Do any of you have Epson inkjet printers? A couple of years ago I ran out of the genuine Epson ink that my Stylus Photo 1400 came with new, and of course, genuine Epson ink cartridges are hilariously overpriced (about $20 each and I needed 6 of them). I've heard/read horror stories about aftermarket ink, and even that is usually $35 or more for 6 cartridges, and I didn't want to take the gamble. So my printer has been collecting dust for 2 years.
Recently I went to watch these DVDs I made and printed back before my ink ran out, and all of them have glitches now (e.g., freezing, not wanting to load). I checked to see what they actually are, and they are "CMC MAG-D03-64", and Google tells me that they are not beloved. In fact, it seems that reliable double layer DVDs are few and far between. So I bought some inkjet printable Verbatim DataLifePlus DVDs ("MKM-003-00") and burned them; so far so good. However, I had no way to print the labels on them.
On eBay I found some ink for dirt cheap ($7.69 for all 6 cartridges, free shipping), and the seller sells a lot of it. That was cheap enough to be worth the gamble, so I ordered some. Amazingly, they worked. My printer falsely believes that they are all genuine, and shows that they are all full. But the truly amazing part is that the print quality was better than with the genuine Epson ink that came with the printer. Here is a comparison:
You can see that the Epson ink printed out "bolder" than it should have, and with the tiny text and closely spaced lines in the CBS Fox logo, you lose some of the fine details and separation that should be there.
The disc I printed with the cheap ink is the same type as the disc printed with the Epson ink ("CMC MAG-D03-64"), which was a coaster I used for a test print after installing the new cheap ink cartridges, so the printing surface can't be blamed for the difference in print quality. The printer settings were the same in both cases as well.
The reason the block of text on the bottom of the cheap ink disc is shorter is because the Verbatim discs I bought don't have a printable hub area, so I had to get rid of some of the empty space in the block of text to make it fit on the Verbatim discs (but I didn't change the text at all). I've already printed labels with that cheap ink on all 3 of the Verbatim discs, and they came out just as good as the test disc.
I can't speak to how well this cheap ink would print out a color photographic image, because I haven't tried that with it yet, but it does a great job with black.