cowasaki
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Well I've just upgraded from a set of refillable cartridges with "ok" ink to a Lyson CISS. This is how the upgrade went......
The R2400 has 8 inks (technically 9 but the matt and gloss black are fitted one at a time) and these can cost about £8-10 each. They are not very large either and after a couple of cleaning cycles you can wipe out a set after printing 8 A3 pictures! The kit from Lyson is currently selling for £179.99 and includes a free hard back photo album.
What you get....
You get the CISS reservoirs for all 9 colours, 9 special cartridges, all the pipework and brackets, 9 x 60ml of pigment inks (as good as Epson's!), a disc with colour profiles on, instructions for getting the best prints, a plastic box, syringes and funnels.
How easy is it?
Well the instructions are pretty good but I have fitted several CISSs in the past so I had a head start. It is not too difficult but some of it might seem strange if you have not done it before. First job is to fill the reservoirs, this needs to be done through the fill hole with the air bleed bung in place. They suggest using a funnel that comes with the kit but when pouring ink from a full bottle into a funnel it can end up going down the side of the bottle. I used 9 spare syringes with blunt needles on them to extract the first 20ml of ink from each bottle first then poured the rest in. This meant that not a single drop of ink went where it wasn't supposed to.
Having filled the reservoirs and re-bunged them you need to fill the ink pipe and CISS cartridges. This is quite easy, the special CISS cartridges have another bung on them and as you remove this bung the ink starts to flow down the pipe. Insert a syringe into the bung hole (which is an air tight seal) and the ink stops flowing. Now as you pull the plunger the ink starts to flow BUT do this gradually. As the plunger gets to about 10ml the ink starts to appear slowly into the syringe. Don't pull anymore and just carefully push any ink back in (there is a warning in the instructions about pushing too much back in but if there is too much you can always squirt it back into the reservoir so none is wasted.
Right thats the CISS full of ink fitting it is very easy too following the instructions to remove the carrier lid, move the carrier and plumb the pipes in.
Job done.....
How does it work?
Well after running 10 cleaning cycles to remove all traces of air bubbles the printer has worked flawlessly and the quality is back up to Epson's standards HOWEVER.......
There is a major issue with Epson printers in that the prints always appear too dark unless you happen to know the secrets of getting it right. Lyson are in the business of making it as good as possible and supply profiles for their papers plus instructions on setting up PS to print correctly. I didn't read the instructions straight away and printed a couple of photos which came out too dark (but wonderful quality). I installed the profiles and followed the instructions which include this gem....
Use Abode SRGB and on the colour settings tab set gamma to 1.8 (this is the magic setting to get the darkness right with gloss, semi-gloss and lustre type papers)
Anyway once this was done the output is decent lab quality !!
Am I happy, oh yes
The cost of the inks is vastly cheaper than Epson by quantity PLUS you waste a lot of ink using genuine cartridges. This is because every time you change a cartridge it does a cleaning cycle and the cartridges are not totally empty when they run out so you loose some ink in each cartridge.
Anyway here is the link : http://www.marrutt.co.uk/r2400-cis.php
The R2400 has 8 inks (technically 9 but the matt and gloss black are fitted one at a time) and these can cost about £8-10 each. They are not very large either and after a couple of cleaning cycles you can wipe out a set after printing 8 A3 pictures! The kit from Lyson is currently selling for £179.99 and includes a free hard back photo album.
What you get....
You get the CISS reservoirs for all 9 colours, 9 special cartridges, all the pipework and brackets, 9 x 60ml of pigment inks (as good as Epson's!), a disc with colour profiles on, instructions for getting the best prints, a plastic box, syringes and funnels.
How easy is it?
Well the instructions are pretty good but I have fitted several CISSs in the past so I had a head start. It is not too difficult but some of it might seem strange if you have not done it before. First job is to fill the reservoirs, this needs to be done through the fill hole with the air bleed bung in place. They suggest using a funnel that comes with the kit but when pouring ink from a full bottle into a funnel it can end up going down the side of the bottle. I used 9 spare syringes with blunt needles on them to extract the first 20ml of ink from each bottle first then poured the rest in. This meant that not a single drop of ink went where it wasn't supposed to.
Having filled the reservoirs and re-bunged them you need to fill the ink pipe and CISS cartridges. This is quite easy, the special CISS cartridges have another bung on them and as you remove this bung the ink starts to flow down the pipe. Insert a syringe into the bung hole (which is an air tight seal) and the ink stops flowing. Now as you pull the plunger the ink starts to flow BUT do this gradually. As the plunger gets to about 10ml the ink starts to appear slowly into the syringe. Don't pull anymore and just carefully push any ink back in (there is a warning in the instructions about pushing too much back in but if there is too much you can always squirt it back into the reservoir so none is wasted.
Right thats the CISS full of ink fitting it is very easy too following the instructions to remove the carrier lid, move the carrier and plumb the pipes in.
Job done.....
How does it work?
Well after running 10 cleaning cycles to remove all traces of air bubbles the printer has worked flawlessly and the quality is back up to Epson's standards HOWEVER.......
There is a major issue with Epson printers in that the prints always appear too dark unless you happen to know the secrets of getting it right. Lyson are in the business of making it as good as possible and supply profiles for their papers plus instructions on setting up PS to print correctly. I didn't read the instructions straight away and printed a couple of photos which came out too dark (but wonderful quality). I installed the profiles and followed the instructions which include this gem....
Use Abode SRGB and on the colour settings tab set gamma to 1.8 (this is the magic setting to get the darkness right with gloss, semi-gloss and lustre type papers)
Anyway once this was done the output is decent lab quality !!
Am I happy, oh yes
The cost of the inks is vastly cheaper than Epson by quantity PLUS you waste a lot of ink using genuine cartridges. This is because every time you change a cartridge it does a cleaning cycle and the cartridges are not totally empty when they run out so you loose some ink in each cartridge.
Anyway here is the link : http://www.marrutt.co.uk/r2400-cis.php
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