Where does your ink comes from ?

Hefger Media ink IS NOT a clone of HP's ink and should not be considered as such. We only pretend that our ink is the best alternative for someone who insist on high quality. It fulfills all the criterias of a professionnal, for giclee or photography.

Our ink is not sold by anybody else than Hefger Media.

After testing inks from many manufacturers, we have concluded an agreement with one of them. They fine tuned their ink to meet our requirements and we committed to buy a minimum quantity per month. The issues we were concerned about were colour compliance with HP inks, colour gamut, clumping and clogging free ink, fading resistance of archival level, drying quickness, multi pass printing capability (printing over an already printed area), and resistance to oxidation (shelf life).

Why we sell our ink ?

Simple arithmetic : very early, we tought that selling our ink to the public could increase the volume of ink we would order each month. This would in turn increase the interest for the manufacturer in making this ink for us, and maybe we could have an even better price.

Our ink compared to HP’s

Have some independent tests been conducted ?

No, we can't afford these kind of tests. However we have conducted our own : we have printed many colour samples, with both our ink and HP’s, along with some other popular inks available on the market (total of 8 different inks).

The samples were placed outside, under direct sun (even under a few heavy showers), until we could notice some evidence of fading on the samples printed with HP inks. The fading on HP samples was 17%, and with our ink the fading was just a few tenths above.

200 years fading resistance ? Well, let's be honest and look at it the real way. Fading resistance rating is relative. HP claims 200 years but this rating assume that the picture will be inside a photo album, between acid free layers, and almost never exposed to light (not taking into account the aging resistance of the paper itself). These are "archival" conditions. If it is hanged on a wall, under a glass and never under direct daylight, it will probably last for near 100 years, and closer to 60 without glass. Add some daylight or sunlight and fading resistance is going down fast.

Afraid of clogging ?

Printhead clogging is the most known and dreaded problem. When something happens, people always think immediately that... " it just happened, because of the ink ! ". There is many reason for a printhead to stop printing, other than cloggeg nozzles.

Don’t think that because you are using HP ink, your printheads will never clog or break. Before we used our own ink, we did have a few printheads problems ourselves, so nothing is perfect ! Think about this : if a printhead would never clog or break, there would not be so many dealer having this item in stock ! For sure, HP does not sell those printheads apart just to help peoples who don’t use their ink !

Our ink is excellent and totally reliable on this aspect also.