I have just had my second try at refilling Hewlett Packard inkjet cartridges. This is something I have tried before with varying degrees of success and more often failure or at the very least success with messy fingers.
Refilling cartridges does appear to make financial sense, I have an HP Photosmart D5460 which produces awesome colour photo output, at present a set of cartridges is around £80 and that is more than 50% of the purchase cost whilst a complete set of inks with the refill tools (the modern ones are good) cost around £23 and I think will do around 4 refills (the box says 5 but with it's hardly an exact science).
Clearly there are downsides to refills (besides messy fingers), chief of which is uncertain print quality and uncertain robustness of the inks - if you are printing photos to display / keep for a long time then sticking to HP manufactured cartridges is essential.
But what if you just want the odd snap to show people and are not concern about longevity? Or you are printing web pages / text for convenience of your work / hobbies (so we print web pages to have a hard copy to refer to when working off screen quite frequently)? Who cares how long the colours stay bright.
I have purchased a set of inks from Inktec. I don't recall any magic claims about longevity of the colours but they are supposed to be consistent colour blah blah and they come from a business specialising in refills - there are plenty of cheaper sources out there, particularly ebay. These come with tools which actually work, the instructions are good but take a couple of goes to figure out.
My experience? Well I have found my HP D5460 cartridges have a little ink window on the bottom that fills with ink, once I realised I monitored how full that was (hold the cartridges the right way up as the ink simply sinks down into the window) and that is the indicator.
The big trick with this HP5460 is the software. HP have been very clever to make sure you keep buying their cartridges, the printer bleats if non originals are used - firstly, refilling the existing cartridge is a disaster as the printer keeps saying the the cartridge needs replacing. So the trick is to have 2 sets of cartridges so refilling the "old" set means the printer just tells you that you've inserted a previously used cartridge and asks you to press ok. Job done.
These refills are great. Just remember to refill over a sink.
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First point I assert is that no ink is colour-fast. It is all dependant on the UV exposure.
ReplyDeleteI have 3 printers at the moment - a Canon I was given along with a bucket load of cartridges, an HP D2360 which was cheaper than a set of replacement carts, and an HP 895 which is so old that the fooling technology hadn't been invented. The carts in both HPs are refilled. However, the carts can only be refilled so often before refilling stops working.
The plan is to run these out (ie no refills anymore) and replace all 3 with a wireless all-in-one.
You are quite correct about colourfastness, the HP inks for the D5460 claim to last longer and you can buy special inks for archive purposes but how does one test them properly?
ReplyDeleteI did look long & hard at a wireless printer before I bought this one, I don't know if it has changed but at the time there was a significant premium for wireless and the printers were all inferior.
I want to buy something like an Iomega IConnect for sharing the printer & usb storage - it's much cheaper than a proper NAS and is simple & low power. Unfortunately I'm still awaiting a response from Iomega on the supported printer list (I don't believe they brought a product to market without realising there is 2-way comms on usb printers nowadays & that's the usual stumbling block of sharing them).