Digital BW, The Print

> "Does this sound familiar to anyone"

Yup, this (a bad load of ink in a cartridge) has happened to me on too 
many occassions with fine art aftermarket ink cartridges. At first I 
would burn through several hours trying to figure out what I or my 
hardware/software was doing wrong until finally after many sheets of 
paper troubleshooting I figured out it was a bad load of ink in the 
cartridge. This would be confirmed later by posts on forums (like 
yours) saying something like, "Hey everybody watch out, so-and-so has 
shipped a bad batch of cartridges." Eventuallly it happened enough that 
I would recognize it right away and just toss the cartridge. I'm 
through with that; I now only use OEM ink cartridges. I've never had a 
bad load of ink in all the OEM cartridges I've used.

A possible solution to this would be to use bulk inks and fill your own 
cartridges, or use a CIS. Personally, I don't print enough to justify 
using bulk ink.