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| ink cartridge ink cartridge printer ink inkjet ink epson ink cartridge inkjet printer ink discount printer ink miami ink printer ink cartridge printer ink refill lexmark ink cartridge ink refill Do It Yourself? You may get the best results with printer cartridges like the midrange and high-end Canon models have, which are simple ink tanks and don't have the print head built in. One-shot print heads aren't designed to last forever. These kits aren't for everybody. Some people need fairly precise vendor ink matching. Photo printing, for instance, is one area in which small differences can become big ones. If you don't deal well with tools, don't like to follow instructions to the letter, and are really afraid of making a mess, you don't want one of these kits. The procedure seems relatively simple: Drill a hole where the diagram says to put it. Through the hole, pump in the amount of ink that the instructions specify, using the included syringe. Do anything else specified in the instructions. Printer ink refill kits aren't difficult to use, and you can get good results with them. Break the plastic button off the provided hand drill/gimlet and chuck it into a drill (low speed) or cordless screwdriver. TIP Try plugging the hole after refilling. I believe that these kits only work two or three times per cartridge when used as directed because the ink residue covering the inside of the plastic bag found in most cartridges dries out, due to the open hole usually left after the refill process. A few extra suggestions for refilling a cartridge: Put down newspaper before you get started. Make sure that you're following the instructions for the right cartridge. Don't overfill. Unless the instructions say otherwise, immediately after refilling you should clean the syringe used to inject the ink. Fill the syringe with warm water and spray the water out of the syringe nozzle. Repeat if necessary. Vendor Mail-in/Exchange Programs Another option is to contact the manufacturer to get a mailer so you can send the cartridge in for recycling. Good for the environment, perhaps, but it won't help you reduce your printing costs. Hopefully, the cartridges actually get recycled?that is, disassembled, shredded, taken to vendors of plastics, etc.?instead of winding up in Chinese landfills or burned in China to recover metals, as described in Karl Schoenberger's article "Where Computers Go To Die." There's no reasonable way to verify what happens to the cartridges you send, and even the vendors themselves may not be certain of what happens to cartridges consigned for recycling. Only a few vendors offer programs for inkjet cartridges. HP and Lexmark include mailers with some cartridges; for others, you can order mailers onsite. Neither Epson nor Canon has a program for recycling inkjet cartridges. Third-Party Programs We know what happens to cartridges sold/exchanged to third-party vendors: They refill and sell them to you. There are many third-party cartridge vendors and recycling services; a casual Google search provides thousands of choices. Some vendors will buy them back from you for about 50 cents to $1.50; the lower price is for previously refilled cartridges. Not much of an offset to the price of a new printer cartridge. NOTE Companies such as Enviro Solutions have fundraising programs in which, for instance, students collect the cartridges and the company pays the organization. For you, it's a feel-good sort of thing; it won't help you reduce the cost of printing. The following examples of other third-party programs are representative, but not necessarily recommended. Third-Party Mail-in Exchange Pacific Ink offers a deal in which you can save $2?$3 when you buy a prepaid mailer over the usual price of a refilled cartridge from them. Third-Party Carry-in/Refill Cartridge World offers a carry-in refill service at quite a few franchise locations all over the world. You can find out whether one is in your area by going to their web site. I tried out their service with a black ink cartridge. I don't know how well their photo printing works; the IP3000 I own uses black for text-printing only and the CMY cartridges for photo/high-resolution printing. I took the cartridge to a Cartridge World location and mentioned that I was doing an article about refilling cartridges. The manager let me into the back room to watch. He drilled a hole in the cartridge, injected ink, used a hot-glue gun to fill the hole, and taped over it with plastic tape. No mess, and I got the cartridge back in a few minutes ready to go. It printed without any trouble. For larger orders, they pick up/deliver refilled cartridges. Cartridge refill prices are typical, about half the OEM cartridge cost. The manager said that the parent company reverse-engineers the inks sold by the printer vendor and provides training on how to refill cartridges. They also have one or more vendor-specific custom machines for refilling cartridges, which I didn't get to see in use because they refill Canon cartridges manually. Despite the problem I had, I still think that most readers will find this vendor worth a try at least once. It's an inexpensive experiment, given that an ink cartridge once run dry is a complete or almost complete loss. Cartridge World warrants their cartridges against problems or printer damage. If this technique works for you, it will save you money, and if you have occasion to bring in cartridges by the bucket, you're going to save significant money. Other Carry-in Refill Shops Cartridge World is the only major service I could find that's available either at the international level or at the U.S. national level, although it's possible that some white-box or refilled cartridge vendors offer this service to customers locally. |
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