I wish I had an ink well

[Alex321]

We have a Canon Pixma printer with separate ink tanks for each colour.

But we hardly ever buy the overpriced Canon inks, I usually go to Cartridge People and buy their own-brand versions at not much more than half the price. Never had a problem with them.

With our previous HP printer, it wasn't so keen on the alternatives, I found it best to only use one alternate brand before using another HP one.

 

[Reynard]

I ran my now kaput Canon S900 printer on 3rd party inks for more than half its life (had it just over 20 years before it keeled over in the autumn), first from Tesco and then from a place on Amazon that did the entire set of six cartridges for the cost of a single Canon OEM cartridge. Other than the occasional bit of leakage from shonky packaging in transit, I never had an issue.

Just about to pony up for an Epson EcoTank ET2811.

 

[GetFatty]

Slightly off-topic but HP Instant Ink is now £3.99. I wish I had known about the impending price rise before I bought my last printer...

I only pay £0.99 a month but I don’t print a lot. To be fair I don’t mind this approach, when I used to have to buy actual cartridges I tended to treat the printer itself as a consumable

 

[alicat]

^^^ I need more than the 10 pages a month that £0.99 buys me tbh. I liked HP Instant Ink a lot when it was £1.99 for 50 pages.

 

[classic33]

I can get 900 pages from a single black cartridge, 470 per colour cartridge using draft setting on the printer*.

*Canon BJC-6500 cost £2 and serviced(£75) once in the the 20+ years I've been using it.

 

[Reynard]

I can get 900 pages from a single black cartridge, 470 per colour cartridge using draft setting on the printer*.

*Canon BJC-6500 cost £2 and serviced(£75) once in the the 20+ years I've been using it.

Canon printers of that vintage were just about the best you could get.

Draft setting is OK if you're just printing stuff out to proof read and the like, or to keep a hardcopy of something as a backup. Did plenty of that with mine.

 

[classic33]

Canon printers of that vintage were just about the best you could get.

Draft setting is OK if you're just printing stuff out to proof read and the like, or to keep a hardcopy of something as a backup. Did plenty of that with mine.

Or doing a load of the same piece of printing in one go. A ream of paper a night, both sides, wasn't uncommon.

Looking at buying their inks in bottles then filling the cartridges myself.

 

[Reynard]

Looking at buying their inks in bottles then filling the cartridges myself.

My bookseller friend does that for the printer which does his invoices. You can get up to about 30 refills on a cartridge before they wear out - drills a hole in the top and fills them that way.

Downside is, you *really* don't want to be moving the printer if you've done that.

 

[Moodyman]

HP, and many other companies, are following the Gillette model.

That is, make a decent principal appliance and sell it cheaply (often at a loss), so that the real and recurring income comes from the replacement blades.

Coffee machine manufacturers do this via coffee pods.

And some car manufacturers are installing certain technology free in the cars,
But, it’ll only work if you pay a monthly/annual fee.

 

[Fastpedaller]

My bookseller friend does that for the printer which does his invoices. You can get up to about 30 refills on a cartridge before they wear out - drills a hole in the top and fills them that way.

Downside is, you *really* don't want to be moving the printer if you've done that.

I understand most printers have tech that won't allow a refilled cartridge to work?

 

[classic33]

I understand most printers have tech that won't allow a refilled cartridge to work?

The cartridge's may be seperate to the printhead.

 

[Reynard]

The cartridge's may be seperate to the printhead.

In this case, they are. The Canon printers come with individual cartridges for each colour that then slot into the printhead.

Was one of the main reasons I moved away from HP printers BITD, as then, they only had a single cartridge which had reservoirs for all colours - and an integrated printhead. They were a right pain, because one colour would run out way before the others, and you'd be throwing so much ink away.

 

[ebikeerwidnes]

I understand most printers have tech that won't allow a refilled cartridge to work?

Yes - some of them count the number of squirts or something
and then assume they are empty never mind if there is any ink left

I seem to remember a court case somewhere (EU????) about it a while ago

many years go my boss had a printer and a system where there was a hole in the top of each cartridge with a thin tube going to a 100ml bottle
you basically just refilled the bottle very cheaply and the cartridge never ran out

The guy he got it from went round car boot sales and the like - and had a printer going all day printing photos and never ran out!

the printer companies have made this contraption impossible

 

[Buck]

Our latest 'we can't buy it anymore' moment........ We've always bought the XL ink cartridges for our Hewlett Packard printer. They have 12.5ml of ink ...... the standard cartridges (at about 90% of the price) only have 5ml. HP has stopped selling the XL cartridges, and it appears to be an attempt to force us into buying a new printer. I'm sure HP (like all companies these days) claim they're great for the environment. HP state their cartridges are made from 80% recycled material - but decide to not fill them any more than 5ml.
Anyone with an oil well is worse off than anyone with an ink well these days.
Printer ink is a big con.

Try www.cartridgesave.co.uk.
Great company and we had a printer at work fail due to their ink cartridges and they replaced the printer like for like.

Apart from that one incident, all good and their service is excellent.

 

[Electric_Andy]

I don't quite understand the reason why ink is so expensive. I mean, is it that the raw product is expensive to buy and the ink expensive to refine/produce, or is it just that it's fairly cheap but the printer companies are all in it together and inflate the price so much becasue they know everyone needs ink and they sell far more ink than they do printers?

Put it another way, if I were to invent a new no frills printer which costs, say, £150 to buy, but I could sell the ink at a little over 30% of what it costs me to make, would I make a profit?