Niagara II CIS (Continuous Ink System) for Ink Jet Printers

Written for "The Imaging Resource" by Peter Horwood

Spring 2003

Before I give you the details, let me give you the conclusion. If you are using more than two sets of color cartridges and more than 6 black per year in your ink jet printer, you need the Niagara II system. This article discusses how I came to this conclusion and gives several tips for making your life better. But the most important tip I can give you is: Buy the Niagara II pre-charged system. See my notes comparing the Niagara II to the original Niagara and other CIS systems I have seen and used, the Niagara II is truly a wonderful system. It has so many improvements that calling it "II" is not enough!

If you only use one or two sets of cartridges a year, then don't bother reading further, your conclusion is also fairly simple:

1. If you don't need ink that will last generations, stick with the manufacturers ink cartridges or the brand new (not refilled/recycled) Plug-N-Play cartridges from MediaStreet.
2. If you do need ink that will last generations, purchase the brand new (not refilled/recycled) Generations® cartridges from MediaStreet. For details on which to buy, see my Imaging Resource article on choosing Generations Ink.

If you fit into #1 or #2 above and are using an Epson printer, just be sure to at least to turn your printer OFF when you aren't using it, and do a print-head/nozzle check each week to make sure that none of the inks are drying up from disuse. I have several friends, and I own 3 printers that this happened to, and once it does, the cost of repair is more than buying a new printer. If you fit into category 1 or 2, the cost of the printer is your biggest cost, so you want to protect your printer.

If you don't fit into #1 or #2, and you bought a printer for under $1000, then the cost of the ink is probably your biggest cost. I remember once around 1989 when I had bought a bunch of cartridges really cheap. I still had several cartridges left when my printer died so I went out to buy a compatible printer just to use up the ink – the printer was cheap, the ink was expensive.

Lets start by taking a look back. For me this has been a 20 year journey. I have tried every option, I have tried every manufacturer I became aware of. Let my $1000's of wasted dollars and 100's of hours save you money time and grief. This whole process started for 2 reasons

1. I was looking to save costs in the companies I owned and
2. I was looking to give solid valuable advice on the same to my clients.

Around the 2000 time period I was getting really good at refilling ink cartridges. Really good meant that I could usually get 3 refills out of a cartridge. Only one in 5 or 6 failed before the 3rd refill. I almost never got a 4th refill. Almost every time I tried I wasted the ink that I put in because it either leaked (the exit ports on the Epson, the heads on my HP) or there were too many air bubbles and this meant lines that didn't print, so I had to repeatedly clean the heads and reprint (think a lot of wasted ink.)

Up until 2000 my recommendation to friends, customers and readers of my articles was: only buy the manufacturers cartridges, don't refill, don't fuss. There were a few 3rd party refilled cartridges that were sort-of-OK, but I found one in 3 failed and that meant the savings wasn't there. Yes I could return the defective cartridge to the store where I bought it, but that is a increase in cost that is greater (my time is money) than the savings in the cartridges.

In general, the problem is that buying ink by the cartridge is a very expensive way to go. Even buying 3rd party refilled ink cartridges is expensive because there is so little ink in the cartridges. As mentioned in the introduction, if you want to buy a third party ink, buy them in brand new cartridges like MediaStreet sells, don't go with the refills/recycled cartridges. This avoids problems such as frequent leaks and frequent failures because the cartridge had been refilled too many times. And if you say "but what about the environment" then I still say don't go with the refills/recycled cartridges, instead read down further about the Niagara II CIS system – that is the way to save the environment, not the low quality, messing, wasteful refilled cartridges.

If you use a printer that you replace all the colors at once, you waste a lot of ink with any sort of cartridges. I use the Epson 1280 as my primary printer and it has 5 colors in the color cartridge and black only in the black cartridge, so I can replace the black independent of the other colors. If you are like me, I use 2 to 3x's as much Magenta and Cyan as I do Yellow, Light (photo) magenta and Light (photo) Cyan. I figure on average, when I throw away a color cartridge, I have used only 60% of the ink in it. And sometimes, when we are printing one of our brochures, we use up the Cyan before any of the other colors are even 10% used up! What a waste.

Of course you can do what I used to do, plan my printing and change the colors on my brochures so I would use up the correct proportions of ink. OK, maybe that was a little stupid, but at the time I was burning through a color cartridge every other day, fiddling like this meant the cartridge would last a week – a huge cost savings if you don't count my wasted time.

Since these tricks were obviously not too intelligent, the next logical step is to refill the cartridges. From about 1990 until 2000 I went back and forth between refilling cartridges and just buying the expensive manufacturers cartridges. Sometimes the refills worked, as I said before, I generally got 3 refills per cartridge before the cartridge leaked all over my printer or the foam was so full of air pockets that I was having to reprint 50% of my documents. Frequently I would "test" an image on plain paper before printing on expensive paper. And by test I mean I was testing whether the printer was going to print properly, not whether the image was good quality or the correct colors.

I was not a happy camper. My solution: Try to use laser printers and do everything black and white and paying "downtown" printers to do my color work. But I kept looking for a good solution.

If you don't want to use a CIS system (yes I'm going to finally get to my discussion of CIS systems in the next paragraph) but you want to use the high quality Generations inks from MediaStreet, they have their inks available in new cartridges – no defective "refills/reused" cartridges here. MediaStreet will warn you that this is not an economical way to do it. Indeed, they give you 40% off your first order, but the idea is so that you will "try" their inks, then when you are happy like I am, you will move to a practical way of buying the Generations inks. If nothing else you've got to go to the MediaStreet.com web site to check out the cool graphic of Niagara falls! But lets move on to my recommended solution, the Niagara II CIS (Note: I am not recommending CIS's in general.)

Next in my search for the ink solution came the Niagara and another almost identical continuous ink flow system. These mostly worked much better. My cost of ink plummeted and my "fiddle" time was reduced by 75%. There was/is still some fiddling with these, but compared to refilling, the Niagara I (It was simply called Niagara, but I'm going to refer to it as Niagara I to clearly distinguish it from the Niagara II) was wonderful.

Consider this, while testing for this article I had 2 – 13"x40" print jobs to do. The roll of paper from Epson came with instructions, it told me that I would use up a color cartridge and a black cartridge for every 6'6" I printed, and so, if I was going to do 2 images longer than 3'3" I would need to put 2 new cartridges (one black, one color) in for each image because I would run out of ink on the second image! I ran with my CIS system, and I could barely measure the amount of ink used up after both printed. Meaning of course that the amount of ink in the Epson cartridges is negligible. This corresponds reasonably to ink usage tests I have previously done with Epson cartridges (see my previous article for specifics.)

But finally my favorite system by a long shot. Recently I obtained a Niagara II system. The first thing you notice with this system is that the cartridges are pre-filled (Precharged.) If you've used the older systems you know there was some hassle starting the system up, and if you ever started it up with the wrong colors. Oh well, start over again with a brand new system. The Niagara is both prefilled and the ink bottle lids have colored beads on them so you can see instantly what color goes into each bottle. So simple.

Changing bottles or top up? You could, if you always buy 4 oz bottles, just replace the bottle & dump left-overs from the replaced bottles in later. But a better way is to just top off periodically. For me, as soon as one of the bottles is ½ empty I top up all the bottles that less than ¾ full. Usually this means when black is ½ empty, I top up black, magenta and cyan. I had some problems that required lots of head cleans when I let the bottles run down below ¼ full during testing – that is why I recommend you refill when they are ½ empty. This also minimizes the amount of air that gets into the system when refilling the bottles.

Rigid supports for the uptake tubes. On the older systems including the Niagara I, the flimsy uptake tube sits in the ink. Some would touch the bottom, others would curl up a bit. When you lift it up to refill, the ones that were curled had a very good chance of letting air into the system. While a little bit of air truly isn't a problem, eventually if you get too much air in, the cartridges will stop working. The Niagara II system comes with rigid tubes that sit over the flimsy tube to keep them straight and pointing down at the bottom of the bottle. A minor improvement? Yes, but a worthwhile one.

There are a couple of major improvements in the supply tubes for my printer, the Epson 1280 (a 13" wide printing area), and I expect it is a major improvement for most printers, especially other wide carriage printers.

The first improvement is a little plastic plate that keeps the supply tubes from getting stuck under the print head/cartridges. On the older systems, when the head came fully to the right quickly, the mass of the ink would cause the supply tubes to keep moving, since they were fixed at the cartridges and fixed at the top, this meant they "bowed down" just a little. If the head then moved quickly to the left, the supply tubes would get caught underneath the printer head and cartridge assembly. This was not good news – think lots of lights blinking, think air bubbles in the print head, think spending 2 days getting the printer going again. I got kinks in my supply tubes when this happened 3 times in a row before I figured out what causing the problem. My solution on the old system was to put tape with a Teflon surface (I got it from a hardware store) on the area underneath so that the tubes would not stick and jam but rather slide and get out of the way. While my solution worked perfectly, the Niagara II solves this problem by design. On the cartridge there is a little shelf that the supply tubes rest on, this means it is now impossible for the tubes to reach down and get jammed. I'm sure this will save many users much grief, of course, if they didn't use the older systems they won't know what the reason is for that little piece of plastic. If you are one of them – don't remove that support!

¹ Actually, I "knew the cartridges were pre-filled, and because of past experience I thought a mistake had been made when they were shipped. The bottles and lines were empty, and I had received "full" bottles besides the Niagara II, But closer inspection told me that they really were pre-filled.

The second improvement was to support the supply lines in the middle rather than all the way to the side. The side support probably worked fine for narrow carriage printers, and it worked fine on my 13" carriage as long as the Velcro held firm. Unfortunately, with the Niagara I, as the printer was in use the Velcro would slowly give way, causing the supply tubes to teeter-totter down until, once again, they jammed, Teflon protection or not. The Niagara II for the Epson 1280 now supports the tubes in the middle. A huge improvement.

BUY 4OZ BOTTLES THE FIRST TIME:

You must buy the 4 oz bottles the first time around. Not because MediaStreet says you have to, but because I say you have to! It was briefly touched on above, but it warrants repeating and detail.

1st Reason to buy 4oz bottles the first time:

In your Niagara II system, you have several 4 oz bottles. These 4 oz bottles have a special cap with a hose going through the cap and into the bottle. When refilling you want to keep the end of the hose in the ink. This means that the lid will only be half off and Ideally you will still have at least ¼ of the ink in the bottom.

This gives you a fairly limited amount of space to pour the ink into the bottle. The larger bottles have a larger opening and the larger bottles are, quite simply, larger. This means they are harder to maneuver around the hoses and lids.

I found that pouring from a 4 oz bottle into the 4 oz bottles was fairly easy, but pouring a 16 or 32 oz was almost impossible for the 3 colors closest to the printer and it wasn't easy for the closer ones.

You could of course create a paper funnel and pour the ink through that. Or you could buy 6 plastic funnels and just clean them every time you use them. You could do it with one funnel, but then you would have to clean it (easy – use warm water) and thoroughly dry it (not so easy when you are in a hurry) between refilling each color.

But the easiest is to keep a set of 4 oz bottles. You see, it is quite easy to take the 4 oz bottle to a safe location with lots of room, take the lid fully off, and pour from a 32 oz to fill up the 4 oz bottle, then take the 4 oz bottle to the Niagara II CIS system, take the lid partially off the CIS bottle and fill it's 4 oz bottle using the 4oz bottle you just filled. Of course this also works if you buy the 8 oz or 16 oz refills and fill the 4 oz bottles from there. The Niagara II system holds the bottles with a little bit of friction so you can raise the one you are filling up an inch or so to make it easy to fill.

This is one reason I strongly recommend you start by buying 4 oz bottles with your first order. , then buying the larger bottles (it is cheaper by the oz when you buy the larger bottles.)

2nd Reason to buy 4oz bottles the first time:

The other reason you want to start with 4 oz bottles is so that you can see which inks you use the most. If like me, you find you hardly use and of the Photo Cyan, Photo Magenta or Yellow, you may find yourself buying a gallon of black, 32 oz of Cyan, 32 oz of Magenta and little if any of the other colors until this is all used up.

By starting with the 4oz bottles you can calculate your usage of each color and then, once you know your usage proportions, you can buy the ink you need in the quantities you need.

After all, that's why MediaStreet makes the individual inks available in all different sizes.

Of course, if you were a "one set of cartridges a day" company then you may buy the biggest bottles for every color and just worry about how many gallons of each color you buy after seeing which color runs out fastest.

One other tip, I have very little spare space around the CIS bottles. I found that permanently removing the case lid (not the individual lids on the bottles) made it much easier to do refills. The lid comes off easily and if you don't like it, goes back on easily too.

What if you really mess up & get lots of air bubbles in the cartridges?

If this happens, you will find yourself endlessly trying to "clean" the heads. Fortunately, if you do every get to that point (I did with Niagara I, but haven't with Niagara II) MediaStreet will sell just the Niagara II precharged cartridges. This lets you get back in business with minimal cost.

All in all, you can tell I am a big fan of the Niagara II system. When I got it, I thought "OK so it's precharged. That's nice." I was expecting to give a report saying that it was basically the Niagara I with a little less hassle to set up. I didn't realize how far MediaStreet went towards fixing up so many little and big irritants. I can heartily recommend the Niagara II to both users of cartridges as well as even existing users of the Niagara I or competitors CIS systems and I recommend the Niagara II system to people that I never would have recommend the older CIS systems to.

Stay tuned for an analysis of the different inks and which one is best for you.