Digital BW, The Print

I am cross-posting this here and the Piezography group in case some here find it useful. This is one person's experience setting up refillable cartridges from inkjetcarts.us on an Epson 2200 using K7 inks. (I don't print enough to want/need the continuous inking system, and Piezogrphy doesn't sell prefilled K7 cartridges in the US.) This is on a Mac with CS4 and stock QTR setup for K7. 

The short version is, it's a complete success so far. Time will tell of course. Here's an explanation in case helpful to others, in no particular order:

The chips on these refillable carts supposedly can trick the machine into thinking they are always full. So ... you should be able to simply leave the carts in the printer forever, and occasionally squirt more ink into their refill holes from time to time to keep them topped up. Like I said , time will tell. 

Re the print: The first print on the K7 machine (And I do mean, "very first") is clearly better than two of the same image made by my two previous preferred methods: A 2200 with QTR/stock Epson inks, and a 3800/QTR/stock inks. (Same paper, etc.) That's subjective, so let's just say I can see which print is which when the three are side-by-side and shuffled. A friend also picked it, and not told why she was being asked to pick the 'best" print. Again, subjective and a sample size of two but I'd say there was no mistaking which of the three is the golden boy.

Setting up: Filling the carts the first time took welllll over two hours start to finish. Reason: Substantial amounts of stuff to read/decode on the CD that came with the K7 bottled inks and more confusingly on the CD that came with the cartridges. None of the how-to vids on the inkjetcarts.us CD would play on my Mac. HUH?? But once I found two very good how-to vids on inkjetcarts.us website, everything got simpler. The two videos are in the "support" area called something like "cartridge nomenclature" and "loading of refillable carts by gravity." gawd.

To be clear, subsequent fill-ups should be much easier/quicker. All it should involve is using the syringe to carefully squirt a little ink into the appropriate cart to top it up.

Note for any other first-timers: Definitely buy two syringes. The second one will be helpful in "blowing" air to "prime" the carts the very first time. (Sounds weird but just watch the video.) If you don't have two, you should plan on a big mess and maybe a pair of ink-stained lips during the very first fill-up. 

Before installing the K7 carts,I made sure the 2200 was working 100% on stock inks. (Perfect nozzle checks, blah blah blah). Then I pulled out the stock carts , dropped in the K7 carts and ran a new nozzle check. It was bad, so did one cleaning cycle. Next nozzle check was fine. After that I installed the standard K7 profile-things that come with QTR, made the first test print mentioned above and it was successful as I believe I have already noted.

What else to say. It might blow up in the future. For now, we have a very promising setup . I'm using this 2200 as a second printer. Total investment: $350 give or take, for inks and carts, and several hours of annoying but ultimately fruitful reading up. Hope this is helpful to someone someday!