Digital BW, The Print

I posted a while ago about the poor shadow density contrast and muddy 
prints I was getting with UT2 carts on my 1280.  Like Jim Pagoda I 
apparently had the wrong inks or the wrong ink order in my carts as 
supplied by MIS (bought in Dec '04).  Like him, once I got the proper 
carts my results were more in line with the good results others have 
obtained.  Jim and I had been discussing our experiences off list, 
but a few details of my experience might help others, so:

It is better to call MIS than to use email, as Jim has implied.  I 
called them up and got instant no hassles replacement, shipped at 
their expense, of the eboni and 'color' carts.  I was polite and 
restrained, and didn't whine about the lost time and paper, and they 
were upfront about problems with some runs of cartridges, and their 
plans to bring that all in house in March 05.

The carts arrived in less than a week, whereas Jim's took a long time 
after email arrangements.  My new carts, unfortunately, arrived with 
considerable ink leakage in the packages.  I believe they had syringe 
sampled the inks to be sure they were in the right order.  If I had 
paid for the carts I'd have been annoyed at the wastage, and I hope 
their 'normal' carts don't leak, but in the circumstances i just 
moved on.  The new carts work fine, although it took a bit longer 
than last time to get a good head check pattern, even after a few 
purge pattern printouts.

When printing out color patches using the 'purge pattern' files, my 
original 'wrong' inks had looked almost normal (compared to Paul's 
kindly supplied scans of his own purge patterns), due to the way the 
Epson print driver assigns the ink colors. I had not been certain 
that i had 'wrong ink order problems'.  Nevertheless, with new carts 
the shadow density problems went away, especially using Roy's Gray 
Lab monitor and print profiles.

Bottom line: MIS seems honest, upfront and willing to make good, but 
I hope they can get their QC nailed down, so more folks don't 
mistakenly waste paper and time trying to fix unfixable problems.  
I'll have to try another set of carts to see if the leakage problem 
is a common one.  

The output results from proper carts seem well worth the trouble, so 
far.  Even the dither patterns are better, now that the proper ink 
gradations are laid down.

ted