Looking around at Print-Rite brand inkjet replacement cartridges. Very low price. Are they too good to be true? Has anyone had any experience with third party cartridges? I am using a Epson.

Thanks.

I've read a bunch of reviews (Consumer Reports and online) about 3rd party ink carts, and my buddy brought a bunch despite my warnings.

If you're just doing one-off printing, or stuff that doesn't need to be a consistent color from print to print, or consistently vibrant, then 3rd party ink is great. Also, blacks tend to be just fine.

But, the major issue tends to be color matching between carts. The actual build quality never seems to be an issue.

I own a company that does photo printing on demand. We work outdoors, so the 10,000+ printers are out of the question.. We've done a lot of reasearch (including disceting printers that gave up the ghost) to determine which gave us the best quality / quantity / price effectiveness.

Whats the final analysis?

quality: very little difference, unless your a professional photographer. Even then, they found it hard to tell on most prints which print was better / more accurate, if they were properly adjusted.

quantity: for us this ment how often they break. Epson toped the list by a lot, though one of our booths is STILL using a 6 year old epson that we started the busniness with. It seems their quality in recent years has degraded alot.

cost effectiveness: both cost of the printer for how many prints it would give us, and the cost of the ink.

We found in the end, that the cannon's FAR AND AWAY outperformed the rest in general. They were a bit more money to start with, but seem to deal better with outdoor dust. Even in the desert.

The other important thing we found about cannon, is that they actually USE ALL THE INK! in the stock cartrages. Most printers don't.

Epson was the worst culprit, leaving between 40-55% of the ink in the cartrige, and FORCING you to change it before it would print any more. Older cannons you could download software to change this, but now you cant. Cleaning print heads on the epson is also overly costly, as you can't JUST clean one colors head. you have to do all of them at once. If you get one stuck nozzle you could be forced to go through a whole set of ink cartrages to get it cleaned.

Moral of the story, avoid epson. If you want our opinion on which is the best of the remaining competitors, check out cannon. (Lexmark was not far ahead of espon in cost effectivness either, their ink is just to expensive.)