Printer Ink Experiment

Printout using Quink fountain pen ink. © Eugene Brennan

I'm fed up buying inkjet cartridges for my Lexmark printer, which usually dry up and stop working. I was speaking to a technician about this and he said that the advice from manufacturers is that inkjet printers really need to be "exercised" every week or two by printing a couple of pages to prevent this happening. I predicted this in the 90s when I bought my first inkjet printer, having owned a fountain pen and knowing that the nib occasionally dried up. The print nozzles in inkjet printer heads are only a few tens of microns in diameter, so it's not unexpected. Strangely, the proprietor in an office stationery store said he had never heard of this phenomena although I have lots of evidence from my own printers and those that my sister looked after in a school. Anyway I decided to fill the cartridge with Parker Quink fountain pen ink using a syringe. The photograph above is of a photocopy I produced using the filled cartridge. The photo below is of another printout. An advantage of fountain pen ink is that it doesn't seem to dry up in the microscopic nozzles of the print head, so it's far superior to inkjet ink. I can print a document and then come back six months later and do a new printout, without having to clean heads. The only downside is that the black pigments isn't quite as black as the proper stuff, but it's perfectly acceptable.

© Eugene Brennan