The refills for Durabrite printers are color matched, but have the properties more like Epson Ultrachrome inks, which are slightly slower to dry but less likely to clog - Durabrite has "quick dry" additives that jam up the print head even faster than refills. A lot of people complain about pigment refills clogging but genuine Durabrite is even worse.
Durabrite also tends to color-shift strongly Yellow when heat pressed, enough to ruin a transfer. Regular refills have a similar problem, but not nearly as bad. There are heat transfer sets sold by some companies that has a duller yellow that doesn't overpower the image and darker black, but it's not as good for regular printing.
All those printers are a bit old. You may want to try to find a wide format printer so you can make larger transfers. If not, I'd actually go with the R220 or R340 - they're dyebased but can be switched to pigments - I ran an R220 with pigment inks with no color profiling for years before it finally broke. The color output was much better than the C88/C88+ were. Also since you have a C84 and C86 I'm assuming you're not in the US so I'm not sure what company you could get inks from. Try to get a CIS or carts with a reset button or auto reset, not manual resetting, so you can refill in the printer and not have to take them out (which gets air in the printhead and ends up with lots of banding until things settle down).
The C84 and C86 are just older US models, they were before the C88/C88+. I bought them in the US and used them in the US.
As you mentioned about the Durabrites .. the reason for the difference is that the 4 color models that use Durabrite are somewhat now competing with laser printers and the text mode of the 4 color printers are now much faster. So if you used for office printing as papers are printing they would be stacking on top of each other, therfore the smudge problem is more critical when using fast print modes which the durabrite based printers were designed for.
I use Cobra pigments and they dry as fast as Durabrites without any abnormal clogging issues, they also don't shift yellow when heat pressed and are a near perfect match for color with Durabrites. Having said that ... paper type settings (ink volume deposited), image quality (which effects speed) and the transfer paper itself are bigger factors for dry times. I don't have to wait for the papers to dry before I press, it's quick enough drying.
As for refilling in the printer or out of the printer and the printhead "air". You are not understanding the design of the desktop Epsons. I remove my carts when refilling as I always have a set of backup carts prefilled and ready to go so I don't have much interuption if the reset and refill are needed in the middle of a print job. What you are describing about air in the printhead when removing a cart is
impossible.
When Epson desktop carts are changed the printer will recognize the new cart and initiate a head clean cycle (and ink charge). The amount of ink residing in the printhead is very small compared to the ink volume pushed through them during the head clean.
Imagine having a 1 oz shot glass filled with water then taking an 8 oz glass of water and dumping the water into the shot glass until the 8 oz of water from the other glass is gone ... the old water (and any air bubbles) in the shot glass is
completely displaced. Of course in the print head the ink volume is nothing compared to the shot glass ... but it is the same concept,
you are displacing a smaller volume of ink by completely flushing out the old ink (and any air pockets) many times over. There are no real ink lines in a Epson desktop.
This is why any air is pushed out and any old inks as well. If the old ink was a different type it too is
completely displaced.
Epsons were not designed to be refillable from the factory, when you replace an OEM cart you have to pull it out to replace a new cart.
So the factory designed the printer so that it displaces any air or potential clogs by forcing a head clean using a larger volume of ink than resides in the printhead. The head clean is not optional when changing carts.
Any banding caused by replacing a refillable cart means there is something wrong with the cart or the way it was refilled. If the cart was not "primed" well on the first time ink was put in it, or if the ink was allowed to go too low the "prime" can be lost and cause banding.
Priming the cart means pulling a vacuum from the bottom when it is full using the same syringe (without a needle) used to fill from the cart.
Having a reset button on the cart is convenient, nothing more nothing less.
Nothing personal, but this misconception about air remaining in the printhead is simply incorrect.
