Perfectly happy with the ink that came in our canon pixma thingy (though cant figure out why it has two black inks? Maybe light black/dark black…?)
However, replacement branded carts are going to be £50ish, getting refills at cartridge world will be about £30, but can get a whole set from amazon, of a brand I’ve not heard of, for EIGHT pounds!

Question is, like most things, do they all come out the same factory and you’re just paying for a badge?
Or, also like most things, do you really get what you pay for?
I’m keen on printing out the odd photo or two, and my face is too pretty to fade after a week….

DrP

cant figure out why it has two black inks? Maybe light black/dark black…?)

one is for text documents and one for the ‘K’ in CMYK (sung and danced in the manner of village people)

where I’ve been let down by non-brand cartridges for my canon iPsomethingorother is with photo printing where some of the colours lack saturation – something red lit up in a dark scene would come out dark brown. For document printing though they’re fine, but they are definitely not the same ink from the same factory.

I missed the 😉 after that sentence…but your post makes sense..

DrP

🙂

the other thing is light-fastness, again with something like photo printing you might want the stuff you print to last. If you’re just printing out documents and shopping lists thats not important though

My dad’s photo prints were always really terrible, like a schoolkid’s attempt at pointalism. He couldn’t work out what he was doing wrong until he tried branded ink. Perfect photo quality resumed.

Refil them yourself if you can find a kit, you will save an enormous amount of cash, ink costs more than liquid gold

I’ve found you can have problems with ‘chipped cartridges in that the printer won’t recognise them. We are currently using Tesco own brand which have been fine.

Canon ink for me
Better colour and lasts better

Doesn’t believe the 100year colour fastness
Full sun fades any ink

Not the cheapest way to print but to keep control over your output if you sell prints
Some online printers colour gamet
is just off

Thumbs up for whitewall great job everytime

thefox60 on ebay is where I get my “canon” cartridges – pretty cheap and work well IME

I have a Pixma 4500 and use third party cartridges from Amazon. No problem with the chips and photos have been lightfast 4 years down the line.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B001EP5X1G/ref=oh_details_o01_s00_i00

I found cartridge world ones to be a gamble so stick to branded ones now. I had a leaky one from cartridge world took it back and they replaced it with another leaky one. Put me off as I use the printer for work and wasted half a day cleaning it etc… The branded ones print better too but as said above if you only do text it’s not an issue as much.