Official Poll: Why Do You Refill?

It had to be save money, plus I'm a bit of a geek......

Because it saves money, of course, or rather because it helps me avoid buying a cartridge at a price several times what I deem it's worth. And, also, because of the great help I have gotten at this site to do it, of course - thanks guys.
Shouldn't leave out the satisfaction felt when refills work well.
I think oem printer cartridge prices are one of the sneakiest tricks played unto the consumer.
I do have a problem, though. Now that I have mastered, in a modest fashion, how to refill the cartridges all the printheads have given in: so far, 2 on a Canon i560, and 2 on a Canon ip4500 - none left/no color printer. Wonder if Canon is not changing its business strategy to neutralize refilling.

My story to fill the "Cucumber time" as we say in Dutch.

I did not trust inkjet printers and had a B/W laser for personal use, until I needed colour prints for a small business 6 years ago.

Colour lasers where expensive to buy and use, and in my search for an All-in-one I was offered a Canon MX7600.
It used non-fading pigment inks and gloss impregnation of standard paper and made very good A4 colour prints. Photos were very decent also.
I knew there were no refills, but I was reluctant to fiddling with syringes and the ink cost was deductable.

Over the years the printer showed reliable and not too expensive to operate, especially in B/W, but is was no commercial success and Canon dropped the PGI-9 system for office use.
Last year, the printer started to leak ink on the rolls causing a black line on the back of the pages.

Because I liked the machine and did not find a good replacement I googled and found on this forum how to repair the printer.
To my surprise there was now a resetter, and the cartridges were a dream to fill (without syringes ).

And since my son's Pro9500 used the same carts, I ordered a starter kit (from octoink) and was hooked.

To be honest after 6 months, learning how to maintain printers was to me of greater interest than the refilling itself.
The (Image Specialists) pigment inks have very good colours (and do not clogg the printer), but for photos the gloss differences are much more present than with Canon ink.
Also, the PGI-9 pigment inks are made for the Pro9500 photo printers, and not for the MX7600/IX7000 office models who have a different printhead, I had ink feed problems with magenta.
(I solved this for now by using the new Prodinks pigments for magenta, more on this later after experiences of other members).

I lost some time, but my printers stayed operational (and before I was messing with the dirty rolls anyway).

Refilling is no free lunch, you have to experiment and make compromises (example: a frame from Ikea - € 2,99 for 30x40 - solves the gloss problem).

I feel more confident with my printers now and even started to hoard some. The trick is to find nearly new machines of an outphased but well-built model (where Canon lost interest to combat refillers).

I refill to save money because buying cartridges new is expensive.

I would like to but if only I knew how. I am new at refilling and ran into a wall so I'm posting for help! Main reason for doing this is to save money, ofc. And yeah, sticking it to the businesses (not to the man) helps too! They use sponges for goodness sakes! No wonder why we run out quickly!

Nifty said:

In our last poll we asked which refilling method you use, but this time we want to know WHY you refill!

So, what motivates you to risk getting your hands inky?

Note, you can select multiple reasons!

Please reply with your thoughts on why you refill, especially if you answered with "other".


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I use ink refill kit so now its easy for me.

To save money of course.

fotofreek said:

My sentiments, exactly. I originally used Epson inkjet printers. I'd come home from many trips with up to 800 digital images, about one third of which I'd print. After forever running out for more cartridges I researched refilling. At that time refilling Epson carts was a big pain! Results were also varied. Further research turned up Neal Slade's site about the Canon i960, the ease of refilling Canon carts, and suggested inks (IS) to buy. That was about 11 years ago. Never turned back!

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I don't print nearly as much as many of the folks here. But when I do, I need the quality to be pretty good for documents and I think we probably all like good photo results.

I have now turned to Canon finally as well and hope it will be a good experience. While I think if I was as dedicated as many here are to the whole printing technology experience I might have had better luck with Epson, I just don't have the time to devote to it. I know I explained the apparent death throws of my Artisan 837 in another thread. So I won't go into it other than to say that since refilling for the 837 seemed to be an iffy experience even for the dedicated printer guys, I stuck with OEM inks. But in an effort to at least try to save something would buy the out of the cardboard box and in the plastic thermal wrap packaging which is OEM packaging. But the only date stamp is on the box. So you lose the expiration date buying them that way.

I am pretty certain that the issues I am having now, blotching light magenta and inability to recognize the light magenta OEM carts is an issue with the printer. The only time I have ended up running into the expiration date for Epson carts was early in my experience with the 837, when I was using another printer alongside the 837. When you run into the expiration date, the error message you get tells you that the cart has hit the expiration date. You don't get the "can't recognize the cart" error message. Plus none of my other Epson color carts are failing at this point.

The first time it happened, the printer shuddered violently on wake up and that was the start of the light magenta blotching followed by inability to recognize that cart and so far every subsequent light magenta cart after only a couple of days after installing it.

But that is part of my frustration. Refilling is far from a solid experience with the 837 and even doing a bare minimum to try to save some money on ink at least in my case puts me in a situation where I lose the expiration date for the carts. I should point out that based on what I have read, the older Artisans, even the 800 was less problematic for refillers. I have no personal experience to back that statement up. Would I put it past Epson to code those chips such that the ink expiration date is way in advance of the ink actually being on the verge of being unusable? Absolutely! When you consider the ends Epson has gone to to get us to dump carts that still have ink in them with that early ink level warning and the built in obsoleteness of the machine itself I have no doubt that the cart expiration date is way in advance of the end of life for the ink in the cart.

It is just too much of an uphill battle with Epson. I may somehow, someday be able to relate that initial violent shudder and the first blotching to the subsequent issues with the machine. But when I explained it to Epson Technical Support they said the shudder I experienced was normal?????? I told them it had never done that before. But I was unable to make any headway with them. Maybe others here have experienced a violent shudder on wake up of an 837 and know what that is.

That is really the message I am trying to impart in this long post. I think somebody like me will have better luck with a Canon printer at least in the generation of Canon printer I just bought. I think you have to be a bit more dedicated to the printer as something of a hobby to deal with the Epson.

First of course of all no matter what others says is that we can save money and print a lot of stuff that you can share with family, second i like to do stuff well and the only way is to do it by yourself i like to get hand dirty and share information and helps others if i considere that i know what you are talking about and third this is one of my favorite place aroud the net the few time i have i'm been here.

Saving money is obviously the main motivation but getting one over on the printer manufacturers (In my case Canon) feels really good.

Also, admittedly to a lesser degree, it doesn't feel right throwing away a cartridge just because the ink has run out.