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Forum Index : Electronics : How to make an expensive MPPT unrepairable
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| Davo99 Guru  Joined: 03/06/2019 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1578 |
I think that's about it tight there mate. People don't like to throw things out so they will buy the ink. On the machines I use, the genuine ink costs more than the machines by a good margin. What I have done a number of times is similar to some of the sellers on Fleabag. I take the genuine ink out and sell it separately. I get the after market ink carts which are around $20 a SET and refil them. The head Canon Rep told me a few years ago Ink is far and away their Biggest profit stream out of EVERYTHING else they do COMBINED. Camera's, lenses, photocopiers, medical imaging, calculators and office machines.... The lot. They make more yearly profit from ink than all their other lines put together. There are a few things with refilling... While you can refil the Carts you have which are the 3 Colours in one type, I haven't done much with it and it's very fiddly. With the price of the after market ink, unless you were printing heaps, probably wouldn't bother with it myself. All the ones I do are the individual colours that take about 8-10 Ml of ink ea. They are waking up to the losses they are taking with refilling and bulk ink tanks and making cartridge chips more sophisticated. Some now will only allow the carts to be refilled about 2.5 times and then lock out. Even the aftermarket ones work the same as I guess they just reverse engineered them and not in the after market makers interest to eliminate that either. I bought 6 Printers last year of the old model they seemed to be phasing out which has the old Non lockout Chips. The machine will still come up asking if its genuine ink etc and do you want to reset the counter ( again with the inference that doing this could set off a small Nuclear devise within the machine) But once reset on the machine they proceed as normal. I HIGHLY suspect the machines I am using are the exact same guts and workings as the ones they had 10 years ago. The model numbers are different, the carts are different but the specs, base drivers and the look of the machinery is the same. The old carts fit as well but won't work because of the chip programming. They rain new models out every 12 Months and I suspect this is to keep the after market providers on their toes as well. I do Critical colour and quality Photo printing and I have to say, none of the cheap Carts I have bought ( for the carts themselves to refill) have had bad ink. There may be very slight colour variations that 99% of people would not even recognise but NONE of them have been bad and the idea of Killing your machine is out and out BS crap IHMO and MANY years of experience and literally tens of thousands of prints. I have used the Bulk ink tanks and they work OK. I used to have 12 Printers set up, Pooled as they call it and had a person just taking out the prints and replacing the paper full time. The bulk tanks work OK but not good if you move the printers as I often do with the photo booths I made or doing onsite work. Sometimes now for family and friends events ( when they were still a thing) I could take a printer, sit it in the corner, take pics then shoot them direct to the printer sitting in the room and direct people to go get the pics. Easier no just to refil the carts. Job I am doing now will be about 300 Prints and only use about 50Ml of ink per colour so I just refil the carts every so often and get about 20-30 A4's per fill. Company I get my ink from now is MIR-AUS And I used to use Rihac in Melbourne only Mir are in my city and the guy that works there is a fantastic help with any problems or suggestions when doing your own hacking as I have. I think they are a bit cheaper than Rihac as well. I buy litre bottles of ink because they don't have 5L bottles ( and had a fit when I asked for them) but I think you can get 100Ml Bottles as well. I used to Drill the top of the OEM carts and refil with a blunt needle then seal the hole with Blutak but then got onto the silicone plugs Rihac has and use them. 4.5mm hole lets the plugs fit perfect. Make sure you keep the original cart Clip on seals because if you open and try to fill a cart with out them, the ink will run straight out the bottom and make hell of a mess. Now I buy the cheap carts and sell the OEM ones so I effectively get the printer for free and modify and refill them. The companies sell the refillable carts which are really over priced and much cheaper to just buy the cheap ones off fleabay and do them. I see they are bringing out the machines with the bulk ink tanks built in now. Bit pricey and obviously cashing in on lost cart revenue but mate has one and reckons it's great. Of course they still charge like wounded Bulls for the bulk ink but no reason the aftermarket ink wouldn't work perfectly and no, the colours won't be off, not that they are ever right to start with. I just calibrate and profile the printer and all is good. Matter of fact, I'm a bit lazy to do that now and just have an automatic colour correction programmed in I calculate by eye to get the colour balance I want for that job and that's it. Looks like crap on the screen but the prints are spot on and that's all I care about. Using OEM ink cost me about $1 per print. Using the after market ink it's less than a CENT. Saving $100+ on a set of carts makes the 5 min or so it takes me to reload them about the most profitable use of my time I can earn! :0) What is sitting on the work table right now:   |
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| Warpspeed Guru Joined: 09/08/2007 Location: AustraliaPosts: 4406 |
I bought one of those $59 ink jet colour printers a few years back, also bought a kit to refill the cartridges. No problem, when it told me the cartridge was empty, I just refilled it with the syringe in the kit. Worked fine. Second time it needed a refill, filled it again, replaced the cartridge but the printer would not run. I discovered the cartridge has a smart chip embedded in it that counts the hours or minutes, or prints, or whatever. Anyhow once the allowed time on the cartridge has expired, physically refilling it no longer works, and neither will the printer. You must buy a new official correct cartridge that costs almost as much as the original printer costs, its been a few years but I think the replacement cartridge was about $35 from memory. Chinese clone cartridges look the same but do not have the chip so will not work. The whole lot went into the wheelie bin, and I bought a good professional quality black and white laser printer which is still going strong. Cheers, Tony. |
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| Davo99 Guru Joined: 03/06/2019 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1578 |
I think they all need a Chipped cart these days. The aftermarket carts I have got all have it although some will only work one or 2 Refills as per OEM. Some of the epsoms have a Chip that you can use a re-setter on. I have no experience with them. I bought an Epsom as they were widely recommended on Forums and supposed to be vastly superior to the Canons I was using. The thing sounded like a Straight cut gearbox that had gravel in it. The software was neither Versatile no intuitive to use and the print quality while acceptable was certainly not superior to the canons in any way. I did a few prints with it then it got set up on the WIFi for the kids to use. Even they didn't like it and wouldn't bother with the thing. I think it eventually got through the original ink carts and went in the bin. It was Pigment ink rather than the dye I use and I wasn't buying any thing for that Noisy, obstinate POS. I haven't looked at another Epsom Since. My father had one in the office he hated and the carts were a fortune for so I gave him one of my older canons and some spare refilled carts and he's still using it. I just refill the used carts for him when I'm up there and all good. The trick to selecting a printer you can refill is to look on the Bulk ink seller sites and see what they sell the bulk ink sets for. This means they are refillable more than once or there is an after market Chip that will allow it. Good either way. The ones you can reset the counter or at least turn it off on the printer like I have don't have a refill limit. Printer only allows those 1000 or so prints then it shuts down. That's why I bought half a dozen of the things at one time. The printers are well cheap enough to be disposable for me which they are anyway and then I can just pull the next one from under the bead, Fire it up and I don't need to go though the drama or re installing drivers and doing calibrations and still have all my cartridges I can use. I have to say, as well as having to throw out a good working machine that is artificially disabled, The amount of packaging that one has after getting a new printer out the box is both a pain in the arse and disturbing. something that yet again makes a farce of all the save the environment idealism that is nothing more than than a marketing ploy for these big businesses. I have a feeling when I run out of this lot of printers I'll be forced onto one of the Bulk tank jobs as all the Cartridge type will have probably gone to the limited refill type but I can check to see if the reverse engineered refillable carts will be available by then. One thing that REALLY irks me with these pre planned Obsolescence printers is when the printing section is "Expired" the scanners and card readers won't work either. They are Multi function besides printing but the whole thing shuts down and becomes useless waste. More greedy corporate Bastardy. |
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| rogerdw Guru Joined: 22/10/2019 Location: AustraliaPosts: 852 |
Oh, bother.  Well your idea would be a good alternative then. It may look messy, but if the holes are neat enough you may be able to find something to cover them that looks legit. Thanks Phil, yes I had seen that. In fact if I wasn't spread so thin with the work I do now, I might have got involved with that. By coincidence I had a call about another of those tractor column displays this morning (well yesterday now!!). He's going to drop it off in 7 or 8 hours. Yeah, I've wondered the same thing. I had to smile about the "made in the US" comment though. When I first started doing my current line of work in electronics about 15 years ago, I built a website to try and drum up work. Took a while to build up work from around Australia, but suddenly I was getting huge boxes of boards from Canada and then once word spread, from just over the border in the US. The most bizarre thing about that was that most of the jobs in the US came from Wisconsin ... which is where the stuff was designed and built!!! Something strange about the whole affair really. Like, they can design and build this stuff and sell it all over the world ... but no one there was prepared to have a go at fixing it. Was costing around $700 in freight each way alone. I kinda got sick of all the paperwork for customs and the boxing and unboxing ... and as my local work built up I eventually discouraged the work from overseas. One trap early on with the first box was that the customer declared the value of the boards to be $7,000. The fact that they were all crook and may not have been repairable meant the value was probably next to nothing ... but customs promptly slapped me with a bill for $700 gst before they'd even release them to me. Big risk if I hadn't been able to fix it all, but I did get it back of course with the next BAS ... though still a crook old imposition to start with. I also eventually discovered that if the sender would put the value at $1,000 or less ... it would go straight through customs or perhaps bypass it ... and no gst was needed. A few times I had to email customers and ask them to amend their form ... and was then still able to avoid the gst. In hindsight I probably should have employed some help and kept on doing the work, but life seems simpler this way. Cheers, Roger |
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