Refillable cartridges and bulk ink

krishna

I have seen that it is possible to get replacement cartridges for our printer, which are refillable, but the price difference is huge. Ranges from £9.95 to over £40 for the set of 5.
£20.88
£12.95
over £40 was cityinkexpress.co.uk but website down at present.
and I don't have the link to the £9.95 one on me at present.

Any one have any experience of using these? Any advice on what to look for?

Is there anything to look out for in these? I asked the company charging of £40 and they said the extra paid for 12 month warranty and 'lifetime support', as well as better quality ink. I wasn't planning to buy the ink from him anyway. Anyone have any experience with this?

We have an HP Photosmart C6280 which uses HP 363 cartridges (5 of them). I have tried using a continuous ink supply system, but it is fraught with problems.

esuhl

A friend has a "continuous supply" system - a local printing company fitted huge reservoirs on the side of his printer and they get charged a flat fee no matter how much they print. It works out okay as they print quite a lot (house contains two teachers and one schoolkid), but it would be very expensive for occasional use.

I've always found it cheaper to just get cheap chipless cartridges - instead of paying £9 to £18 each, I get them for about £1.50... Maybe refillable cartridges would be better, though... I guess it depends how much the ink costs once you've bought the empty cartridges...

krishna

I can't find really cheap HP 363 cartridges and actually I'd rather avoid the landfill if I can. Once you have the refillable cartridges, the ink itself is very reasonably priced. Octoink sell inkjet ink manufactured by Image Specialists, which is supposed to be one of the better ones. It costs £3.25 per 100ml, so seems like a good deal to me.

The continuous ink supply system I bought cost me £50 and I got 100ml of each colour of ink. It worked well for around 9 months and we printed loads of photos. Then one day it decided to go into overdrive and pumped much of the remaining supply of ink all over my wooden furniture and paperwork! At least refillable cartridges will only have a fraction of the amount of ink.

Any one have any experience with purchasing refillable cartridges?

rrf494g

for a number of years now I've refilled the cartridges on my canon pixma ip3000 printer. I've used the supermarket kits that give you a little drill to allow you to make a hole in the top of the cartridges (and rubber plugs to close them ). Using the supplied syringe, you can top up the cartridges when they get low. The bottles of ink are so cheap that the cost of ink virtually becomes zero. When any colour gets low I top up all the colours. You do get a little ink on your fingers occasionally, but I always keep some kitchen towel to hand when doing the job. I do quite a lot of colour printing on gloss paper so this has been a massive cost saving. The colour balance has been good and the rate of "head cleaning" neeeded has not been any different from using canon cartridges, which I did way back, until the massive cost of original carts became unacceptable.

I recommend a trial to see if you are happy with this approach. A kit only costs about £8 I think. Tesco, Asda (and others) have them. Mail order bulk ink is even cheaper, but as the cost is so low now for me, I haven't tried them.
good luck