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.

Did you know that Epson printers waste up to half the ink in your expensive cartridges?  They use ink every time you switch them on and during print head cleaning.

You can extend the life of your cartridges by simply never switching your printer off.  I know this goes against the best advice we are given, and we should switch off devices when not using them, but your printer uses just a trickle of power when compared to the impact of manufacturing, transporting and disposing of all the extra cartridges you’ll use if you don’t take this advice.

Please note:  We only recommend you do this if you use your printer twice or more per week.

Do you use Epson compatible cartridges?  Some feedback from our customers who have been using them for years is that updating their driver software caused their printer to reject the cartridges.  So the advice is, if it works, don’t try to fix it.

Any Epson printer not fitted with a colour display communicates error states by flashing different sequences of lights at you.  These are explained in your products instruction manual.

Most combinations are ink out, paper jam or other normal day to day things that can usually be cured easily by yourself.  There are several other states that do require an engineers attentions caused by physical failure inside the printer.

One such state can be fixed by yourself for no cost.  All Epsons will eventually report to you that “parts inside the printer require a service”.  This usually means that the waste ink tank inside the printer is full. The screen message is usually accompanied by the two red lights on your printer flashing alternately.

There is a cunning piece of software, freely available that will get you out of trouble.

Click here to download the software

Sorry Mac users this program only works with a PC.

This software also allows serious cleaning of the printheads.

Got a Continuink Printer? Is it saving you money? Give us some of your feedback and let others now what you think of our service and support.