In this video, a Canon print cartridge is opened up and revealed not to contain the meagre 11.9 ml (0.4 fl oz) of ink it is advertised. The proposed solution is to buy a printer designed to be manually refilled with bottles of ink (such as the featured Epson EcoTank ET-2850), though it has only been tested briefly.
The cost effectiveness difference on the bottles versus sponges is probably much bigger than the video suggests, because a whole bunch of ink is likely sticking to the sponge and never coming out.
I've always ordered ink from inkjets.com because it's cheap and their cartridges are completely clear so you can actually see that they're full of ink like you'd expect.
My biggest problem has been that the ink always dries up, since I don't print very often, and a laser printer has solved that for me. Now, about 3 years later, the black toner is still at 90%, and still working reliably.
My Brother laser printer has told me that my toner is empty three times now for the same cartridge. It eventually refuses to print, but that can be overridden with some undocumented trickery. I have manually overridden it each time, told it that I installed a brand new XL cartridge and it just keeps printing. It just told me, again, that the toner is low - I don’t believe it, I’ll override it again. It would have forced me to throw out at least 66% of the remaining toner if it didn’t have the override.
I feel like a Brother laser printer is a much better solution unless you specifically need color. Also, if you try and print with a laser printer after a couple months of disuse, it should fire right up and print. The same is not necessarily true of an ink jet, where things may have dried out and clogged.
I agree, $100 for a simple b&w laser printer $200ish for color from them are as much as pretty much anyone needs and they’re stupid fast. Their software and toner management isn’t customer hostile yet at least.
I use a colour Brother laser printer. It works fine. Granted it’s not great for photos but those are cheaper to have printed in a lab, which will give much better results that an inkjet anyway.
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