Ink Yourself
I have a venerable HP Deskjet 990cse color printer which I bought a few years ago. I have learned to love this little machine for its speed, quality, and excellent drivers.
Probably like a lot of you, but not all, I like to print a lot of stuff. I might print maps for trips, bills, maps and graphics for D&D, and pictures of my kids. I don’t want to worry about how much the ink costs and I like to have extra cartridges laying around so I’m never without the ability to print.
The reality of the situation is, of course, that ink cartridges are very expensive. I did my best to find bargains over the years but I could say at most $5 from the $35–$40 list price of these babies.
So, I was intrigued by the lure of paying half-price for refurbished inkjet cartridges at a new Cartridge World store near my house. This is the place that parks a horrendously decorated yellow punchbuggy (or other sub-compact) outside the storefront to attract customers.
I handed in my old cartridge and got a new one back. I though this strange since I wanted them to fill the one I gave them. I knew that I took care of it and since the actual printheads are a physical part of the cartridge, I figure I can keep track and chuck it after I felt it had seen enough use.
to make a long story short, I started to get totally crappy cartridges from them and I eventually got fed up. Sure, they guarantee quality but they won’t do anything m ore than replace the cartridge with problems with another that probably still has problems.
The only good thing that I got out of my handful of visits to these folks were some tips on how to care for the cartridges. Such detailed instructions made it clear to me that lots of people will probably ignore these instructions and continually hand in damaged cartridges which will wind up in my hands and will inevitably produce crappy prints.
There had to be a better way.
I headed over to Pacific Ink and bought a refill kit for my hp78 color cartridge for $14.99 plus $3.85 in shipping. A new cartridge from HP direct costs $34 with free shipping. The refill kit is advertised to be good for two refills. This means that instead of paying $34 twice more, I spent $14.99 once. I guess this is a savings of $49.16. If I can get away with a second ink refill kit on the same new cartridge then I’d save another $49.16.
I don’t know how difficult the filling process will be, but I’ll definitely blog about the experience when I perform it for the first time. Here is a picture of the kit. Not for the faint of heart, I suppose.
