.... I began experimenting with different highly rated, third party Canon compatible ink cartridges. The printer quickly became flakey and unreliable, after trying several different low cost brands I finally switched back to Canon cartridges and once again my Pixma prints beautifully and is completely reliable.
As mentioned earlier I have flipped back to Canon cartridges in order to resolve oddball issues, and it has worked. This time around I have done a few things like cleaning the printhead but shied away from a full set of Canon cartridges.
The rationale was simple, the set of cartridges would cost almost as much as new printer and so, since I will in future need a new printer anyway (32 bit versus 64 bit issue), why bother? Just go to the new printer now.
I had been looking at some Epsons that were interesting until I saw the post from the person who was refused a firmware update, allegedly because Epson objected to the compatible cartridges, so I'm looking elsewhere. It's still not clear to me if it's plausible that Epson could actually know....but, why take a chance?
