The first company to supply ink jet printers was H.P. Their ink jet mechanism didn't last too long so they combined the ink jet mechaniism with the ink reservoir so as soon as the ink ran out the new ink cartridge renewed the ink jets as well. Naturally, this meant that ink refills were expensive for H.P. printers. Once the general public had got used to paying an arm and a leg to HP for their replacement ink, other manufacturers who then entered the market with ink jet systems which did last the life of the printer jumped on the bandwaggon by charging an arm and a leg for their replacement ink cartridges. Due to the pressures of competition, the price of such printers felll from about £300 to about £50. As ink jet ink is fairly cheap, the manufacturers had to force their customers to only buy their own ink hence the built in chips and other mechanisms to attempt to prevent the use of third party inks.
To me this stinks and I have always used third party inks. At the moment I am using a Canon photo printer. It has never had "genuine" ink in it and I get superb prints using third party (chineese) refillable cartridges with third party inks manufactured to B.S. standards. Each cartridge costs about 50p to refill. Before that I used an ancient Epson and the third party ink cartridges again never let me down. For some time my wife used an H.P. The black cartridge could be refilled and continued to work happily as I never let it get empty which is what makes the jets burn out, but the colour cartridge, for some reason, never refilled satisfactorily. I did learn then however that using third party H.P. refiled cartridges doesn't work as there is invariably a fault with one or more of the ink jets.
It is important to remember with any ink jet that if it is not used for a period, the jets will dry out and need cleaning. My old Epson was quite bad in this respct, my Canon much less so but if this gets really bad the printer may well be scrap.
My wife now uses an A3 Brother. 3rd party cartridges are sensibly priced and there are no chips or other systems to prevent the use of third party cartridges.
P.P.
Last edited by P.Pilcher; 4th Dec 2012 at 13:36.