*NEWS*INK CARTRIDGES:REFILL OR NEW ..?

[Anonymous]

Ink cartridges: Refill or new?

Cost savings versus quality
You’re
strolling through the mall and see one of those stores that refill
printer ink cartridges for up to 60 per cent less than it costs to buy
one from the printer manufacturer.For example, Island Ink-Jet, which
has 53 locations in Ontario, will replenish your empty cartridges and
also sells brand names. An HP 45 cartridge costs $19.99 when refilled
versus $39.95 for a new cartridge.

That’s quite a savings, but is it really worth it?
Printer
manufacturers say it isn’t. They report they’ve spent lots of money
developing the best inks to go with your printer. They say the quality
of prints can never be equalled with a generic cartridge. They also
argue generic inks can clog and damage the printer and are
unreliable.”Printers and inks have to work together to get the best
quality,” says Neil Stephenson, manager of the technical marketing
group at Canon Canada in Mississauga.”People want their prints to last,
so if you use our inks and printers, those prints will be in an album
for 100 years or on a wall in a frame behind glass for 30 years. But
you only get that stability and quality with genuine inks and paper.”If
all you’re printing is black text then I’m sure there’s not much
difference. But not many people these days are buying printers to just
print out emails. They’re doing other things with them.”The generic ink
cartridge manufacturers say their products are guaranteed and undergo
the same stringent quality controls that brand-name cartridges face.”At
Island Ink-Jet, we use over 125 formulations of ink to deliver to you
superior print performance,” says Ontario division president Alex
Schulz. “Our inks are tested for excellence by our research and
development department to ensure that we bring only inks of the best
quality to our customers.”Manufacturers also claim that refilling may
void your warranty but Schulz disputes that.”Most printer warranties
state that if the cartridge is mutilated and that mutilation damages
the printer, the damage is not covered,” Schulz says. “Our refill
techniques do nothing to affect the shape and composition of the
cartridge. We simply refill the manufacturer’s cartridge. How can a
cartridge designed to be used in the printer damage it?”Hewlett Packard
commissioned testing organization QualityLogic to compare HP ink-jet
print cartridges versus refilled brands. The 2005 testing, which
covered markets in North America, Europe and Asia, found that nearly
one out of every six refilled ink cartridges tested was dead on arrival
or failed prematurely and 70 per cent of refilled cartridges had some
form of reliability problem.Schulz says there are other services with a
high return rate but “our return is about 2.9 per cent whereas the
failure rate on a brand name is 3 per cent.”A recent New York Times
article compared the cost of buying a new printer ink cartridge against
refilling, and found that refilling is up to 50 per cent cheaper.But
the article found that “the more important consideration is the price
per page printed, a number that is affected by the quality of a
refilled cartridge,” and that yielded a lesser advantage for the
refillers.It found that you wouldn’t have much of a problem with
refilled cartridges from reputable refillers if you were printing
documents with black ink on standard paper. You also won’t have many
hassles if you’re using colour inks to print your kids’ homework.But
for high-quality colour printing of digital photos, you may be better
off with the new cartridges.

[Author]

June 20, 2006 at 11:20 AM