I had to buy a new printer because my old Canon blew up - the power supply board failed (it was about 10 years old). But the new printer uses opaque black cartridges which would make refilling pretty hard, and of course they have the dreaded chip. eBay to the rescue - I found a set of auto-reset refillable inkjet cartridges from a seller in Hong Kong. And they appear to work.
By Julian
Youtuber, shed dweller, solar charge controller aficionado
Great video, did you ever make a part 2?
Were the original cartridges 100% full?
(Since you're comparing the prices)
Julian….great vid but I cant find a new one of these MG5250 anywhere. Will your process work with the Canon MG5550 or lower down the scale, the MG3250 which are much readily available.
This is why am sticking with my old HP laser jet; parts are cheap and the toner is 30 quid for 2500 pages on avg.
I use to service Epson printers and the number one issue we had was blocked printer heads because cheap inks had been used.
I also noticed that the ink you buy for refill is lower quality than the actual stuff,but its still pretty good for the price!
As someone else has mentioned, the HP cartridges with their integrated printhead are hard to fill. They seem to have a plastic bag of ink in them and require the use of a suction primer to get the ink into the head. Another advantage of the Canon printers was their removable printheads for easy cleaning. Is your new one removable?
I loved my old Canon with its unchipped transparent cartridges. Over it's life I must have refilled them hundreds of times. Latterly (and recently) it suddenly and randomly fired the print head. 🙁 I've been using an Epson printer recently and it is NOT my first choice of printer due to Epson being the absolute WORST for trying to defeat replacement cartridges. At the moment I do however have a set of auto reset cartridges in use and interestingly it seems to have a little lithium cell on the back of each chip to allow it to reset when it detects it's been removed from a powered printer. So the printer itself see's an empty cartridge being removed and a full one being put back in. In due course I'll be getting another Canon though. With the Google cloud print feature for my Chromebook.
Very useful video.
Are you sure the PSU in your old one failed? We had an i4300 that worked well for years until one day it just died in the middle ov a print. I initially suspected the PSU, especially since I was running it off a MSW inverter at the time, but that turned out to be perfectly ok. Something else in the printer just stopped.
Laser toner cartridges are the same. Over the top in price and have a chip. Apart from the exorbitant prices I hate the wasted hydro carbon. Perhaps printer companies that indulge in these practices should be charged a landfill levy.
I have an HP photosmart 7200, been doing this for 9 years now – 9 years with a kit that has ink wells outside the printer which keep the ink filled using tubes. cost $75, I've had to replace the ink once last year! Good idea making a vid to share!
refilling sucks for hp, they leak and make a mess, ive tried refiling, i dont like it, smudgy prints and you can see the dye has leaked into the fibres
One should buy a new printer every time it's out of ink! Though environmentally questionable and at a little premium (add to that that the included cartridges are often smaller than the ones you buy extra), but that's the only way to thwart that stupid system.
Since often enough the print heads dried out and needed a messy cleanup or replacement, I ditched ink jets all together. I never got the advertised amount of pages out of the cartridges anyway. While a similar thing (overpriced refills) is happening with laser printers, it's not that extreme there. Color lasers may not be as dirt cheap, they don't have to constantly clean (or planned waste?) the nozzles after power on and even if newer inkjets are quite fast, it's a pain to wait for a larger document to be printed.
Not to sound negative as i do this myself, but Epson will shoot you in the foot with this on some of their printers, they have a counter for ''waste'' when it cleans a little on power up or when you clean the heads – when it hits the magic number, new printer time.. or a new 'sponge' in a plastic draw for £20 …
ask how i know…..
I have 3 WF3010dw 's here that need waste tank counter resetting, cant yet get a patch/fix/bodge, so looks like £60 to epson…
if your going to refill, push the boat out, buy archive quality ink.