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 phenomenon, although I have lots of evidence of problems with my own printers and my sister also had issues with the printers she looked 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.
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