Inkjet Photo Printing
Printing photo is a final step of producing a paper image in photography. Traditionally this is
where one depends on a 3rd party person, such as a minilab's operator, who will ultimately
determine how the image will be on paper regardless what a photographer's own perspective
was when the picture was taken.

     Essentially when your photo is printed the picture is being shot the 2nd time, first by you then the 
     2nd by the minilab operator. So only half of it is the result of your work.

Fortunately that is all history now. 

     The latest Inkjet photo printing technology has changed drastically the landscape of photography.
     Now everyone can do photo printing without a 3rd party person involved.

Not only dedicated film scanners but advanced digital cameras are now widely available for producing high
quality digital images files 
Photography now for most people is no longer limited to the skill in compsing and taking the pictures. 
A photographer now has the option of printing the final images by him or herself without depending 
on a 3rd party person. Even if you are not a novice about inkjet photo printing, you may find our
in-depth exploration here about inkjet photo printing. 

3rd Party Compatible Refill Inks
As of taday, there is no doubt that state of art high quality 3rd party compatible inks are available.
However, obviously people still ask frequently: are they worth trying? Do they work at all? Will
they cause any harm to printers? How about performances? Are the colors as good as the original?
The answers are definitely yes and no. Some 3rd party compatible inks are absolutely more advanced 
than others. Not all are equal in quality. Among all the first question to ask is really about compatibility.
There are no universal inks that can be used by all printers.

There are basically two drastically different types of printers, bubblejet and piezojet. HP and Canon
printers represent typical bubblejet printers and Eposn printers are piezojet ones. The inks for these
two drastically different printers are not compatible with each other. The inks for bubblejet printers
contain chemical additives to lower surface tension so that bubbles are easily formed. That does not
apply to inks for piezojet based printers. This is the primary difference among inks based on 
different printhead technologies. There are also differences in terms of dye based and pigment based
inks. Dye based inks should not be used on printers designed to use pigment based inks and vise versa.
Exception of this applies to printers that are designed to use both. However, such printers must be
supported by printer vendors specific drivers for each type of inks. Without a correct driver, for example,
a dye based printer will not print well when fed with pigment based inks and vise versa.

3rd party ink vendors generally have two ways to manufacture compatible inks in terms of the ink's
color perspectives. One is to fomulate the inks with colorants that match as close as possible to OEM.
Or choose its own set of colorants to formulate the inks then develop and provide a specific printer
profile to be added to the printer driver. When such inks are used users must direct the printer setup
to use the specific profile in order to match the color characters of the OEM inks.

Matching color spectrum of the OEM inks is a critical quality issue for 3rd party compatible ink vendors.
Slight color mismatch against OEM inks may result in completely unacceptable quality degradation.
This is easily proven by simply try to refill a high quality 6 color inkjet photo printer's cartridges with a
set of universal refill inks that claim to be compatible with dozens of, including a mixture of bubblejet
and piezojet, printers. Human eyes are quite sensitive to unnatural colors resulted from a mixture of 
colorants in which one or more colors are slightly mismatched. One typical symptom is muddy colors
shown in printout of a photograph. A tree trunk may look brownish as supposed to be greenish. Sky
may look purple and skin tone turns out of natural look.

Technicals About Ink Refilling
There is little doubt that OEM ink cartridges may be refilled. From a broader perspective refilling ink
cartridges is not just for saving cost. It gives printers specific featues such as getting wide/narrow 
gamut, etc.

Is refilling for you? Depends. Some people never want to deal with the technical aspect of refilling
inks. Some printer ink cartridges present more challenges than others to refill. Some printer
vendors put some harware/software hooks that makes refilling more difficult but some actually make
refilling easy. Printer owners should research thoroughly before jumping on the band wagon of
refilling ink cartridges.

Here is our suggestion. If refilling is desired then choose the right printer that is designed to be easy 
to refill. Avoid those that are designed otherwise to force users to use only OEM inks. There exist
many top quality photo printers that do not appear to have designs to discourage refilling their ink
cartridges. It seems that vendors of such printers are fully aware of the fact that it is to their benefit not
to discourage use of 3rd party supplies including inks.

However, before deciding and actually getting into refilling ink cartridges it is strongly advised that
printer owners have the uderstanding of: how an ink cartridge works, in terms of how ink is retained
inside the cartridge, how it exits the exit port to feed the printhead, how gravity and the sponge inside
an ink cartridge work to hold and release the ink from the reserve tank, etc.

The knwledge will help down the road when one encounters issues associated with refilling inks. 

Printer Care Issues If You Refill
Watch the condition of each ink cartridge. This seems a vague statement however, never
underestimate how important it is. Make sure each ink cartridge is in its prime condition in terms of
smoothness of ink flow in supplying ink to the printhead. A printer having a starved channel of ink,
one ink cartridge reduces or stops its ink flow, will knock out the color balance or even cause
printhead clog if continue to print without detecting and correcting the problem.

Do nozzle check frequently. A nozzle check uses very little amount of ink but tells vital information
about a printer's healthiness of the printhead and each ink cartridge. In fact it is suggested to do
a nozzle check at least once a day, especially before launching a print task of printing multiple pages
of photographs which will consume some significant amount of ink.

Cleaning Printhead. If a nozzle check indicates a problem, such as banding as a typical symptom,
a printhead cleaning cycle should be run. A Canon i960 as an example have two cleaning cycles to
choose from, a cleaning and a deep cleaning. Often a cleaning cycle is referred to as a light
cleaning cycle. Most of the time one or two light cleaning cycle is sufficient to correct problems
revealed by a nozzle check. However, a nasty printhead clog may need a deep cleaning cycle to
clear. Deep cleaning consumes a lot of ink. It has a potential of causing printhead damage if too
many are done in a row. So it is advised to avoid unless light cleaning does not clear the problem.
Note that printing large blocks of color is not the same as a cleaning cycle. Such practice is known
as printing purge files. The idea behind printing purge files is instead of filling the waste bin, which
may quickly become full and cause a problem, it may be a good alternative to lay the ink onto paper.
Well, still it is really not the same as cleaning cycles. It does not correct banding as an example
as effectively as a light clean cycle does according to our experience from our i960.