Foreward
This is an independent test of the newest ink on the market, the long awaited RiDisc ink! RiDisc for some time have been one of the market leaders in producing high grade low cost media, and are now expanding into the ink industry. It's about time that good reliable compatible ink came onto the market at a price that anyone can afford. Official Epson ink for the R200 can cost as much as £76 for the 5 colours and 1 black, more expensive than buying the printer in the first place!

This is an unofficial test using a home rig, and results may differ slightly from user to user. The findings can be compared against my other ink tests for a baseline should that be required.

Set-up
The R200 is connected to the PC via USB. I am using Windows XP's print facility (right click on file and choose print) to print all my images. Within the printer driver I have selected the highest quality prints possible, lower quality settings would yield more prints.

The test is to see how long it takes to run one of the carts out of the set, and then resetting the cart to see how long they last after reset. I will be using the SSC Service utility (v3.71) to reset the ink levels, and failing that, an ink resetting hardware tool.

The papers used are:-

• Double sided Kodak picture paper, glossy, 190g/m2.
  
• 6x4 paper is 190g/m2 glossy photo paper by Canon

Printing tips
Different software applications can give a wide variety of results. Printing the same picture in Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, and Windows Print can give 3 totally different results due to the way it prints the pictures. Printing within XP by right clicking and choosing prints will, be default, provide very dark images. You can tweak the settings to give a much brighter more normal print should you desire. If your prints are not coming out how you'd expect, it is probably not the printer, more likely the way you are printing.

Different papers will drastically affect how the image will also print. I have used a very wide range of papers and am amazed at how they can produce prints on both ends of the scales. One of the cheapest papers I have used (about 10p a sheet for 210gsm paper) would not absorb the ink quickly enough and would make the inks bleed into each other, giving either a blurred effect at best, or similar to someone smudging after dropping some water on the paper fresh after the print. On the other end of the scale I have used paper that produces results with third party inks that give a quality that matches a lot of professional photographers.

Another issue I have had with low grade paper is that the ink will not fully stick to the paper. This can cause the thin layer of ink to peel off as you are printing and slightly block or damage the print heads on the printer. This can make your pictures look streaky or put fine lines on the print. It can take nearly a third of all the ink carts installed to try to flush the problem away, and even then it's not guaranteed to work.

In short, do not buy low grade paper!

The carts


The carts have been packaged in a clean environment and securely for transportation. The packaging is as good as any other replacement cart, and install without any problems into the printer. At no point did the printer flag that these were not genuine Epson carts and never gave me any issues during printing. Once installing the carts I flushed the nozzles once more (installing gives an initial partial flush and primes the heads) to ensure that the ink was flowing freely.

I have tested 5 complete sets of RiDisc ink, and the results below are an average of all 5 tests. Please note that I used the same grade paper and pictures throughout for fairness.

Costs
Prices from 65p per cart £3.90 for a set

These prices are extremely low, and knock the stuffing out of any high street prices. Jet-Tec are known as the biggest UK name in ink, but with Jet-Tec carts setting you back around £3 a cart, can RiDisc become a true rival offering performance and quality but at a price that's more sensible?

Results Part 1 - Output
The results below show how many pictures were printed before the first cart ran out of ink. This is a very good indication to show value for money, and can indicate pretty quickly how fast you use specific colours for your type of usage. In this instance it was purely photographs, and no text was printed.

• 6x4 prints = 63
  
• Half paged (A4) with border = 42
  
• Borderless (A4) = 3
  
• Bordered full sized A4 = 56
  
• Black ink remaining = 81%
  
• Cyan ink remaining = 69%
  
• Light cyan ink remaining = 34%
  
• Yellow ink remaining = 33%
  
• Magenta ink remaining = 58%
  
• Light magenta ink remaining = EMPTY

Results Part 2 - colour
The ink performs as well as any other on the market, and beats some of the lesser known carts. The colour balance compared to the original is extremely close, the brighter colours being very vibrant but not losing the darker shades either.

Results Part 3 - resetting
In my previous tests I have tried to reset the carts to get extra prints out. Although this worked about 30% of the time, unless the carts have a facility themselves (i.e. Jet-Tec) then I feel for the price you are paying for the carts it is not worth trying to reset them. Running a cart dry can damage your print heads or cause them to overheat, neither of which is very good. For the minimal prints you would get is far outweighed by the fact that all other 5 carts would lose ink from doing a nozzle clean (automatic when you change any cart of any brand). For the price per full page of A4 it's really not worth the potential hazard.

Bang for buck
This ink is one of the 3 cheapest inks currently on the market, and definitely lives up to the RiDisc name! The performance is absolutely outstanding, reflected by the very high output of pictures before one of the carts ran out. Seeing how much ink was left in the black for example would indicate that you would be able to print out a lot of pages of text for that same £3.90 a set.

The first results above are approximately 100 A4 photographs at highest quality settings in the drivers, with the equivalent of 2.75 carts worth of ink remaining in the other set. This would mean that you get approximately 190 A4 sized prints if all colours were equally balanced, meaning that each full A4 sheet printed would cost you between 2p and 3p.

Summary
The carts yield a higher output than that of Jet-Tec (previously tested by myself), and if anything I believe that the colours are closer to the original with the RiDisc ink. The price is far more favorable, so I can only wish RiDisc the very best of luck with this superb ink!

F.A.Q.

• I hear cheap ink clogs and wrecks your printer!!
  
  • The inks in these RiDisc carts (and others such as Datasafe, Datawrite, Smartjet, etc) include cleaning agents and all the required emulsifiers to keep the heads clean and prevent blocking
• I want to use my ink to print good pictures. Some printers use a pigment ink but no R200 cart does yet. Does yours?
  
  • The OEM carts for R300, C42, C62 etc are dye based (so no pigment). Pigment ink is generally used for archival documents, and cost a lot more than standard carts.
• Surely they must have less ink than retail carts?
  
  • The cartridges are full, containing an amount equal to or greater than the OEM.

Check out Page 2 for "Flash's" contribution to this review

Added:  Monday, June 13, 2005
Reviewer:  Meg

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