Best low cost printer for refilling

[jayjay22]

Hello, I am currently looking for recommendations on the best printer to buy specifically for refilling. I currently have a simple HP Deskjet 1000 which uses #61 black and #61 color cartridges. I have attempted refilling this, and have been successful refilling these a couple times, but it is a major pain to get these printing again after refilling. The reason I am looking for something else now after picking this up just last month is that after only 2 refills, I am now not able to get the yellow to print no matter what I do. If anyone has tips on refilling HP cartridges, those would be great too. I do not need to do anything fancy with the printer, not really printing photos or anything, just need to print documents and some pages with pictures and text. I know that most of you on this forum deal with canons and some epsons. I am not opposed to them if you really recommend them for ease of refilling, but also am open for other suggestions. I am mostly interested in ease of refill and cost, the cheaper the printer the better, as long as it is easy to refill. Does not have to print fantastic pictures. Color is really not even mandatory, so if anyone knows a low cost simple laser printer that is easy to refill the toner on, that would probably be perfect!

Thanks so much for any suggestions you can offer! I am very open to all recommendations, and eager to learn.

Gary

 

[pharmacist]

You should always seek printers who have separated printhead and ink tanks and also one ink tank per colour, not the 3-in-1 cartridges. Your Deskjet 1000 uses cartridges which have the printhead embedded inside the cartridges: these can only be refilled a few times before they will stop working.

Now the easies to refill printers are Brothers: no chips, so no resetter needed and there are large refillable cartridges available on ebay. Print quality is however not as good compared to Canon and Epson printers: these printers give the best printing quality. But for Canon: choose the ones having 5 separate cartridges or more. There are now resetters available for even the latest PGI-525 and CLI-526 carts, so this won't be the problem anymore. Look after for good quality refill ink (KMP pigment for the PGI-525 and for dye: Hobbicolors, Image Specialists, Inktec, OCP).

For Epson printers the original cartridges are very difficult the refill, but you can buy refillable carts for these printers with auto reset chips or using a resetter and they will perform very well, provided the carts are well primed (air completely removed) or you can use CISS system with ease of mind. Due to the piezo printhead, these printers can cope with fade and water resistant pigment inks as well, which is impossible with Canon printers.

 

[jayjay22]

Pharmacist thank you for the reply and the information. You mentioned the brother printers having refillable carts available on ebay. Does this mean that the original cartridges cannot be easily refilled?
Thanks again, Gary

 

[pharmacist]

They can be refilled, but it is rather cumbersome and must be sealed with glue and removing and putting glue on the refill hole again and again is not a good idea. The Brother cartridges rely on a floater and and a wedge gradually masking a light beam which detects the amount of light going through the sensor and on which the ink level is estimated.

 

[TheTonerGuy]

Hi JayJay,

Although I'm TheTonerGuy, I operate a small local store in the Montreal area and my clients absolutely just love the Brother inkjet printers for very low cost printing. Since you are not printing photos, Brother's quality with aftermarket inks is perfect. We use Brother inkjet printers to print most of the color documents we produce. A base model Brother inkjet comes with FAX, Copier and flatbed scanner for typically around $70. If you need speed and duplex printing, you may with to consider the higher end Brother printers.

There are some really could CIS Style cartridges you buy and the ink is very cost effective. We calculated our operating costs at $0.003 per page. That is 3 pages for less that 1 cent.

Check it out for yourself. Go to YouTube and search for "Brother Refillable Cartridges".

TheTonerGuy

 

[jayjay22]

Thanks everyone for all the help! I will look into buying the brother printer and getting refillable carts on ebay. My office max has a brother mfc-j410 on sale for $59.99 regularly $99.99. It uses the LC61 style cartridges. Would this be a decent choice for refilling? Also, if I buy refillable carts with no ink in them, what is the most recommended quality ink to use for these to prolong the life of the printhead?

Thanks again to all, your assistance is much appreciated!

Gary

 

[qwertydude]

Refilling HP printers is easy. The secret is never let them run out. If you let them run out you'll burn out the print heads causing stripes and difficult printing. They're also very difficult to refill and get working again. It's good also to have 2 sets of cartridges. That way one is filled and ready to go.

After refilling the HP cartridge you have to let it sit ideally overnight. I always filled them up all the way, they'd inevitably start dripping so I'd blot them on paper towels until they stopped dripping, you'll know because ink won't bleed from the nozzles. Then you let them rest so they can let out any bubbles in the cartridge. I've found HP cartridges far less finicky than Canon's cartridges. Plus if you mess up, a new cartridge solves any print head issues. Canon you might as well buy a new printer cause the heads are so expensive.

 

[jayjay22]

Qwertydude, Thanks for the info I have finally gotten them printing from the last refill yesterday. I think a majority of my issue is that I am impatient in getting them to stop dripping, which they seem to want to do for quite some time. I placed them back in the printer while they were still dripping because I figured that running a few headcreanings would get them to stop dripping, but no luck and they made a pretty good mess inside the printer. Once I finally got the color cartridge to stop pooling the cyan and magenta and then cleaned off the printhead real good by wiping it, and then ran several cleaning cycles, then printed a couple pages of solid yellow, the yellow finally started flowing and I finally got a good nozzle check pattern. Perhaps I am overfilling as well? Maybe if I only inject 5ml or so each time i refill, instead of injecting ink until it nearly overflows out the top hole, I may have better luck and have much less drippage and also much quicker time getting it printing again without too much hassle. Aahhh the things I do to save money, but like I said I am not printing prize winning photos, just documents and webpages occasionally. And I just refuse to pay the store prices for ink! Far too expensive and goes far too quick! Thanks again for the help!

ALSO, what kind of ink do you recommend using for HP carts? I am not using ink specifically designed for HP, I am using ink that was actually ordered for an epson printer I had. The ink is from a company called alotofthings.com Is epson ink basically the same as HP ink? Is the epson ink perhaps too thick and maybe that is why even after I get a good check pattern, if I print more than a page or 2 at a time I start getting banding, kind of like the ink is not getting to the printhead fast enough.

I will likely still go for the brother printer if I can get a decent deal on the printer and find good refillables and bulk ink on ebay.

 

[qwertydude]

Epson ink is definitely different. A lot of their inks are pigments. But you probably don't have that as pigment will not work in an HP tri color cart. It might work in the black as HP black is pigment. But in reality piezo print heads require a different ink formula than thermal so it's entirely reasonable it doesn't work well in HP.

With my HP printer I've found stratitec generic refill inks work great and the color balance is pretty darn close to correct. Their pigment black is also fantastically cheap and decent quality stuff.