NY Times article on refilled carts

[fotofreek]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/04/technology/04money.html is the link to the 02/04/06 NY Times article about commercially refilled carts. This was on the front page of the business section. The article touched very briefly on home refilling as well.

 

[drc023]

Interesting article and it did address some of the issues we see on newsgroups about refilling HP and Lexmark cartridges. I've had reasonable success refilling my old HP tanks many years ago, but I never could get a Lexmark cartridge to work very well after a refill. What the article didn't address was the absolute ease and 99.99% success rate of refilling Canon tanks. I did find it amusing to see in the first paragraph the bit about the fellow who pays 50% of the Canon price for refilled BCI-6 tanks from Cartridge World. That means he's spending about $6.50 each when he could be spending about 50 or so by doing his own refilling. Maybe I'm too frugal (cheap???), but that seems like such a waste of money.

Where the article did tend to bog down in generalities was the part about fading and print longevity. Granted, OEM ink is the benchmark to judge any other ink against, but all inks will eventually fade. A variety of environmental factors in addition to ozone can cause fading. Even traditional photo process prints will fade for a variety of reasons. I've got an entire set of prints from a professional studio that turned to sepia in less than 10 years. Not just the 16x20 in a frame, but the wallets, 5x7 and 8x10 prints as well. It didn't matter whether they were in an album, behind glass or in a frame.

 

[d86cfv]

RE: Cartridge World.

Your never going to convince everyone to re-fill at home, people just cant be bothered. However taking you cart into a shop and waiting 10 minutes to have a set of canon's filled and pay half the price is a very appealing prospect to most of people who don't have the know-how of inclination to fill their own. CW have over 1000 stores worldwide and are taking a battering from all of the OEM makers but so far none have been able to come up with a suitable law suit. Although Epson have just successfully sued jetec for $4.00 per compatible cartridge they've sold so it might not be long before the wolf enters the door.
Then when they have finished with companies that re-fill, perhaps they will turn their attention to the home user, same as the music industry, for years charging 15 for an album, and instead of reducing the price to stop customers infringing copyright first they go after the big guys, then they go after the 12 YO girl who downloads.
The same principle applies to the people who will never use a re-fill or compatible, either big businesses or home users, some people just don't like the idea, whether they are just too sceptical that it could work or don't trust it I don't know, obviously the manufacturers are doing their job well!

 

[Nifty]

What I found was interesting was these $40,000 machines that will automatically test, purge, refill and test (again) your cartridges: http://info.inkodem.com/

The article said that Walgreen's will be putting these kiosks into their stores. I sure hope one goes in by me so I can see it work. Heck, I'd pay the extra $$$ to see it in action! Hopefully it provides visibility to the customer so I could see it during every step in the process.

Maybe I'll take one of my bad Lexmark or Canon cartridges to it and see what magic it can work.

 

[kudos]

You should see ours makes Ink O Dem look like a toy! www.inkteczone.us
This is how I refill normally!

peace

 

[Ken_CW_Honolulu]

Maybe I'll take one of my bad Lexmark or Canon cartridges to it and see what magic it can work.

Lexmarks/Dells need to be flushed with a chemical to dissolve that lovely "shoe polish" effect. Once they've been hit with that, the ink flows well until the crappy circuit fails. The Walmart refill station near me basically puts the same inks into every single cartridge, with all the quality, viscosity and surface tension issues that can arise from universal inks.