Two printers to get rid of...

[bovil]

We've got two old printers taking up space. If you want them, and you can pick them up, they're yours.

Canon S450

This is a standard inkjet printer, probably about 8 years old. We printed a bunch of the Costume-Con 26 fliers on it before we got the Phaser 560 (now dead). It includes a BCI-32e photo print head (that can be swapped for the black print head). The standard color print head is borked and color output is way off, but the print head is user-replaceable. If you buy a BCI-31e print head cartridge and swap it in, it will be just fine. Print heads can be cleaned with windex, of all things (and they probably need cleaning).

Canon i9900

This is a 13" carriage medium-format dye-ink photo printer. We printed the 11x17" Evil Genius Hall of Fame posters on it. It needs some TLC to get it back up and running, but is salvageable. It includes an extra print head, a set of nearly-full cleaning cartridges, a bulk ink system and a bunch of Lyson Photonic ink for the bulk ink system. There are three paths to get it back in operation:

• Install a print head, print a few pages with cleaning cartridges until it prints clear, and buy the standard set of BCI-6 Canon ink tanks (Black, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Light Cyan, Light Yellow, Red and Green) and run standard ink.
• Install a print head, print a few pages with cleaning cartridges until it prints clear, buy a set of refillable BCI-6 cartridges (the CAN-CK02-8 set is the right cartridges) from ink2image and use the bottled Photonic ink (or toss the Photonic and just use the bottled Lyson color-matched ink). The Photonic ink requires some knowledge of ICC profiles and ideally print calibration, it's not standard-color ink, but if you know how, the results are gorgeous and the ink is cheap.
• Install a print head, print a few pages with cleaning cartridges until it prints clear, and install the bulk ink system again and try to persuade it to work It also requires knowledge of ICC profiles and print calibration, and the output is gorgeous. The system is fussy, though.

I liked the i9900, I liked the color range and colorfastness of the Photonic inks (and had no problems dealing with ICC profiles), but the bulk ink system was more maintenance-intensive than I really wanted to deal with. It's one of the last printers to use the BCI-6 ink cartridge (no chips in the cartridge), so it's very refill-friendly.

Comments

[inflectionpoint.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm. Do you know Joe Decker? joedecker here on lj. He might be interested in the printer, he's a photographer and might want to be able to do some of his own printing. He's also geeky enough he'd be amused by the challenge of the color calibration.