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When you refill an HP cartridge the chances are that when you put it into your printer it will report as empty.  This is because the printer remembers the cartridge and refuses to reset the ink meter.  Don’t worry, the meter is only an estimate.  Go ahead and use the cartridge and watch for poor print quality.  That is an indicator that the cartridge is nearly empty.  Don’t be tempted to force the cartridge to print more at this stage as you could damage the printhead.

The following video testimonial was submitted by David Wilkinson of Guerilla Films.

There is no such thing as a cheap printer.  You may think you have found a bargain for around £40 but don’t do it.  Find out what cartridges the printer takes and how much they cost.  Then look up the page yield you can expect.  Divide the cost in pounds by the yield and you get the cost per page.

Beware, as a rule of thumb the supposedly ‘cheap’ printers on the market cost the most to run!

Don’t consider anything with a page cost of over 2p for monochrome.

Here at Continuink we have been dealing with customers both business and domestic for 6 years.  We sell converted printers that do not need cartridges to the converted and we fill cartridges so we have seen and heard a whole host of horrors.  For example there is an HP cartridge on the market that should contain 20ml of ink but the internal volume is blocked off so that we can only fill it with 5 ml of ink.

Here you can clearly see the foam that holds the ink in the left hand cartridge uses all the available volume but in the right hand cartridge there is more air than foam.

What a rip-off!  Not only that but think about all those extra cartridges and their associated packaging going into Landfill.  HP are not the only guilty company either.  Lexmark and Canon are also at it.  Please tell us about any bad experience you have had with a printer and what you did about it.

So the advice is purchase XL or extra large cartridges for your printer if you can.