I think is sort of depends on the type of printer. I had off-brand ink ruin a Canon printer once. Canon printers use a print head that is separate from the ink tank, so bad ink can ruin the print head (which are so expensive you might as well replace the printer if they go bad). HP printers, however, use combined ink tank/print head so I don’t think bad ink would ruin the printer–you’d just have to replace the ink cartridge.

The answer is easy. If the price of a cartridge costs more than your printer, then its worth trying to refill. If you mess up and blow your printer (either by goofing up or over time), you’ll end up paying less for the replacement printer than 1 single cartridge. Its a win-win situation.

I personally prefer to buy the name brand cartridges. My experience with refilling was not the best. I refilled a black Canon cartridge once and even though I saved some money the quality of the print wasn’t the best. There was some bleeding of the ink on the paper. Also by off name brands of cartridges don’t always guarantee a high quality print. I’ve had less than stellar performances with the no-names and those cartridges seemed to last 80% as long as the name brands.
So, in my opinion, buy the brand name print cartridge from the printer company.
Bonus tip: Most companies offer 2 types of black cartridges, one that is easily available at all stores and another one that will print more pages. Those cost a little bit more, but the price per page is much less, so try to get those also to help save on some cash.

Refilling your own cartridges is great if you have a relatively inexpensive printer, however for a $400 Hp 7310 all in one, it isn’t worth the risk of really ruining a printer.

I confess a bias; I manage a store where we refill ink and laser cartridges. Yet it’s my work there that’s given me an insight into refill kits.

There are several problems with ink refill kits. They’re messy and potentially disastrous for tables, counters, floors and hands. There’s no universal ink that works in every printer cartridge, as the ink’s molecule size is related to the openings in the print head. Some cartridges need to be filled in a vacuum chamber, making sure the ink is pulled down to the print head. Others need to have a chip replaced or reset in order to be accepted as new cartridges by the printer. It’s not as easy as refilling a water pistol.

Stores like ours generally charge about half what a new cartridge would cost. We guarantee our work and replace non-working cartridges or provide refunds without question. We incur the mess and frustration, allowing the customer to carry on with their printing while enjoying a savings over office supply prices for OEM cartridges.

By pricing their OEM cartridges like they do, the printer manufacturers are not just encouraging the search for alternatives, they are encouraging wasteful and ecologically ruinous practices. People are throwing away printers when the ink runs out because they can buy a new printer which includes cartridges for less than the price of the cartridges alone. Now, instead of millions of perfectly reusable cartridges in the landfill, we have entire printers. In their pursuit of higher profits they’re trashing our cities and towns.

when my last printer died, i did not replace it, period. i was just burnt out on the whole ink stress — as the ink buyer in the household, i would just cringe every time i heard the printer start up, people just hit print like a reflex, some sort of instinctive hangover from days past in which we want to hold things in our hands rather than on our storage media.

i mean one time i came home and my idiot boyfriend was printing out pictures of naked chicks off of chatropolis. i freaked! “you know how much ink that uses? do you not know how to right click and save in a folder on your hard drive? can’t you just favorite it? don’t you realize that’s full sheet ink coverage??” yeah. printer stress.

now, if i must print, i do it at work, and i’m pretty sure it’s way under 10 pages a month, just the absolute necessities. you really can lead a useful productive life without hitting print.

I too looked into refilling solutions a few years ago but never got into it. Problem is a lot of manufacturers put ink level chips in the cartridges, which prevent you from refilling an empty cartridge.

I actually bought a refilling kit to refill my Epson inkjet and couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t work, only to find out about the chip later from online forums.

I don’t refill, but I don’t print photos much anymore either. Its too expensive, but I don’t want to hassle with refilling.

I think it makes more sense to send my photos to a reasonably-priced service, like Costco for printing. They produce good results for much less than what ink costs, and if they have to redo the print do to a mistaken setting, which is common for me, I’m not paying for it by using even more ink. You can pick up the photos same day or next day. There are many other reasonably priced printing services too, that will mail your prints.

I make my own paper, too.

I’m switching to a Kodak printer the next time I’m in the market for a new printer. Tired of getting ripped off by HP.

You might not use Microsoft software to blog next time - Internet Explorer pukes on it if you didn’t notice.