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Since I had to change the color tank of my Epson Stylus 1200 anyway, I tried to examine how much ink actually is in the cartridge, and how much of it is used. The examination was quite similar to that described on the nomorecarts website. I measured the weight of a new tank, the used tank, and the used tank, opened, rinsed and dried. With a syringe I pulled as much ink as possible out of each single compartment. Of course, since most of the ink is in the sponge, a great part of it remained in the cartridge. Still, I think one can conclude from the amount of ink extruded if one or another ink was consumed way over the average. These are the figures: Weight of new tank: 120 grams Weight of used tank: 85 grams Weight of cleaned, dried tank: 50 grams Ink extruded from single chambers: Yellow: 2,75 ml (milliliters) Light Magenta: 2,9 ml Magenta: 3,5 ml Light Cyan: 3 ml Cyan: 3,5 ml My conclusions: 120 gr (new tank) - 85 gr (used tank) = 35 gr total weight of ink used 120 gr (new tank) - 50 gr (cleaned tank) = 70 gr are in a new cartridge, 50% of ink has actually been used, each color has about 14 gr ink. 35 gr / 5 colors = an average of 7 grams ink per color is available to the user The amount of ink I pulled out of the chambers doesn't show a much higher usage of any color, leading to the early shut down of the cartridge by the printer. The usage is quite similar from color to color, a bit stronger with the lighter dyes. The balanced color usage may be due to my printing of mainly black/white (greyscale) images in color mode, I don't know. The result of 7 grams used ink per colors closely matches the results on the nomorecarts website, when I remember correctly. A 4 oz bottle of ink is supposed to contain 128 grams of ink. A six-bottle set then would be the equivalent of ca. 18 oem-cartridges. To import a six-color set of oem-match inks from nomorecarts I would have to pay $ 48 + $41 shipping. With currency conversion, import taxes etc ... I would have to expect about 213 german marks. The best price I can get here for an epson 1200 color cartridge is 59 german marks. I would have to pay 1062 german marks to get 18 epson cartridges. I think the savings are obvious, about 80%. There are some other manufacturers of compatible cartridges, they are hard to get and cost around 30 marks = 540 marks for 18 cartridges = still 60 % savings with imported inks. If I would order 6 bottles w/8 oz ($ 14 p. bottle), assuming the same shipping rate, I would pay 300 marks, but have the equivalent of 36 cartridges, leading to a savings of 72 % against locally bought compatible cartridges. I think this shows, despite the uncertainties of importing stuff, it would pay off even if only ordering oem-match inks. Cheers Mike _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com - Turn off HTML mail features. Keep quoted material short. Use accurate subject lines. http://www.leben.com/lists for list instructions.
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