subject: The Thrills And Spills Of Ink Jet Refills.
[print this page] Of the two main office printer technologies in common use today Ink Jets are by far the most popular. This is certainly mainly due to their low initial cost in comparison with laser printers, particularly colour laser printer. However this low initial cost comes with a price
The makers of these printer will push to sell at below the actual price of manufacture Essentially they can make even more of a margin by selling the replacement cartridges. It's a similar deal with laser printers, however a normal toner cartridge is capable of doing approximately 5000 pages before it needs to be changed.
Another way printer manufacturers keep costs down is by having the actual print head incorporated in the ink cartridge itself. This also has the benefit of keeping the graphic sharp as the business end' is always replaced.
There are a lot of choices for replacing ink and toner:
Manufacturers own brand
Buying the replacement ink or toner cartridge from the manufacturer of the printer, so a genuine Epson replacement cartridge for an Epson printer. This is usually the most expensive route but could be the most dependable and trouble free. In the end they want you to buy form them. So for trouble free printing then this is the best choice.
3rd party manufactured ink and toner
This tends to have considerable savings over the genuine cartridge and is a hugely popular choice. More often then not the cartridge will need a bit of help to get the printer to see it. Generaly a good cleaning of the print head will do the trick.
Ink refills
This is where the original cartridge is actually refilled with ink or toner. The advantage is low cost and the kit can generally refill the cartridge more than once. The downside, and there's always a downside, is it can be a bit messy and laborious, also the printer head can wear out if reused a few times.
While some commercial ink jets use oil-based inks, virtually all desktop inkjets for office or home use have water-based ink
Often the manufacture will recommend their own ink.
Coming back to the ink cartridges with an in-build printer head. Generally the heads can start to deteriorate or even get clogged up if you refill more than two or three times.
In the end there is plenty of choice for the savvy customer to save money on your printing costs. For those using a lot of ink for simply black and white printing it may make more sense to go for a laser printer.
Alternatively for anyone who is looking to do short run full colour printing then ink jets are considerable cheaper to start with.
