Just a short walk to a wild area of undergrowth near the airfield today.
Thistle
Hoverfly
Lots of butterflies about. Saw at least 5 species, but the only one that would sit still long enough to get a shot was the tortoiseshell.
Another tortoiseshell
Right at the end, I saw this beastie. I’m reliably informed (thanks Shane) that it’s a 6 spot Burnet – a type of moth.
6 spot Burnet moth
Went for a walk by the stream yesterday and saw lots of tortoiseshell butterflies, cabbage whites, a couple of species I haven’t identified and several beautiful blue damselflies with dark blue wings. Oh, and a fox. 😎
Went back today with the camera. It was a bit cloudier and windier than yesterday. No fox, no damselflies, but still lots of tortoiseshell, a female cabbage white and a small fly-like insect I’ve never seen before. I also saw two buzzards, but they were too distant to even attempt a shot.
Tortoiseshell
Female Cabbage White
Scorpionfly - female
After I posted the last pic on a forum, someone told me it’s a scorpionfly. Looked it up and it looks right. I am astonished though, that the available shots on the web are mostly of very poor quality, making my shot, with which I was disappointed due to poor depth of field, look quite good.
By Jost Zetzsche
I love Skype. It may not be the coolest thing to be in love with a wildly popular tool, but I can’t help myself. No tool has changed my work habits in the last few years more than this one.
Skype is primarily a VoIP (Voice-over-Internet-Protocol) service that allows you to make free calls from computer to computer if the person you are calling also has Skype installed. In addition, it allows you to make cheap calls to regular telephones, organize telephone conferences (free if everyone is using Skype, cheap if people are using telephones), send text messages, send large files, make video calls, or easily share your desktop.
True, there’s always a risk with programs like this that you’ll waste time by chatting too much with your friends, but for me Skype has been a real productivity catalyst. It’s so much easier to text message or call with Skype when you are working in teams, want to talk to a project manager, or do some consulting with a client. And because of the mind-blowing success of Skype, chances are that your colleagues and friends use Skype as well, thus circumventing the non-compatibility problems of other chat and VoIP programs.
IntelliWebSearch would probably be the winner of the popularity-among-translators award for the last few years.
This humble little application copies highlighted text from any Windows application with a number of user-definable shortcut keys; strips the text of paragraph marks, line breaks, or any customizable characters; opens your default browser and sends the copied text to up to 10 customizable search engines, online dictionaries, or dictionaries that you have installed on your hard drive. Once you have set up your search engines and dictionaries for your language combinations, it’s incredibly easy to use. I promise that your fingers will think in IntelliWebSearch terms from then on. (Mine automatically go Ctrl+Alt+D for the Duden dictionary that I have in my computer or Ctrl+Alt+D for the über-search engine/dictionary Linguee. I’m always terribly disappointed when I am doing something on someone else’s computer that may not have it installed.)
Teleport is a website copier or webspider. While this is actually an “antique” tool from the early days of the Internet (people used it to download complete web sites so that they could browse them offline) it has proved very helpful for translators. It does what you would expect a “website copier” to do: it copies websites (including image or multimedia files). This is wonderful when we have to quote for the translation of complete websites. It’s important to remember to ask for the actual source files before the translation is started, but it is an invaluable tool for getting an overview of a website, including its file structure or files that you would surely miss if you were just to browse through the site or to make a word or image count.
Another very helpful use for this tool is when you need to align (convert separate source and target documents into a translation memory) data from websites. For instance, you can choose to download only PDF files in all the different available languages and then continue to align them on a site such as YouAlign or NoBabel.
Since we just talked about word counts, I would strongly advise you to invest in a word count tool. Without going into the whole complexity of word counts, here’s what I think you should look for: a tool that allows you to count in a variety of formats (including a minimum of all MS Office formats, PDFs, and tagged files) while using MS Word parameters without the MS Word problems. As most of us know, MS Word’s word counts are notorious for their problems. (In versions 2003 and before, text boxes, footnotes, and endnotes were not counted; some items, such as WordArt, are still not counted in the current versions.) However, chances are that your client will still use Word to count words and check your invoice. So the tool should use the same logic for counting words that Word does while including the parts that Word blithely ignores (which we have to explain to the client). I use PractiCount & Invoice for this task and love it, but there are a good number of other tools that do very similar things.
Everyone has strengths, and accounting is definitely not one of mine. So it’s not too surprising that I love the program that takes care of most of my invoicing and accounting, while at the same time requiring little more than the most basic data entry. Translation Office 3000 does all that, plus job-tracking, profitability reporting, and many other things. All this can also be done with various tools such as Excel, Outlook, and Project – but why spread yourself thin over three tools when you can do it with one?
I like to “think with my fingers” and I’ve become a reasonably good typist over the years, but I gotta tell you, if I’m under pressure to get a translation done on a crazy deadline, or if my medical condition keeps my hands from working the way I want them to, there’s nothing like speech recognition. Dragon NaturallySpeaking, now available in most major Western European languages and Japanese, is stunningly accurate, requires little or no training, runs well on computers with fast processors (no need for superfast processing), works with essentially every Windows program, including translation environment tools, and is surprisingly inexpensive. (Windows Vista and 7 also have an internal voice recognition feature for Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Spanish, and English; in my tests, these did not score much worse than Dragon.)
Well, how could I leave this one out? Truth be told, my translation environment tool is by far the one tool that has given me the most joy during the past 10+ years. How else would I have accessed my translations and terminology that I stored last month, last year, or even five years ago for my project today? How else would I be able to work in virtually every file format without needing to become a master of each? And how else would I ensure that my translations are consistent, free of formatting and other errors, and adhere to my clients’ glossaries?
My main tool for many years has been Déjà Vu, but I have used many other tools in production situations, including Trados, SDLX, Transit, memoQ, Heartsome, Wordfast, Across, Lingotek, Multitrans, and others. I had good reasons for starting to use Déjà Vu in the first place, but I have come to the conclusion that it hardly matters which of the available tools you use as long as the tool can fulfill your client’s needs. It supports exchange formats such as TMX and XLIFF so you can access data that originated with other tools, and you can make the tool work for you, rather than feeling caught by the idiosyncrasies of the tool.
Jost Zetzsche is a freelance translator. He also publishes…
The Toolkit – A biweekly newsletter for people in the translation industry who want to get more out of their computers.
http://www.internationalwriters.com/toolkit/
ISSN 1470-3866
***End of issue 71***
To subscribe to tranfree, visit http://www.tranfree.com/
tranfree 71 – Avoiding & coping with Staleness.
You can also download this edition of tranfree 71 as a PDF
As I sit and type, it’s a beautiful sunny day here – perfect for the second week of Wimbledon.
We’ve got two articles for you this time. The first is about getting the balance right between work and other aspects of life. This is an area I have been constantly challenged in – having spent time at both extremes and in the middle. In the article we explore ways of coping with and avoiding staleness and burnout.
The second article is by Jost Zetzsche on the theme of translation tools. Jost is well placed to write such an article, as he publishes his own newsletter “The Tool Kit†about software tools for translators.
I hope you enjoy and benefit from tranfree 
Alex Eames
tranfree editor, Author –
How to Earn $80,000+ per Year as a Freelance Translator and
Selling Your Professional Services on the Web
Getting the Balance Right – Preventing & Coping With Staleness
By Alex Eames
Do you ever get stale1? Do you ever find, when you’ve been working on a large project for a long time, that you just get fed up or bored with it? Does that ever happen to you?
It’s almost impossible to get stale on a job that’s “for tomorrow†because you’re only working on it for one day and you’ve got no choice. You have to get the job finished by the deadline date or bye-bye client.
But when you’ve been working intensely on a project for a while – burning the candle at both ends for a sustained period of time – eventually you can find yourself getting “staleâ€. You sit down at your computer and it feels like you are two similar magnetic poles repelling each other. It’s as if your computer says “not you again?†and the feeling is mutual.
You think to yourself “I want my life backâ€. That’s when you’ve got to sit up and take notice. You’ve been overdoing it! You’ve become stale and you need some time off.
You really need to listen to that, and take some time off. If you’re a “deadline junkie†– going from one adrenaline rush to another, with a string of tight deadlines – one day you might find yourself stale. You sit at your computer and you think “I can’t go onâ€.
So how is it possible to get the balance right? To be really honest with you, I’m not quite sure. But let’s explore a few possible solutions together.
Translation work can be somewhat sporadic – unless you’re busy ALL the time. (That can be a good problem to have, but not always. You’re more likely to get pushed into burnout if you’re too busy for too long.) Is there a way that you can schedule in some leisure activities as “Immovable Objects�
Any kind of social, hobby or leisure activity that gets you away from your computer will work. Can you do that? Will it work for you? Can you say…
“Right! Every Friday I’m going to take the morning
off and go and play tennisâ€
(or whatever it is that you like to do).
Of course, you need to reserve the right to be flexible about it. If you know a job is coming in on Friday, take the time out earlier in the week. Just don’t make a habit of skipping the “time out†altogether.
“Sorry I can’t fit that in as I am fully committed this morning.
How about Friday early afternoon?â€
OK, so you’re “fully committed†going to the gym , but they don’t need to know that! Quite often, deadlines are somewhat arbitrary, and if you care to challenge them, there can be a degree of flexibility.
If a proposed deadline doesn’t offer any flexibility and threatens to rob you of your sanity…
“Just say Noâ€
I’ve deliberately chosen that phrase from Nancy Reagan’s campaign against drugs in the 1980s. You see, I think you can get addicted and trapped in a “continuous earning cycleâ€, which can lead you to ignore other needs – both yours and others’. That’s a dangerous place to be. Adrenaline addiction is real and there are several different types. It’s not just people who jump out of planes and do crazy things. See adrenalineaddicts.org for details.
Productivity enhancing methods and tools can be a great help. But instead of always using them to earn more and more money, use them to work less hours and fit in some refreshing non-business activities. I bet you never thought you would hear me say that!
This one might ruffle a few feathers. 
Increase rates? Impossible! You must be mad!
A big hint here is that if you want to charge more, you’ll need some (more) direct clients.
Everyone hates wasting time looking through a document to either count words or estimate how long it will take. It needn’t take a long time. A few minutes spent really looking at a sample of the text might stop you from grossly underestimating how long a job will take you. We’ve all done it! You work on a job that looked great for the first ten pages, but the next five were a complete nightmare, taking twice as long as the first ten. Having a proper look at the job in advance can save you having to pull an all-nighter and tiring yourself out.
We’re after less stress here, not more. 
Despite the above preventative ideas, there is still a likelihood that staleness will appear at some point. There is a tendency to take all the work you can get because of uncertainty over the future.
When you’re stale, you may try to force yourself to carry on regardless. Or, you can accept that you are stale and say…
“I’m not going to get anything useful done sitting at my
computer today. I’m going to take the day off and do
something fun; something I want to do; something I enjoy;
something for somebody else.â€
As long as it’s something that changes your focus, away from your work and earning money, it will be refreshing. (Preferably something not involving your computer.)
It’s hard to be prescriptive about this, so I won’t even try. What is refreshing to one person will be a burden to another. But “a change is as good as a restâ€. It really can be. Just find something that suits and refreshes you.
One of the main advantages of being a freelance is the total freedom. But, as I said in tranfree 69, you have to use it wisely. You also have total freedom to mess yourself up physically and mentally, if you abuse that freedom by working 24/7.
When you’re busy, there can be a very strong temptation not to have an abundance mentality but to be locked into the “feast or famine†mentality…
“I’ve got this glut of jobs right now so I’m going to work
my tail off, get all of this lot done, and then have a rest.â€
But, the thing is, that your rest doesn’t actually materialise unless you schedule it in and stick to it. You’ll keep saying YES or agreeing to artificial deadlines to get your next adrenaline rush.
Most religious faiths recognise the Sabbath principle, which means having one day in seven free from work. I believe the underlying “earthly†reason for that is that it’s simply not good for you to work all the time. Yes you can get away with it for a while, but it will catch up with you at some point – and you’ll pay for it later!
Even if you aren’t a workaholic, adrenaline junkie (and not everyone is) I expect you know someone who is. I hope you found this useful and thought-provoking.
Alex Eames is the founder of translatortips.com,
editor of tranfree and author of the eBooks…
How to Earn $80,000+ Per Year as a
Freelance Translator
and
Selling Your Professional Services on the Web
1 Stale: having lost freshness, vigour, quick intelligence, initiative, or the like, as from overstrain, boredom, or surfeit: He had grown stale on the job and needed a long vacation. (dictionary.com)
For the second article visit http://alexeames.com/blog/?p=533
Found this shield bug in the garden this afternoon. We watched it for a while and then ejected it from the chair it was on. Later on, the very same beastie crawled onto my foot, so I figured he was asking for his photo to be taken.
Shield Bug
Shield Bug 2
listen to tranfree 70 or download the mp3 for later if you prefer.
You can also download this as a PDF
The Times newspaper has decided that enough is enough and is ending free access to its content on the web.
According to this BBC news story…
“Times Editor James Harding said it was time to stop “giving away†journalism in the two newspapers.â€
I see parallels here with the translation world, with…
These are results of globalisation – a process in which translators usually stay in the background like ghost-writers. Let’s remember there would be no globalisation without translation.
James Harding went on further to say…
“Our feeling is that it is time to stop giving away our journalism. That’s because we feel that we are undermining the value of our journalism, undermining the value of the Times and undermining the perception that journalism and news has a value.â€
Does this overtone of undermining sound familiar? Isn’t that what we do when we agree to a low rate or disastrous terms for a translation job?
“Localizing†that quote for “the translators’ marketâ€, I came up with this…
My feeling is that it is time to stop giving away our translation work. That’s because we feel that we are undermining the value of our translation, undermining the value of the profession and undermining the perception that translation and documentation has a value.
Well, it’s food for thought anyway. Be careful how much you are giving away in terms of discounts, lowered rates and ever quicker turnaround.
It looks to me as if the Times are moving towards a web-only publication, as printed circulation dwindles and people spend more time online. It will take a few years for people to get used to the idea. This makes me ponder the question “How can we take steps to ensure that our work is valued?†This fits in very well with the article I had planned for this edition, which is all about resisting rates erosion.
Thanks to Wenjer Leuschel, we now have the last couple of tranfree editions in Chinese. I have had one or two technical hurdles to get this published in HTML but it works beautifully in PDF.
http://www.tranfree.com/tf68-ZH.html
http://www.tranfree.com/tf69-ZH.pdf
One other thing I almost forgot to mention is that I have given the www.translatortips.com web site a new look. This is the first revamp for a long time. It’s a much cleaner look. I’ve still got lots of sub-pages to go, but the main ones are done. Feel free to check it out and let me know if you like it.
I hope you enjoy and benefit from tranfree
Alex Eames
tranfree editor, Author –
How to Earn $80,000+ per Year as a Freelance Translator and
Selling Your Professional Services on the Web
Erosion is a gradual creeping process. In the UK we have had a steady erosion of civil liberty for quite a long time. 
Because it happens gradually, in small, digestible steps, “they get away with itâ€.  It’s the same with rates erosion. It happens in small steps and is only hindered when people see it for what it is and resist. But just because one person resists, another may not. Then we find ourselves being undermined – just like in the BBC article about the Times. So resisting rates erosion is something which needs to be done collectively if it is to be effective.
In general, the only good reasons I can think of for working for low rates are:
Pretty much any other reason just allows someone else to collect the profits on your work. So don’t do it!
“But I am constantly bombarded with stories about low rates
and translators without work on the internet.
How can I resist and stay strong?â€
Well firstly, you need to be a little bit careful about taking everything people write on internet forums too literally. Some people exaggerate, some people lie and others are sociopathic. Talk is cheap in cyberspace. Try to filter what you read and only accept advice from people who have a record of giving good advice.
Do not accept work for a rate which is lower than you can comfortably make a living at. (Unless this is a charity or pro bono project). It is better to write off a working day and decide to relax and enjoy being FREE, than to work for a ludicrously low rate.
Do not accept any reduction for fuzzy matches or for the use of any translation technology that you had to pay for yourself. You should reap the reward from your investment. Don’t give it away! I would make exceptions for the following reasonable scenarios…
…but observe the golden rule. Anything I work on, I get paid for. 
…so you have too many clients. Then dump the ones who are fussy and resistant to decent rates (usually the same people). This is an ongoing business development process. As you get busier, you can afford to dump the clients you prefer not to work for (for whatever reason).
…instead of always working for agencies. A healthy freelance business has a mix of both in the client portfolio. Clearly there is a lot more income potential in working for direct clients, but their expectations are different too.
With direct clients, make sure that you charge significantly more than your agency rates. Otherwise you are guilty of spoiling the market for agencies and, in-turn, other translators. Yes, you might find you are partly responsible for spoiling the market because you lack the confidence to ask for more.
Be aware of approximately what other translators working in your language combination charge for the sort of work you are quoting for. If you don’t know, find out. Ask people, read surveys, or ask for quotes from other translators. It needn’t be difficult to get the information you need.
If you get everything you quote for, you’re charging far too little. If you are charging what the market will bear, you should get somewhere between 30-60% of the work you quote for.
If they chose someone cheap, they probably got what they deserved and you avoided working for a client with poor judgment. That means you WON! You don’t want a portfolio chock-full of cheapskate clients do you? I don’t.
It is neither unethical nor likely to result in anti-trust action – despite what some people in the US would have you believe. But be sure you don’t breach client confidentiality. Some people say it is unprofessional to talk about rates.
That’s easily disproved. What do you say when a potential client phones and asks you how much for 2000 words into your target language? Do you say…
So it’s OK to talk about rates with a complete stranger, who might have a job for you. So why would it be unprofessional to compare notes with others in your profession? Simple answer – It’s NOT! If it were, why do so many professional translators’ associations around the world produce rates surveys? Is it because they’re unprofessional?
…propagated by people who really don’t know what they’re talking about. Talk is cheap. There are people out there who hang out on internet forums for the sole purpose of annoying, disturbing, disrupting and making others feel uncomfortable. They are the terrorists of the online community. If it weren’t for them, there would be no need for moderators. They are the only reason that we embrace the self-imposed censorship that is moderation.
“There’s plenty of work out there – I’ve just got to find it.†Leave the low-paying jobs to those just starting out and those trying to scratch a living in developing countries. Spend your time more productively…
…and encourage them to set their rates at acceptable levels. It takes a certain leap of faith to do something like this, but believe me, what goes around comes around. If you help people, you will benefit from it.
Make them understand how dangerous it is to treat it lightly. Get hold of and distribute the excellent booklet “Translation – Getting it Right†(US version or UK version)
So that’s the 13 ways to resist rates erosion that I thought of. Not all of them will apply to all people. I’m sure there are plenty more. If you’ve got one to add, or you’d like to discuss or comment on this article, feel free to add a comment below.
Alex Eames is the founder of translatortips.com,
editor of tranfree and author of the eBooks…
How to Earn $80,000+ Per Year as a
Freelance Translator
and
Wotan, the bald eagle I photographed earlier in the year did a runner (more of a flier actually) at the weekend and ended up in Bristol, landing on a girl’s hand. Unfortunately she was not wearing a falconry glove so got a bit cut up.
And here’s the naughty boy himself.
Bald Eagle, Wotan
A few weeks ago the majority of Europe’s airspace was closed for a week because of the Icelandic volcano eruption. Many people were forced to consider other travel options. Some people in the blogosphere have been pondering what the world would be like without air travel. Life would not be the same at all.
It’s not until something we take for granted is taken away from us that we realise just how much we rely on it. I thought it would be an interesting exercise to imagine what freelance translating would look like if we took away our equivalent of airspace, which is cyberspace – i.e. the internet. Eeeeeeeeeeek! Don’t go there!
Many of us probably do experience broadband outages from time to time. They are very annoying and inconvenient. But that’s more like a delayed flight than a cancelled one. How would we cope if they actually took our internet away? I’m not going to be too cruel to your imagination and take our computers or cell phones away, just the internet. So let’s see how it’d be. There’d be no…
If you wanted to buy an ebook, you’d have to make a phone call or send a letter and we’d have to mail you a disk. That business model would no longer be viable. We would not be able to publish tranfree because there would be no email. You would probably have never heard of either of translatortips.com anyway.
No Email
Having no email would hurt translators even more because it has become the mechanism for sending and receiving work. Before that, we had to use the postal system, fax, or direct modem to modem file transfer through phone lines. That only stopped about 10 years ago. Anyone remember the Zmodem protocol on WinComm? And the painfully slow 28.8 kbps file transfer?
Of course, the upside of losing email would be no spam. D’you know what? Annoying though it is, I’d rather have email with spam than none at all.
No Web Sites
Having no web sites would be equally traumatic. What would you do when you want to find out the usage of a term you’re not very familiar with? Go to a specialist bookshop? Phone a friend? (Fifty fifty? 😉 What would you do when your five-year-old asks you a hard question? No google, no answer. Go to the library? Yes. The web allows us access to all sorts of stuff we could only find by going and looking in the physical world before. It saves us a lot of time. But the internet giveth and the internet taketh away. For every time-saver on the web there are loads of time wasting activities that spring up to fill their place.
No Skype
Without Skype or Yahoo messenger (and all the others) we would be paying full price for all our international phone calls. Actually, I think we’d be making a lot less phone calls altogether. This would make collaboration harder and more costly. We’d also be in touch less often with friends and family abroad. Perhaps this would make us more efficient in our communications? Is it possible that we are in touch with others too often and too much these days because it’s cheaper? If we had no Skype or email, perhaps we’d write more letters? When was the last time you sent someone a personal letter? I can’t even remember.
No Software Downloads
Without web-based software, and free trials, we would miss out on a lot of excellent productivity enhancing tools. Many of those lovely software applications that make our lives more productive would probably never even have been created because there would be no viable publicity or distribution system for them.
No Online Collaboration
No web-based TM sharing or software. If you wanted to share a glossary or TM with someone, you’d have to mail them a CD or suffer direct modem to modem transfer (shall we allow memory sticks in this scenario?)
No Social Networking
No facebook, no ProZ, no internet forums to discuss work, hobbies or whatever floats your boat. These sites are all useful in their own ways, but the inability to network with others would make translation an even more isolated profession. Being able to talk to other people – even through text-based forums – is a really helpful way to develop relationships with people you would otherwise never “meetâ€. It’s also a great way to have a short break when you’re half way through a translation that makes you want to go to sleep. They are the fun side of the business.
Freelance translating without the internet would still be possible, but it would be…
I vote we keep the internet. It’s pretty useful!
The title says it all. I bought a new Dell Studio 1557 in November 2009. Lovely full HD WLED screen. Delighted with it. The only probem is (was) whenever I load up a DVD, after about a minute of playing, it starts juddering and the picture and sound go intermittent. I also had a problem burning a DVD recently when the same sort of thing happened.
I assumed it was a faulty DVD drive, but am very reluctant to return my machine as I use it for my business. I thought I’d see if anyone else on the web has had the same problem. And I’m glad I did. Several people have. In this thread, the problem is described and near the bottom, someone mentions that they tracked it down to the supplied Dell backup software (Dell Datasafe), which seems to poll the DVD drive every minute when a disk is loaded. So, as recommended, I fired up task manager (CTRL-ALT-DELETE) and killed the process STService.exe
Then I loaded up a DVD and watched it for about 10 minutes with no issues. Hallelujah 😀 It works just like it should.
So I celebrated that success by uninstalling Dell Datasafe to make it permanent. :X-P:
I just got back from school where I teach an ICT class. We watched a 40 minute DVD on this machine with no issues at all. Now it’s working how it should. I’m so pleased. 😀
Well I recently bought this Canon Pixma MP640 and it prints photos beautifully. But the downside is that it takes 5 cartridges (ink tanks) and they cost about ten pounds each (a bit less if you shop around). Now I don’t want to have to restrict my printing out of photos because of overpriced ink (£2/ml – that’s more than most perfumes), so I have evaluated a couple of alternatives.
I did a bit of web research. Someone on one of the online forums I hang out on suggested a continuous ink system. That led me to City Ink Express. When I got there, I saw their refillable system and rather liked the look of it. They sell a kit which includes ink tanks with auto-reset chips, 100ml of each ink (FotoRite) and 5 syringes with blunt needles for tank filling. Instructions were good and there are even online videos to guide you through the process. I bought one. It cost me £50 + ~£5 postage and arrived promptly. As the original Canon cartridges ran out I replaced them with these.
City Ink Fotorite kit
This ink worked fine in routine document printing. Once I had replaced all except the Canon photo black (it still hasn’t run out) I printed a few test photos, duplicating ones I had already printed with the Canon ink. This was to make a direct comparison. Now I wasn’t expecting miracles, but I was looking for the holy grail of “cheap ink that is as near as possible to an exact match to the OEM Canon stuff”. (I don’t want much do I?) Here are the results…
Canon left, Fotorite right
Canon left, FotoRite right
Canon left, Fotorite right
As you can see if you look closely (click any image to enlarge it) the eagle has a bluish colour cast. The blue sky on the sunflower looks an odd colour and the Canon yellow is much more vibrant. The butterfly shot is a much closer call between the two, but if you look closely at the butterfly’s black body, the FotoRite ink gives a decidedly bluish cast. I did have a go at adjusting the photos’ colour balance to try and duplicate, but it was a bit hit or miss. I know you can buy a calibration kit and change the printer profiles – but who’s got time for that? No. I’d like to see if I can find an ink that will give me what I want…
…without messing about with hardware profiles. So the search went on. I found an interesting thread about the
“German “Durchstich” refill method for the PGI-520/CLI-521 cartridges” on nifty-stuff.com (via google) :rotfl: My eyes were opened to the possibility of refilling the original Canon cartridges, which I still had. In that thread there are a couple of inks that come highly recommended. The thread also warns of using inappropriate inks, which can burn out your print head. OctoInk comes highly recommended on that forum, so I banged off an email to Martin with an enquiry, and got a reply within a couple of hours – always a good sign. I decided to try his ink, which is made by Image Specialists in the US. OctoInk appealed because they are UK based and well recommended. I ordered ink and a few 21 gauge needles on Monday night, it was packed that night, shipped on Tuesday and with me on Wednesday. This is the ink I bought. It cost me £21.30 delivered for 100ml of each of the five inks. (Update 6 december 2010 OctoInk now sell a kit with everything you need for the Canon Pixma MP range)
I filled the cartridges according to the Durchstich method, installed them and cleaned the print head, sent a nozzle test page through the printer and then printed out the same three test photos (on the same paper of course – also remember I’m still using the Canon photo black – but that’s the same for all three tests now). So here are the results. I captioned the photos this time. Each set of three was photographed in one shot so the lighting for each is identical.
I did a blind test with Tomek and Malgosia, putting the three photos in random positions and asking them which they liked the best. Tomek picked three out of three OctoInk image specialists. Malgosia picked one Octo outright winner and the other two she couldn’t choose between the Canon and the Octo.
My own opinion of the OctoInk Image Specialists’ Canon Compatible CLI221 + PGI220BK Ink Set is that it is a very good match for the Canon ink – particularly if, like me, you don’t want to mess about with printer profiles. This ink is good enough for me to use as a direct replacement for the original ink. And instead of costing £2 per ml, I got 500ml for £20. That much of the Canon ink (admittedly with brand new tanks each time) would cost £1000. This should mean I don’t have to be a tightwad with my photo printing, which is exactly what I set out to achieve. Thank you Martin from OctoInk. 🙂