Sunday, January 20, 2013

CIS (continuous ink system) from City Ink Express

January is often a time of lots to do and few blog posts.
Maybe it's the aftermath from Christmas, or all these great new hobbies we'd resolved to take up as part of a New Years Resolution. Or maybe it's taken until now for the turkey and Xmas pudding to finally wear off but there's been very little activity at Nerd Towers for a while. It's time for that to stop.

As we've just acquired a new PC and a printer, so there's plenty of setting up and messing about with technology to be done, but then it's back to making cool stuff and playing with  (and making) gadgets once more. While printing from an industrial-sized Xerox is great for press-n-peel and making PCBs, sometimes an inkjet printer is just what you need. We've got to the point where waiting for everything to warm up for laser printing is getting to be a bit of a bore, so invested in a Canon IP4900 from City Ink Express

It's not the most expensive printer on the market, but it has a rear-loading tray which makes it great for all kinds of different thickness materials; some of the top-end printers on their site have a bottom loading tray which is fine for regular paper, but not for plastics and thicker card.


The system comes with five pre-filled ink tanks and was surprisingly easy to set up.
Just uncap each of the cartidges, install them in place and follow the instructions!
It took us a few test prints before all of the different coloured inks started to appear on the page. Using the windows printer driver, a quick "clean nozzles" to get the ink flowing and hey presto! Everything came through fine


We've quite often seen Steve turn up at BuildBrighton with hands covered in inks so were quite nervous about the whole process. But it went surprisingly well and with only the tiniest little bit of ink spillage


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