Have you used ink cartridge refill kits for printers?

Wondering if I should try them. Are they any good? Are the printing results as good as with new cartridges? Will they mess up my printer? Are they good only for certain printers (I have a Lexmark)? Anything else I should know, or should I just forget about them?

Thanks for any input.

If your printers under warranty, it could void it... and because you can't clean out the cartridge before you fill it, you end up mixing inks and leaving dried up stuff in the cartridge, it lessens print quality, is bad for the print head, and is messy to do.
Lots of places offer refurbished ink thats been done right :)

Ruined a nice pair of pants, printer only laid down messy globs of ink. Not worth it.

A lot of the cartridges have a computer chip in them that knows how many prints can be made with the ink. Even though you refill it, it tells you it's empty and refuses to print. Bastards.

but no luck with refills

and do not have comparable generic inks.

A salesman in Staples told me that the reason Lexmark does not have generics is because their copyright is still extant. Staples provides substitute inks for almost every other printer--he said the Lexmark copyright will soon be up and then Staples will probably market a cheaper ink that would work in the Lexmark printer.

The price of printers has become so cheap, it is almost better to buy a new printer that will allow you to get cheaper ink. :-) My printer has not had color ink for more than a year. The price of a color cartridge for my printer is forty dollars.

I have successfully filled the black ink cartridge with inks I ordered. When it came to the color, I did OK for one loading, then really screwed up and added the yellow to the wrong channel and ruined the whole thing --

So I have not bought a new color cartridge since then.

And I don't know about other locations, but we do ink refilling thats guaranteed, cleaned etc. and can do it on Lexmark carts.
We also have a COUPLE of models of ink refurbed for lexmark, but not very many at all...
Lexmark is awful.

everyone I know who used an aftermarket cartridge had major problems, clogging jamming, voiding warranty, etc. best to suck it up and buy new if you can. <sigh>

black ink for Epson. Only way to get a readable copy is to print everything on QUALITY, which is 3x as slow. I won't buy them again.

Black, for Epson. It works, but I have to print everything on the Quality setting -- the quick setting is fast, but very very poor quality.

I won't buy them again.

I've got an HP 3550 (The last HP product I will ever buy, but that's another story.)

Using them cannot void your warranty (See the Sherman & Clayton Anti-trust acts or this URL http://www.a1-printer-ink.com/a1-printer-cartridges.htm ). If your manufacturer is saying so, they are in violation of anti-trust laws.

They're messy and it is time consuming to fill them. That's the downside. I find that my cartridges run about 85 pages of high quality images on a refilled cartridge, about 55 pages on a standard, OEM cartridge. However, the print quality is not a problem for me. It seems equivalent. (I print photos on glossy clay paper, CD labels on half-glossy, and CD Case covers on matte cardstock.)

I find when I'm in a hurry that having new cartridges is just easier than trying to fill the old ones, and since Office Max gives me a ream of paper for each empty cartridge I turn in, I just do that. (I use a lot of plain copy paper in my laser printer.)

Your mileage may vary, but it's not a warranty issue.

Politicat

Better than epinions.com....dempinions!

Thanks again :hi:

on my Canon BJ3000 ??? (I forget the #)

They do everything they can to make refilling cartridges difficult.

I have two printers I use every day, a nice one I use for color work, and an old Canon BJC-4100 with a BC-20 cartridge. The BC-20 cartridges can be refilled easily, and the quality is okay for black text.

If you print a lot of text get a commercial grade laser printer and shop around for the lowest price per page, not the lowest priced printer.

There are quite a few good color printers, but none of them are inexpensive. If you print more than a few pages a day, and most of those pages are plain black text, you can save a lot of money by having two printers.

One is an old dot matrix, which is great for long text files, of course.

I used it to print almost everything. It was out in the garage, so I didn't have to listen to it. It was very reliable, I parked it above a carton of perforated paper and it would go forever without any supervision.

But then I moved some of my machines around and I haven't bothered to reconnect it to my network. It is easier to refill the cartridge of the old Canon ink jet on my desk. It's not as reliable because occassionally the paper jams, but it's right there next to me, so it's no big deal.

Unfortunately the ink cartridges come with a chip attached that tells the printer when the cartridge is empty and you can't use a refill kit with it.

I tried a generic cartridge with a chip and I ended up having to unclog the heads so much that it wasn't worth the cheaper price.

Wasn't there a story out about a year ago mentioning some cheap refill kits and their connection to funding terrorism? Does anyone actually believe such stories?

Perhaps it was just some disgruntled Squids.

And after spending $20 on a refill kit, I discovered the same thing. Total waste of money. Plus I got ink on my hands and it took several days to wear off.