I was recently at Fry’s Electronics looking for replacement ink cartridges for an HP G95, and decided to try the refilled cartridges this time around.
I wouldn’t recommend refills for photo printing, but for everyday draft printing and copying, the generic ink cartridge refills seem to be a completely transparent substitution.
The price difference between the official HP cartridges and the refilled ones is substantial. The standard HP 51645A (45ml) black ink cartridge was around $29, while the refill (Innojet) was around $19. I noticed that the refilled cartridges are marked “Remanufactured in China”, so it’s apparently worth collecting the empty cartridges, sending them to China for refill, then shipping them back to the US. The print heads are the tricky part to manufacture, and don’t wear out nearly as quickly as the cartridge runs out, which makes it attractive to refill them.
Most of the printer’s output gets thrown out after a few days, so it’s loaded with the generic ($0.99 per ream) recycled paper, and I can’t tell any difference in output quality in everyday use. The color cartridge initially seemed to have a clogged nozzle, which I cleared using the normal printer maintenance utility. This might be a problem for some users, but I’ve had problems with clogged nozzles on HP original cartridges as well, which is how I became acquainted with the printer maintenance utility.
The refilled cartridges have original HP print heads, so assuming the nozzles are clean, the main difference is in the quality of the ink. HP’s inks are likely to be more fade resistant and have a greater color gamut than aftermarket ink. If nothing else, the HP print drivers are developed for use with HP ink components, and the refilled color cartridge is unlikely to be an exact match, so photos may look better with HP ink.
For casual users, though, the combination of cheap paper and cheap ink seems quite practical.
I don’t currently have this problem, but you may also be interested in resetting the HP cartridge DRM.
Update 10-21-2006 11:01 PDT - Today I got a refilled color (78A) cartridge, in which the cyan didn’t work at all. I exchanged it at Fry’s for another, which is working fine. In contrast, I’ve never had an HP ink cartridge fail out of the box. So there’s an additional tradeoff between cost and reliability. For casual use, the $10-per-cartridge discount is still worth it for us, but on the other hand, we’re only 5 minutes from Fry’s, and go through a lot of ink.
If I’m feeling adventurous / bored, I may try one of the ink refilling kits next time around.