Is there anything wrong with using Aftermarket Carts. ?
In the market place there are many 10’s of thousands of 3rd party cartridges and inks available for Canon and Epson printers. Now I wish to speak mainly of Canon cartridges.
There is nothing wrong in using third party inks and cartridges, they are a great source of good cheap ready to use consumables and they can easily fill the gap between the refilling and OEM cartridges.
There are many good third party inks and cartridges available on the market today but there are thousands more out there that are not fit for purpose, knowing which is which, is a matter of using you head and not your wallet to decide.
For example:- The average OEM cartridge costs about $12 or so give or take a little, which are way to expensive for most compulsive Printaholics and so we come to the aftermarket ones !
Any good ink supplier will charge about $5 P&P on an order to your home, then if you happen to purchase a set of empty cartridges to fill yourself, they can cost about $5 a set and if you decide to purchase only a small amount of ink, that will cost your another $5.
Going on the above modest prices that will set you back a minimum of $15 and yet there are ink sellers out there and I wont call them ink suppliers willing to sell you a complete set of ready filled cartridges for $6 including P&P to your home.
If you still cant see the catch then stop reading because you obviously don’t need good advise you’re already hooked on these ridiculously cheap consumables
that are not going to do MY printer any harm. ! !
Now I can hear some guys saying I use them all the time and that maybe so but staying that lucky can be only be a part-time luxury, because you’ll lose your print head when you least expect it in nearly every circumstance.
Now as for the ink itself that’s inside these very cheap cartridges, it’s a bog standard colour mix, of what ingredients is anybody’s guess and can be used in every inkjet printer known to man, even pigment ink printers. ! !

Aren’t all inks the same I hear you say, well no certainly not is the plain truth.
Yes that’s what I am saying, they’ll say anything to suck in the naive who just don’t know the consequence of using the wrong ink in their little Canon printer.
If you can afford to lose the odd print head then used I say.
Does this actually happen, yes it does because there are many on this very forum that were taken in by their slick advertising and have suffered exactly the same fate, the loss of their print head. (All to often)
So my advise is to buy you third party inks and cartridges from a good ink supplier, one that wont sell you ink for the sake of a sale, and not from these fly-by-night EBay sellers out to make an easy fast buck at your expense, and under no circumstances even think about refilling these same cartridges, it’s just not worth it.
Rant over..