Printing With Food Colouring

Intro: Printing With Food Colouring

I use HP 343 Tri-Colour cartridge and got fed up of paying high prices for ink cartridges that contain just 7 milliliters of ink. Would food colouring that costs just 22pence for 38ml work, I wondered. It does a passable job, though certainly not perfect, but works in an emergency.

Comments

[roboak]

does not see this video

[-A-N-D-Y-]

You will be surprised at just now much ink is left in the cartridge, try adding just water as a refill and the results are actually quite good! Think of it like the old days when you would run that dot matrix ribbon until the text was a light grey

[framistan]

Worked for me too! (on my HP c5280). Thanks, but keep in mind, this cheapy method of printing may not have much longevity of color. Most of what i print is not going to be something i want to keep for 20 years in a photo album though. Also, the food colors may be more succeptable to color running if photo gets wet. But for what it is... it is one of my favorite instructables!

[Treknology]

Make sure that you only use this technique on a cartridge-direct-to-head system. I have used it very successfully on a variety of Canon systems, but when I tried it on a Brother system which sucks the ink up through tubes into Piezo heads, the whole thing clogged up, and I now have to decide whether to expend the effort trying to flush it out or toss it out. In the case of HP units where the head and cartridge are combined in one unit this method yields excellent results.

[zenith828]

you could print on a cake!

[wupme]

Did you know, that most food printers are usually build the same way? Some companys just take used catridges, clean them carefully with isopropyl alcohol, print a couple of empty pages. Then they fill in food coloring, and use it to print onto cakes and stuff, with a normal household printer like every HP or Canon. Just one thing is important, you gotta have a Printer that can print on paper without bending it, because that eating paper can't be bendet.

[blodefood]

Not that I don't believe you, but can you cite any sources  to prove that?

[blodefood]

Your conversion from pounds would be about CAD $40 which is STILL bl**dy expensive!  (Could one use blood instead?)  :-0

I wonder if there are different consistencies across brands of food colouring.

[jeffreeze]

AWOOOO AWOOOOO WHAT IS YOUR PROFESSION?? WHAT A GREAT IDEA YOU HAVE GIVEN.... THANKS TO THAT... MAYBE I CAN TRY DOING IT WITH MY CARTRIDGE....

[trooperrick]

Please turn off caps lock.

[blodefood]

I like this precise and clear rendering of how to type lower case.  Do you have it in metric?

[slim_jim]

Ohmygot that's funny. Priceless. My wife wants a copy of your graphic. Hilarious.

[glorfon]

it's from thebestpageintheuniverse.com

[TheShawMaestro]

I admire that witty comment!

[ewok01]

If you use rice paper instead of printer paper, you can make the edible pictures that go on top of cakes just like the ones you buy, but cheaper.

[BhavinST]

Tell me the truth. It doesn't work, does it?

[8bit]

Now to figure how to do that on a cake. . .

[mooshisho]

Thanks so much!. I just refilled my red and yellow ink (blue wasn't out yet) and it works perfectly. :D You just saved my butt hundreds of dollars on ink. Thanks again! -- Moo

[geekdude]

that is cool, but i would like to know some more info about food coloring vs ink. does it fade or smear? does it rub off?

[compudude86]

just a warning, DO NOT do this with printers that have the heads seperate of the tanks, such as some epsons, canons, etc. I did this to a canon that had the tanks removable from the head, it worked a few times but eventually burned out the heads faster than regular ink.