The Ink

The key to success on inkjet printing comes with pigment inks. Hold on, what is pigment ink? Right, you have to check on Wikipedia(www.wikipedia.com) for a good answer. But for the sake of discussion, normal inkjet inks (I would call it house-hold inkjet) are water based, which is essentially soluble in water. I know you have experience this unpleasant situation, when spilling the tea on the most important document....

On contrary, pigment ink is not water soluble, which means you can spill tea without a problem, humm I mean to say no problem on the ink , but nothing about the paper itself which will get screwed anyway.

Okay, to cut long story short, you need Pigment Ink for PCB printing. There are two known options available at the time of this writing.

1) Use EPSON DuraBright ink (I am not from Epson, nor do it get commission from them for publicity)
2) Use MISPRO brand ink. (No, I don't get commission from them either!)

Option one restricts you to use only EPSON printers (since the ink wont come in jars, but in cartridges which wont fit in other brand of printers.

Option two comes in jars/bottles, so you can fill it on other printer cartridges, so can use a variety of printers. I used the words "variety of printers" and deliberately avoided using the words "any other" simply because world is not that fair, and you may be out of luck with some printers.

Can I fill EPSON cartridges with MISPRO ink? well, yes, but not very easy. EPSON guys have given some intelligence to the cartridges, buy incorporating a microchip/memory in the cartridge and it keeps track of ink usage. Once the cartridge is impty, the chip will keep that in mind, even though how much ink you put inside. Only way out is to re-set this chip. There are few methods around, but the sure and easy way is to buy an EPSON chip resetter (not selling by EPSON of course). With this unit, you can set the chip status to FULL, even though you don't have any bit of ink inside the cartridge. Why the hell Iwant to do that? yes, you want to do that since you may only need one color (Magenta is said to be the magic color) for the whole process of PCB printing (unless you want to print on non-coper side with fancy colored images), and the EPSON printer is so stuborn and it refuse to print if Black ink is out.


Kavee