Inkjet cartridge refill kits
It's well-known that printer companies make most of their money
selling inkjet cartridges. I pay about $30 for a color cartridge,
which contains a few millimeters each of yellow, blue, and magenta
ink. It's a rip-off.
I no longer buy ink cartridges. Instead, I buy refill kits. They cost about $20 and come with enough ink to refill a cartridge at least six times. It's fun to inject the ink, and even more fun to save that money.
Hewlett Packard feels so threatened by refill kits that they attack it on two fronts. They run ridiculous ads on the radio warning people that non-HP ink will smear, making critical information such as driving directions and boarding passes impossible to read. How often does that happen?
Worse, HP's printers also record the unique ID stored in a chip in the printer cartridge, and once the printer determines the cartridge is empty, it will insist it is empty even if you refill it. How evil is that? To get around this barricade, I keep two old color ink cartridges in a desk drawer. After I refill a cartridge, I insert and remove the two old ones, one at a time, and then insert the refilled cartridge. That's because the printer can only remember the IDs of two cartridges at a time. How long will it be before HP puts more memory into their printers, making this trick unworkable? $20.99 on Amazon
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Another nasty trick:
Printer cartridge "recycling" programs, designed to get empty cartridges out of circulation.
One recycling box I saw purports to benefit a kids' charity.
Office Depot, for a while, was handing out a ream of paper in exchange for empty carts.
I'm not sure I'd classify the "recycling" programs as a "nasty trick," as the other commenter suggests. Where do you think the Staples/OfficeMax/OfficeDepot brand cartridges come from? That's right- they're recycled carts, refilled back at some factory somewhere, then resold. The person/organization who collects the carts gets about a buck- which can go to charity or wherever else, and the remanufactured carts get resold to those economically-minded folk who are too timid to refill their own.
Realistically, tho- there actually is quite a bit that can go wrong with a refilled cart- and keep in mind that if you refill a cart and the printer's still covered under warranty- ANY warranty, even those nasty extended ones- if you pop a reman in there, you've voided the warranty.
And an Even better tip
1) buy a printer from a manufacturer who gives you INDIVIDUAL color cartridges (NOT HP NOT LEXMARK!)
Cannon, Brother, Epson are 3 makers of multi (4 or even 7) cartridge systems.
You can refill ONE color at a time.
Refilling the Tri-color cartridges is a bear.
2) You can buy (Never the FIRST time you refill your cartridge) LARGE bottles (even a quart!) of each ink color, throwing the price down from 20.0 for the refill kit, down to say, maybe 30-40 refills instead of 2-3.
3) cartridges DO wear out eventually. Thus, you do need to have a FEW unused, (OR NEWly refilled Cartridges)
4) Lexmark (especially) has a nasty habit of using id-keys on their cartridges, and have actually sued cartridge re-fillers for dcma copyright violations
...REALLY mean I think!
Yes, I agree. Printer cartridges are ridiculously overpriced compared to the printers that usee them. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that printer companies lose money on the actual machines, only to completely make up and exceed that defecit through cartridges. I use an ink refill set from Polariod, which cost $20, has no quality issues I can see, and comes with instructions to "hack" the ink cartridge
status chip (with small pieces of tape).
I don't use these kits...tried it once and that was enough to splooge myself with blue ink that didn't wash off for DAYS. I looked like a smurf.