Refurbished Canon Ink Cartridges Low Ink

[Pork Chop]

My girlfriend got refurbished ink for her Canon printer. The printer always says it's low on ink, but it works fine. I'm wondering if they all do this or if there's other ones she can get that don't do this.

 

[britechguy]

These days they pretty much all do that. It's the same with the non-Canon toner cartridges for the laser printers.

For myself (and I still have a TS6300 multifunction that's inkjet) I don't get refurbished ink. It's way less expensive to buy refillable tanks with ARC (auto-reset chips) which the printer accepts and always thinks are full. You can tell when you're running out of a given color or black (dye-based for photos, pigmented for documents) when they start getting light.

I bought one of the sets from eBay, along with large bottles (as in quart sized, much like these) of all the ink colors, including pigmented black, and I know I will be dead before I ever come close to emptying any one of these bottles, and until we got the laser printer last year, we printed an awful lot of pages (partner, in particular) on that printer. You have to be willing to deal with stained fingers, or using latex/nitrile gloves, for the refill process. There are other options, like this, where the refill "nozzle" (more like a needle) is part of the bottle itself and I find that style the easiest to deal with and least messy overall if you go with ARC tanks.

 

[Pork Chop]

These days they pretty much all do that. It's the same with the non-Canon toner cartridges for the laser printers.

For myself (and I still have a TS6300 multifunction that's inkjet) I don't get refurbished ink. It's way less expensive to buy refillable tanks with ARC (auto-reset chips) which the printer accepts and always thinks are full. You can tell when you're running out of a given color or black (dye-based for photos, pigmented for documents) when they start getting light.

I bought one of the sets from eBay, along with large bottles (as in quart sized, much like these) of all the ink colors, including pigmented black, and I know I will be dead before I ever come close to emptying any one of these bottles, and until we got the laser printer last year, we printed an awful lot of pages (partner, in particular) on that printer. You have to be willing to deal with stained fingers, or using latex/nitrile gloves, for the refill process. There are other options, like this, where the refill "nozzle" (more like a needle) is part of the bottle itself and I find that style the easiest to deal with and least messy overall if you go with ARC tanks.

The ARC cartridges sound nice. Don't think they make them for her Canon PIXMA TS3522, which takes CL-275 color and PG-275 black. I really need to get her a better printer. Sucks having tri-color ink.

 

[britechguy]

Just to be clear, these are NOT cartridges, but ink tanks. I will not buy any printer that has the print head as part of a black or tri-color cartridge. The expense for those cartridges, even "remanufactured" ones, over time is insane.

I'm a Canon fan, but have also done the same with Epson and (I think, it's been ages) Brother devices that had individual ink tanks that feed a built-in print head.

Now I know that Canon has its Megatank line and Epson has its EcoTank line (Canon MegaTank & Epson EcoTank Supertank Printers - Consumer R) and were I buying an inkjet now, I'd definitely go for one like that. Refilling is so so much easier than dealing with fiddly little ARC chip tanks and when you buy ink in bulk from 3rd parties, the cost is orders of magnitude lower (and it works just fine, as my own experience shows).

Inkjet ink is where the money is made, not the printer. And even for Megatank/EcoTank devices, OEM ink is insanely more expensive than "generic" inkjet refill ink in bulk.