For those of you who have tried refilling inkjet cartridges:
-Is it as easy as they claim?
-Is it really economical?
-What was the quality?
-Do you still continue to do it, or have you reverted to pre-filled?
I’m tempted to give it a go, but I have this mental picture of me, too much exertion, a sudden release of friction, a cyan coloured fountain, and finally, me looking like that alien from The Fifth Element.
But can you sing like her?
It wasn’t worth my time and effort, as far as I’m concerned. I have a Canon S560 and the cartridges are only about $9-$11 apiece depending on where I buy them. I value my skin tone, my desk, my clothing and my carpet too much to ruin them with ink if I screw up trying to refill a cartridge. I did it once, but probably won’t again.
But she was SEXY!
I had a good experience the first time. I just tried to refill it again, (about an hour ago!) and there’s as much ink on my fingers as in the cart. I’m not sure what’s different, but I wish we could do a search on three-letter terms since soap isn’t getting this black ink off.
My experience is that color is a lot trickier than black. On my HP 952 the ink bled into the adjoining chamber and the color was off. I was trying to be real carefull too. I buy re-filled color cartridges now at about 1/2 the price of a new one and cannot tell the difference. Black ink is very easy though.
Yes, I re-fill. After about 4 runs, the circuitry (HP) is shot, but if I’m doing enough volume to need frequent replacement, then yes, I will use the syringe, automatic center punch (the fancy way to pop out the fill plugs) and
LATEX EXAM GLOVES - I buy them by the 100 and never have inked-up hands.
p.s. - the gloves are also useful when using adhesives, paint, anything you don’t want on your hands.
I bought a color and black and white refill kit from a company called 4inkjets for my Lexmark X83 printer. After refilling, the color cartridge could no longer be seen by the printer. The black cartridge, on the other hand, has been refilled twice with no difficulties. The ink isn’t quite as good as the original, but I don’t think you’ll notice except on large black graphics. Text looks perfect. Even counting the bum color refill, I’ve still saved about $40.
In the future, I might just buy remanufactured color cartridges, and refill the black on my own. $10 for two black refills certainly beats $30 per cartridge Lexmark wants new.
Lexmark cartridges (apparently) have a chip in them that specifically prevents re-use - more than any other manufacturer, Lexmark’s strategy is to sell you a very cheap printer, then hold you to ransom for small, expensive ink carts.
There’s a device you can buy to reset the chips, but I think I’m right in saying that Lexmark made a big fuss about it.
Been re-filling for a long time. I’ve never refilled myself - I just give it to one of the hundred agencies dong this kind of thing in the vicinity of my office.
Like Alereon said, the ink quality isn’t as good, but you wouldn’t notice it with normal usage. It’s cheap and it works - I’d be stupid to keep buying a new cartridge each time.
Sure. I did. I had an HP at the time. I later ended up stomping it into tiny bits on my office floor but that is a topic for another thread and was completely unrelated to the ink refill. It was a piece of cake, no muss, no fuss. The quality of printing did not seem to suffer in any way. I would have done it again had the printer not incurred my wrath on that fateful day.
Did I mention just how therapeutic stomping a flakey printer into bits can be?
My current printer is a Cannon color photo printer (note the lack of an HP brand replacement) and I must admit that I might be slightly worried about sacrificing print quality by choosing an ink not specifically designed by Cannon. Although I would be willing to bet that it would not be noticably different in print quality, I might be unwilling to risk that possibility with my photos.
This may be only vaguely related, but I’ve had bad experience with refilled laser cartriges.
No messes or disasters in my most recent run-in, but just plain awful print quality after about 2,000 pages from a cartridge that’s normally good for 10,000. Certainly wasn’t worth the $10 saved.
I wouldn’t bother with a color catridge as it’s just too much of a pain in the ass, and as others noted, you can cross-contaminate the colors very easily.
Even black was a bit of a pain with our HP printer. The problem is that you are squirting a large syringe into a small cartridge that is black plastic. As such, you have no way of knowing when you are getting close to the top until it overflows. I guess it would have killed them to make these clear plastic, right?
The other problem was that the ink wasn’t coming out evenly at first. I had to keep blotting the cartridge on a paper towel for several minutes until it finally ‘coagulated’ enough that the flow stopped and came out in an even fashion.
I never quite trusted the cartridge after that afraid it was going to just dump black ink all over the inside of the printer at any moment. It never did, but it made me uncomfortable enough that I have not tried it again. I just buy my cartirdges from discount retailers now (like Costco) and get them new even though it costs a bit more.
Hmmm…we have lots of dead and dying BJs.
Do you suppose a guy would pay for that kind of therapy?
Oh, the OP:
The tank or container kind refills better than the sponge.
HP 51645As, no way. They have a bladder.
They don’t refill well if the cart sits around empty and the sponge dries out.
I sweat in the gloves and they get slippery.
I think it pays. but they don’t work all the time. For a bunch of users, I’ve tried to go for new ones. For personal use, I’d at least try to refill.
I’ve refilled Lexmark, no problems, I even used a Cannon refill kit to do it. The trick is to immediately refill when its empty so the nozzles don’t dry out.
I bet it looked something like this. 
As for refilling cartridges, I tried it once (on an Epson, I think), and it didn’t work at all. The printer’s output looked worse after I refilled it than before. The mess was no big deal, though… no worse than dying Easter eggs.
I had a friend who once thought so. Serious. He wanted to fill up a room with all manner of dead PC devices and then charge people to take out their frustrations. Of course if you wanted to use the sledge hammer, you would have to pay the BIG bucks.
Some guys in the North West were letting you blast away at dinosaur PC gear with high powered rifles, but I don’t have the room for that.
“Pull!” and an HP bubble jet 620 goes flying by…
