Epson P400: Buy Refillable Carts from China?

[Charles218]

I've browsed the forums here looking for info on buying a backup set of empty refillable carts directly from China. The problem is there are so many listings, how does one find a reliable vendor? Anyone have a recommendation for a specific vendor? I'm currently looking at AlliExpress.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I got some P4000 catridges some time ago via Aliexpress, they work w/o problems. I think there are only a very few actual manufacturers of such cartridges but a myriad of smaller and bigger companies selling those.

 

[Charles218]

Yes, I assumed that there are but a few manufactures of these, but the listings on Aliexpress don't really give you the information you need to determine if you are getting a quality product from a reliable vendor. I'm hoping that someone here has a history with a vendor/s and can recommend a specific one to do business with.

Related to this, is there any issue with mixing cartridges from different manufacturers? I recall reading that when replacing the OEM carts on a new printer, one should generally pull them all out and put in all new generic carts. Would the same kind of thing be true for using generic carts from different companies?

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

The chips are relevant, not so much the cartridge/the plastic, all chips on my cartridges seem to come from the same
manufacturer, probably not the same as the plastics production place. I didn't try to mix with Epson carts since they are not refillable. But I got as well a P400 chip resetter which let me refill the cartridges at any earlier time, and I can prevent the situation that the printer stops in the middle of a page with an empty cartridge. It continues from there after you reinsert the cartridge, it does a cleaning and continues. But a small stripe may be visible, and I rather like to do a nozzle check before I continue to print which is not possible this way. And I can refill more than one cart at the same time - including those almost empty ones which may otherwise stop on the next sheet - which reduces the number of cart swap cleaning cycles significantly, and saves you paper if not all the nozzles are clean instantly or you get some ink drops onto the paper.

 

[soysauce]

I have purchased some cartridges from AliExpress. Which specific vendors were you considering?
Also, which country would the cartridges be shipped to?

 

[stratman]

I have purchased some cartridges from AliExpress.

Please tell us which cartridges and from whom and how they performed so everyone may benefit from your experience. A link is always appreciated.

 

[Charles218]

I have never ordered from AliExpress before, nor from any other direct from China vendor. When I browsed AliExpress a couple of weeks ago, there were several many vendors with the carts that I wanted, but no real basis for determining reliability , quality of product, etc. That is why I posted here, looking for anyone with specific vendors to deal with, or the opposite, vendors to avoid. A couple of links to proven vendors would be quite helpful.

 

[pharmacist]

Actually, I always buy my refillable cartridges from aliexpress.com. The quality has been always good till now. Unfortunately they don't produce reset chips with batteries inside, which can be reset at will. The reason is that after every cartridge change the printer primes the print head (ink is pushed through the nozzles and is actually a cleaning cycle that consumes quite some ink). The causes the cascade problem: For example Cyan is empty (0%), which is to be refilled, but Magenta is 3% and Yellow is 6%. After installing the print head primes, so your cartridges are now C 100%, but Magenta is now 0% and Yellow 6%, so Magenta has be exchanged and Yellow is 3%, to be refilled after this second refill. With chips that can be reset at will, I would refill al the cartridges near empty and reset them to 100% to avoid this spilling cascading problem. In the past I had a Epson R2000 (the forerunner of the P400) and for this reason I sold the printer, because I could not reset the cartridges at will. I had to wait until the empty chip really gives an error, so after reinserting the chip resets. With my latest P800 refillable this is not a problem, because this printer has a built-in cartridges, you can wait until the chip says empty and refill accordingly without the priming process. However even without the warning I always top the cartridge when it reaches about 15% to be safe.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

I got a resetter for my P400 refill cartridges just for the reason you describe, it works.

 

[Charles218]

Actually, I always buy my refillable cartridges from aliexpress.com. The quality has been always good till now.

Can you supply a link to the vendor/s that you have used?