Just spent an hour pulling in the MSDS sheets for (Black & Grey inks) of Epson, Canon, and HP. This is a first post of what will be more extensive information about the inks. Others are working on and have worked on this type of information. Even to the point of having many end users. I am doing this for my own purpose, not a product, so if it is of use to you, great. I will fill this in more … but for now off to shoot in this nice rain….

For open source [ OSX ]:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gimp-print/
and
http://buymelunch.org/printing/usbtb/
gutenprint for OSX:
http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/MacOSX.php

The gimp-print/gutenprint packages include a terminal script that allows you to do the “Printer Utilities” checks via the terminal.