One yellow cartridge would not interact correctly with my Canon Pro9000 printer. The others worked fine. Amazon doesn't offer a reasonable way to obtain a replacement yellow cartridge, which is what I would like. I don't want to return everything, which is their only option. Bureaucracy is ubiquitous.
I am hoping Blake Printing Supply reads this and sends me a yellow cartridge.
Within minutes of my publishing this review, and my writing an email, I was contacted by the company, who will be sending me a replacement cartridge.
And this is on a Sunday.
Excellent service!!
I raised my rating.
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I am new to photo printing, having just bought a Canon Pro9000 II because of their aggressive rebate program. After looking at the price of Canon ink, though, at $200 per set I decided to try aftermarket ink. This kit is the first one I tried.
Since the printer was new to me, I played around quite a bit testing various papers using a test image that included both subtle color gradation sections and gray step tablet sections. The results with the Canon inks were outstanding. Dense, saturated colors and very pure grays.
The Amazon/Blake ink came quickly, was well packaged, and went into the printer just fine. The first cartridge I tried was the photo magenta. Unfortunately this immediately resulted in images, particularly grays, with a distinct green cast. I persisted, though, adding photo cyan and several other cartridges from the kit as they were needed. No joy. Always a green cast.
Today I received some cartridges from another aftermarket vendor and replaced the Blake photo magenta, then the photo cyan. The effect of this was to shift the color cast to a brown which worsened when I added the photo cyan.
So ... bottom line is that I have learned that these aftermarket inks are not a slam dunk if you want good photo colors. I don't particularly blame Blake but the fact is that I cannot make acceptable prints using these inks. I'm off to the forums on dpreview dot com and the other photo sites to see if others are on this quest and to see what their results have been.
If your primary use is not printing photos or if you are just printing snapshots you will probably not notice these color issues or you may not find them objectionable. But if you are even a little bit fussy, I think you will find these inks to produce unacceptable results -at least on a Canon Pro9000 II.
Edit/2 weeks later: I have found that these inks used as a complete set can produce acceptable prints if the Pro9000 driver is set to manual color and +30 Cyan. Grays are still off a little bit towards brown but good enough for non-critical printing. For many, it would probably not be acceptable for printing B&W photos or photos with lots of grays. YMMV, of course.
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I go through 300-500 cartridges a year using 8 Canon Pixma printers at various office and home locations. I have had good luck with some off brand ink tanks (ld, etc.) but these were harder to install (i.e., they wouldn't 'click' into place or had incorrect fit), some weren't recognized by the printer, and the PM and PC were really M and C with a PM / PC label stuck over the original M / C sticker.
I ordered two of these multipacks and tried them in 3 different printers and got the same results; the PM and PC tanks were ALL no good (they were normal M and C tanks with the wrong labels stuck over the original sticker).
Keep in mind that once you change tanks it will take a few pages before the leftover ink in the print head is used up, so if you do a 'back to back' test with different cartridges you really need to run print head cleaning and print several pages to make sure the ink from the newly installed cartridge has truly made its way through the system.
After changing the PM and PC tanks, a few pages later the terrible unusable color cast appeared. I swapped back to original Canon tanks (for those two colors only) and after running a head cleaning and printing a few more pages the colors came back to normal. Then I started looking at the cartrides and saw that the labels for PM and PC had just been simply placed over the M and C stickers.
I also had issues as these got low they didn't set off the print warnings that they should have, and some just registered 'ink level cannot be attained' (even though other generic ink tanks work flawlessly and give the correct messages).
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I have owned a Pixma 9000 printer for about a year and it produces professional grade photos when the Canon inks are used. Because of the VERY low price I tried this knock off. Let me assure you, if you want great looking prints stay as far away from this ink as possible. It is entirely unpredictable and has not produced a single acceptable print yet. I just ordered the Canon inks that I trust and love and threw this crap in the trash. In some things you get what you pay for. This is a prime example of that.
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Overall these inks are ok, although some tweaks are required for photographs to look good.
I will be using these for printing proofs, but for the final prints original inks are better.
Black ink is the real problem in this set. Unlike original ink that is slightly on the warm side, here the ink is dark cold (bluish) grey. It is not a big deal when printing documents, but I found it impossible to print BW images. Considering that I do mainly monochrome photography this set is not for me. However it may work for someone who prints either colour images or documents. I would still recommend to make custom profiles for your paper, printer, and inks combination.
