Canon MP610 ink recomendations

[wavemachine]

Hi,

I have a Canon MP610 and need to get some more ink.

The original Canons are really costly, are there any good alternative/pattern cartridges anyone can recommend? There are a few local places that claim they are chemically the same as Canon.

What are other people experiences?

[SieSmith]

Hi Wavemachine,
I always go for originals, in my experience there are always too many problems going with equivalent inks :-
They either don't give quite the right colour or end up blocking nozzles, either way you end up wasting most of your cheap ink with cleaning routines and test prints. This happened on an Epson printer I had.

I've just bought a Canon printer myself, so would be interested to hear how you get on.

Good luck, Sie

[Forseti]

I've tried several alternate brands of ink on several different printers over the years and have to say that I was never 100% satisfied with the end results i.e. the quality of the finished prints.
Several months ago I too purchased an MP610 having read several test reports that it's successors (the 620/630) were not quite as good. Now whilst it's true what you say that the inks for this printer aren't exactly what one would call cheap I have to say that the quality of finished prints is, to my critical eye, nothing short of excellent. I can now happily print from applications such as Lightroom, Photoshop, QImage and yes, even the printers own software (Easy Photo Print) with consistent results. This peace of mind alone is well worth the extra spent on using the manufacturers own inks and papers as opposed to the previous hit and miss experiences.

[wavemachine]

Thanks for the replies, I too experienced a blocked Epson print head after using cheap inks so know where you are coming from.

For good print quality I am prepared to pay the full price, just testing the water really.

Interesting point about the 620/630 I heard similar things about them and was lucky enough to get a Canon refurbished one for £75 with a full waranty as apparently the newer ones have smaller ink tanks.

Out of interest do people tend to replace the inks individually or all in one go? I found with epsons in the past that the recharging cycle for replacing one ink tank drained the others so much it always was better to replace all of them.

[Forseti]

Originally Posted by wavemachine

Out of interest do people tend to replace the inks individually or all in one go? I found with epsons in the past that the recharging cycle for replacing one ink tank drained the others so much it always was better to replace all of them.

Interesting question and one that I've never given much thought to in the past. In part, I guess the answer lies to what use the printer is put to e.g. multiple uses including document printing or exclusively for printing photographic images. If the former then no doubt it will be the black ink tank that will be emptied first whilst the others remain relatively full. In the latter case the ink consumed would be more evenly distributed. Like I said a little earlier though, it's something that I haven't given much thought to in the past although on the face of it replacing all ink tanks, many of which may well be almost full, would seem perhaps to be false economy. The MP610 of course indicates the levels of ink remaining in each individual tank so maybe a decision whether or not it would be worth replacing all the ink tanks simultaneously should be made on the quantity of ink remaining in individual tanks as indicated.