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Which recommended that people buy generic
cartridges which are often half the price of branded products. Yes very good - a good alternative and some we sell fully fill the cartridges giving up to 4 times more ink!!
The the re-filling case is also made as the per millilitre cost of bulk ink can be below 10p per millilitre.
Protecting customers?
The magazine
suggests that people squeeze every drop out of the ink they use, ignoring the
premature warnings that the ink is low and continuing until they see a drop in
quality of printing. If you plan to refill we do not recommend that path as you
can easily ruin the printhead and make it a waste of time attempting a refill.
You are best to refill early rather than too late. It is an expensive lesson to
learn if you do what Which say and then try to refill and find it did not work properly.
Seasoned "Refillers" know these things and try to always keep their expensive cartridges in ink,
refilling as soon as they see the signs of faint printing.
Most cartridges
give people the option of continuing printing. But Which? found that Epson
embeds a chip which stops the cartridge running when the ink runs low.
The company says
that it employs the cut-off system to "protect customers from accidentally
damaging their printer or producing sub-standard print quality".
Which? magazine
purchased a "chip resetter" to research how many extra prints would be
obtainable with a cartridge that the user was being told should now be replaced
as it was "empty" They documented their results and found that in one case he
could print up to 38% more good quality pages, even though the chip had
"switched off" and stated that the cartridge was empty.
The least amount
of extra pages that could be printed was 17% more.
The cost of ink
has been the subject of an Office of Fair Trading investigation.
What have they done? Nothing so far as we can tell as the situation from an end used perspective is worse - not better!
It has accused
manufacturers of a lack of transparency about the price of ink and called for an
industry standard for measuring ink cartridge performance.
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