I am new to the forum. I have been printing with Piezography ink sets first in a 4000 and later in a 9880 for about 8 years. I recently acquired an 11880 for and I would like to install Carbon K7 in it. Getting cartridges that work seems to be a pain, but I am confident that inkjetsolution.eu can make it work for me. So far I have not put any ink in the machine. Before I do, I would like to ask if anyone here has had success working with 11880 and Piezography K7 either with QTR or Studioprint and which workaround worked. I used to treat my 9880 as a 9800 in Studioprint in order to get access to the monochrome mode, would this be possible with the 11880 as well?
That trick for studioprint doesn’t work for the 11880 (I tried it at Black Point Editions). It’s different scale printer . . .
If those carts work, the head design is about the same as the x900-levels so the curves for the x900 printers that are at piezography.com should work with some small amounts of linearization. Now that there will be a lot of orphan 11880s out there I’m thinking of supporting it . . . For now though, all I can say is it should work! If you get a perfect nozzle check and run some linearization charts that I can validate were printed and read-in correctly, I wouldn’t mind running some lins for free. We could post the .quads as beta for others interested in the 11880 system. Not sure how much interest is there but this could gauge the interest-level.
Keep ahold of your old OEM chips and carts though just in case. also, this is going to take a metric “” ton of piezoflush to clear the lines of stain (especially Y). You’ll need two sets of carts. It might be worth it to simply buy a new damper assembly now to clear the stain from that little beast. If it hasn’t been replaced already, the damper assembly is due for it.
ps: Due to the under-printing nature of Piezography, this should fix (somewhat) the ink-starvation issues in large dark black prints that plague the 11880.
Thanks for the reply Walker, that’s good news! I’d be glad to put in some extra effort if I could be of any help in the process. I bought the printer as it was on sale, so it’s new. I would prefer not to put the epson ink in at all. I will go ahead ordering the cartridges from inkjetsolution, and try if these work. If I understand you right, I will then print a target as if the 11880 is a x900 and linearise with the QTR tool. I will have to read up on that though, it is a very long time ago since I last attempted to linearised a QTR curve.
Consider us at Resolve Photo in Calgary also as HIGHLY interested in getting Piezography up & running on the 11880. We’d be prepared to assist to help prove it out. I’m going to start looking for refillable carts asap and see about getting a QTR install configured to drive one of our 11880’s as a fake 9900. That I can do right now just to see how the driver talks to the hardware.
The main downside I suspect we’ll see is driver-imposed 44" width. I sure do wish we could run > 44" K7, but that’s a separate issue…
No success with refillable carts here - just what the people at inkjetsolutions warned me for. I shaved off some plastic here, filled out some gaps there, but the printer always rejected at least 3 carts. Inkjetsolutions assures me that they can provide single use carts profiled by them with Cone K7 that will work. But obviously I would prefer to use my stock of Carbon ink. For now I am trying to see what I can achieve with StudioPrint.
Walker, what is the reason for the 60" limit? Why not 64"?
Oh, it may vary well get to 64! I haven’t tried. There are only a few papers that are 64 though (I think Exhibition Fibre, and Double-sited Matte). Everything else is 60.
Hmm. The 11880 is not listed as a supported QTR printer and there is no Quad11880 available to select in my install. (Windows.) I’ve seen numerous discussions / enquiries about 11880 support on QTR over the years, and never anything (at least that I saw) that indicated the printer was actually supported. Only that you could fake it by treating it as another printer model like a 9900. I must be missing something, more digging to do…
We have Macs in the print shop but I don’t mess with the production environment when trying out new things. My Windows laptop is a disposable test bed.
Anyway, I was able to get it going on the Windows QTR install. Ran a big test print yesterday on a roll-end of 60" luster just to make sure everything is talking properly using the stock QTR curves with OEM ink. Looks perfectly fine. So now to try to track down some carts.
My thanks to this thread for kicking this experiment into gear. It’s something we’ve been meaning to look into for a long time, but something else always was more urgent and it wasn’t clear that it would even be possible. Now it feels tantalisingly close.
congratulations! Whenever you have a clear nozzle check w/ the new Piezo inks in the future I’ll send a target and some master curves for printing and we’ll get you profiled.
It helps us because then we can publish these curves for others who are wanting to convert 11880s that are now sitting dormant.
Cart options are looking a bit sketchy but I’m still searching around for something that looks worth trying first. Inkjetsolution.eu shows up most highly / frequently in searches, but with Marc reporting above that their 11880 carts are rejected by his printer I’m not eager to order a set of these as yet. Hopefully I’ll find something soon that looks worth trying. The 11880 would be a super K7 platform and I’m dying to get one going. I’ll keep updating as I make progress…
Inkjetsolution.eu has told me the same thing they told Marc above. The refillable carts they offer on their web site either are not really available, or else they don’t recommend them as a reliable solution. But they are willing to provide pre-filled K7 carts that they feel will be reliable. I find this odd… if pre-filled carts can be made, I’m not sure how I wouldn’t be able to use the same carts to fill my own.
Anyway, I’m pursuing that option with those guys, and still searching for other avenues. We run a custom blend and would expand on that if I can bring all our 11880’s over to K7. So buying pre-filled carts would be strictly a stop-gap measure for us. Ultimately we really need to fill our own. Other 11880 owners I’ve been corresponding with indicate they’ve never been able to find a working refillable solution. So maybe we’ll be out of luck, who knows… I hope not.
Just a brief update on this. I was unable to get anywhere with Inkjetsolution.eu. Their web site won’t ship outside of the EU as far as I can tell, and they didn’t answer emails when I tried following up to see if there was any way to get something from them into Canada.
I did eventually poke around some of the Chinese aftermarket parts suppliers and found a set of cartridges and chip resetter that looked worth trying. The chip resetter appears to work. But the cartridges are pretty grossly misaligned in the 11880 and there’s no way to get a reliable connection with the chip. I couldn’t get far enough along with them to see whether seals and the rest of the ink flow matters would be okay. Those carts have been tossed out.
When time permits I’ll try another source for carts. We have our first P10000 up & running for colour, and have a P20000 on the way as well, so I expect to retire our 11880’s from colour printing before too much more time passes. Hopefully they can see a new lease on life for K7…
Thanks for the update Royce. I had hopes on the filled single-use cartridges from Inkjetsolutions.eu, but they only seem to offer inks they already have in stock, and since they don’t have Carbon K7, it was a dead end for me. My next attempt will be to refill original epson carts. I almost succeeded once, it’s a hassle but it seems to be doable, at least for relatively low volume printing. As soon as I have time to try this out, I will share the results.
Walker, I read Jon’s newsletter about the possibility that IJM has a solution for the Sure Color printer cartridges, would that solution be transferable to the 11880 carts? Is there any solution on the horizon, or should I best give up the hope to make Piezography work with the 11880?
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