Fill yer own Inkjets
 

My trusty brother fax ran out of toner at a very bad time this morning and I didn't have time to get a new cartridge so I blew the dust off of an inkjet refill kit that made it into one of my drawers somehow.

Anyway my unit is newer so I had to google to get the instructions but after that I filled 4 cartridges in less than 5 minutes. all I had to do was use a supplied hand drill to put the ink in and whamo no need for a trip to the ink jet shop and cheap too.

Interesting subject! Really, when my printer runs out of ink, it's cheaper to buy a new printer than to buy the ink for it!

Be careful which cartridges yoiu refill. On my epson, it has smart chips which ensure that you cannot reuse the cartridge without somehow modifying it. MY lexmark also has those chips on it too. However, I find that if i look hard enough, I can find great deals on printer cartridges on the internet. I found 2 black and 2 of each color for my epson for les than 10$ on ebay, so I think I have found where I am going to buy my future replacement cartridges.

Refilling is by far cheaper but the heads do wear out so you'll get streaking and gray patches around the 2nd or 3rd refill. If your cartridges still print clean beyond that, that's a bonus. :)

I believe the Epson cartridges have a chip built into them that stops the cartridge from working once it is empty. They have to be reset to be reused and there is a device for it if anyone happens to have one of those printers.

I got a color Laser printer for $450 a Samsung...

It doesn't take long to to through that much in your average inkjet cartridges. Found that out with my old Epson 740

mine is 16 ppm full duplex printing color..built in network card and cost $450 at CompUSA less than a year ago.

thats not really all that expensive when you figure our what 5 or so injet cartriges cost...and your average laser toner does about 10X the page count or more.

You can get pretty nice prints...not as good as a decent inkjet but then the cost per page is far less for everyday use than an inkjet.

The Epson, Samsung, NEC laser printers are nice and work well BUT their life cycle for those products is shorter and the companies will likely not support them and or be able to service them later on through their limited dealer or service network. I have a NEC 870 and a Epson 1000 laser and parts are hard to find for both.

This is compared to a Xerox or an HP unit which costs more up front. The advantage is that there are more places that can service them and have access to more replacment toner and parts suppliers as they age when the fuser, rollers, imaging units start to burn out. Plus, feeding them is cheaper since you can get refurbished cartridges for cheap if you print in volumes and you can punch a hole in the cartridge once the toner is used (which goes for all laser cartridges) and fill them up, empty out the waste toner compartment and reuse them. For black only, that works, color is a different story. Remember to not expose the transfer roller on the toner cartridge to sunlight since they are sensitive otherwise you'll get some weird prints. ;)

My 2 cents.

Its pretty good on some....mine is real decent an I am happy with it....I keep the inkjet for photos on the good paper...but the epson was damned expensive as a primary printer...ink cartriges every few hundred pages was mighty pricey.

True inthe long term an HP is a better bet....but in a few years I could replace it and still have saved bundles from what an inkjet costs to run. They are cheap to buy but bleed you to death on supplies.

Refilling is a good suggestion! I got so tired of buying ink jet cartridges that I went out and bought a laser jet. They’ve gotten very inexpensive, and a single toner drum has pushed out about 3000 pages and is still going strong. Compare that to about 300 sheets we got out of an ink cartridge.

Guess that’s why Dell got into the printer business. The call inkjet printers “sockets” into which the inkjet cartridges are inserted. Clearly most of the revenue comes from the cartridges.

For color, i found its far cheaper and higher quality to send stuff to Costco. They will do an 18" x 22" photo for about $3.

My Brother fax is no big deal it uses a reservoir system to filling the cartridges is a piece of cake. My HP 8150 is an ink HOUND my wife prints pictures so we use 2 cartridges a month and I'm venturing on that as we speak, the cartridge uses a sponge and when you peel the sticker off the fill holes are revealed. I'm squeezin the ink in as we speak and its very easy. The kits come with a stand for your cartridges.

I look at things on a time value stand point so 2 new inkjets cost $50 and it takes me 5 minutes to refill and about $5.00 of ink. So I think I'm doing OK and heck its recycling right?

And don't forget, you can get your own ink for the refills from squids . . .

Are those the same squids that have 1600 dpi full color resolution at 100 ppm?

I agree with boneheaddoctor, inkjets as a primary printer are very expensive.

I have an HP color laserjet 5M as my primary printer. It's and older printer but the advantage is that you refill the toner bins instead of replacing the entire cartridge. I can get toner refills for $5/each on e-bay which last 1500 sheets at 5% coverage. It has an ethernet port which allows any one of my 3 computers to print to it. I have the rear paper feeder which can accept up to 11 X 17 sheets of paper.

The down side is that it can't do envelopes or glossy photo paper due to the very high fuser temperatures.

I purchased an Epson RX500 color injet printer for photo prints. Since the Epson has a scanner I can scan with the Epson and print on the HP. I purchased an chip resetter ($5 e-bay) to allow me to use every last drop of ink before tossing it.

Since I don't print on my Epson much I am on my original set of ink. I am debating to purchase generic ink or stay with the pricy Epson ink. I like the Epson ink because it doesn't smeer with water. Anyone have any luck with photo prints with generic ink?

Inkjets are more expensive to run and generally are slower than a laser.

I love my inkjet because it prints awesome pictures. I have an Epson Stylus CX4600 All in one. IT is a great printer and is fairly inexpensive to run. Downside is that it wants to be slow when you are printing color documents. IT also sucks up alot of ink when printing photos. Documents are a different story. I have an HP Laserjet 4050. It does about 20-25 pages per minute. IT is only black and white though. It has all of the bells and whistles, such as networking, auto doublesided, and large page yield. I typically get about 15,000 - 20,000 pages to a toner drum. This is cheaper than running my epson which gets about 300-500 pages per cartridge.

Well I have three printers on my home network....an Epson Stylus 740, A Samsung CLP-500N and a HP Laserjet 4000N for the bulk of my printing.