ... about 2010 or so .... then I consider CLI-8 based printers to be significantly better than BCI-6 printers.
* prevents putting cart in wrong slot of print-head
* reduces possibility of damaged or even fried print-heads from ink flow starvation from the printer treating a LOW or EMPTY cart as full
* better ink level monitoring beyond the optical prism of the BCI-6 generation
* otherwise they are very, very similar
* my understanding is that CLI-8 carts work fine in BCI-6 printers ... they have the same form-factor
* but BCI-6 will definitely not work in CLI-8 printers (unless you somehow put CLI-8 chips on BCI-6 carts, which would be a pretty odd thing to do these days)
* my understanding of the chip's primary purpose is to keep a quite detailed track of number of ink droplets sprayed/exploded onto the media, for significantly improved ink level monitoring beyond what the BCI-6 can do.
I observed a gadgit that looks like a chip resetter, does anyone know where they are obtained from and are they for one specific printer..
Resetters for CLI-8 and the next generation of CLI-221 based printers are widely available at reasonable cost. Goggle/Amazon/eBay are your friends.
The more recent CLI-226 printers may or may not have reasonably priced resetters. Due to the smaller 9 ml ink capacity and fully opaque cart, I don't ... and wouldn't ... own such a printer, so "consider the source". However, they are perhaps potentially capable of incrementally better photo printing than previous generations like the CLI-8, and especially the BCI-6 based printers.
My speculation is that it may be a while before CLI-251 based printers become available, if ever. Hope I'm wrong. My observation is that Canon has become more and more hostile to the reverse-engineering required to produce a legal, reliable resetter. (An aside: can't blame them, and I'd probably do likewise if I was the person making that decision for Canon.)
I quess that this topic is a very sore one with Printer Companies but I am of the opinion that they sell their products without difulging the parameters which are of interest to the customer.
My speculation is that the OP is like me, with little or no first-hand experience with HP, Epson, Dell, Lexmark, Kodak, etc. My impression is that the older Canon printers, especially the CLI-8 generation, were the "friend of the refiller". My further speculation is that this might have been a "distinctive" so that Canon could gain market share on Epson for photo quality printers.
From the perspective of refilling, every other manufacturer of hobby'ist / individual / non-professional printers are significantly worse, imo. Canon is just now getting as refiller-hostile as the other printer manufacturers have been for years. But, YMMV, and "consider the source".
No thanks.
To me, "it was good while it lasted" to be able to purchase heavily subsidized Canon printers capable of excellent photo printing with not-too-difficult to refill carts. Sigh.
CraigsList is your friend for used CLI-8 based printers.
