» HP CB277AN#140 78 Plus Tri-Color Inkjet Print Cartridge with Vivera Inks

HP CB277AN#140 78 Plus Tri-Color Inkjet Print Cartridge with Vivera Inks Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Color quality varies with different cartridges
Comment: Have had to throw away two cartridges out of six because the color was so bad. When the color is right it's great but this can get expensive. I just bought two more and will update my comments when I open the next one.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Vibrant ink... BUT I'd avoid it unless you can profile your printer
Comment: I thought I'd try to get better prints from my five-year-old, dirt-cheap Deskjet 952C. HP offered a Vivera ink cartridge that fit my 952C, the 78 Plus, and I thought to give it a whirl.

Pretty colors... but sadly they didn't match the actual colors on my home planet.

The answer? I found a service that creates ICM/ICC printer profiles. There are are several around on the Web that ask you to download and print a page or two of calibration information with the Vivera ink and whatever brand of paper you want to use. You then mail the printed-out calibration target to the profiling service. They scan it into a computer, run a profiling program, and generate a 2 MB profile. You then tell your photo printing software (I use Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop CS3, but many, many printing apps are ICC/ICM-profile aware) to use the profiles... and it's like night and day. The best $40 I've spent in quite some time, and now I can turn out reasonably decent photo prints on my humble little three-ink printer.

Why four stars? I'm a bit miffed at HP. There is no good reason why they couldn't have a bunch of ICC/ICM profiles already built on their Web site. The HP Web site clearly says that the 78 Plus cartridge works great with the 952C... but it doesn't, at least not without an ICC/ICM profile.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: not worth it!
Comment: I got this cartridge for my HP DeskJet 932c. I'd been using the regular color ink cartridges and got good photos but thought this new ink would be even better. It's NOT! What's more, when I print on plain paper in "draft" mode, the color portions are wrong. I've cleaned the printer contacts twice according to HP instructions, ran all the utilities, and still cannot print in draft mode with any color. However, B&W in draft mode is great, as long as there are no color graphics or text. I realize this printer is old, but I didn't have a problem with it until I switched to this cartridge. Huge ripoff!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: This should be a great idea, but it isn't.
Comment: According to HP, the new Vivera inks produce longer-lasting photo-quality prints than the older formula used in the standard 78 tricolor cartridge. In the short run I can't really test that, but it is an attractive property, especially for those of us who have watched old color photographs deteriorate. The newer HP printers use Vivera ink cartridges, but many of us with reliable Deskjets that use the 45 and 78 cartridges are reluctant to discard what works. Along comes the 78 Plus to the rescue!
From the start I found myself regretting having lost the receipt. The first alignment prints were awfully streaky, and it took a LOT of cleans and primes to get good results. Nevertheless, I succeeded in getting good test prints. On to a run of 4 X 6 tabbed HP Premium Photo Paper prints of my digital vacation pictures. They did print successfully, however I noticed they often had a slight reddish tinge. On the monitor they showed good, clean whites. Is my monitor adjustment off? Is it the fault of my old HP Deskjet 6122? A direct comparison would not be long in coming.
With the standard 78 tricolor cartridge it might sometimes take a few cleanings to get an alignment print that is just right, but it usually works fine from there. Not so with the 78 Plus. A few hours between print jobs, and there were missed colors (usually the cyan), and it took a cleaning or two or three to be just right. This got worse, and I finally just replaced it with a new standard 78 cartridge. What a relief to be able to print things again without having to do a cleaning and repeat printing! As long as I have the older type of 78 tricolor on my printer, I might as well try a reprint of one of the photos that I had printed with the 78 Plus. Lo and behold, white objects came out white in prints using the standard 78 cartridge. Maybe in 50 years the prints made with the standard 78 won't look as good as the 78 Plus, but in the short run they look better.
Maybe the Vivera inks work well in the current generation of HP printers and cartridges designed for them. Trying to retrofit the 78 cartridge for Vivera ink has been a disappointment in my experiments.

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