The great printer ink rip-off.

Tired of being ripped off every time you buy printer ink? I was when I bought an Epson CX3650 printer and found that the cartridges are designed to extort money from me.

Epson cartridges, and indeed many other makes of printer cartridge, have a "level indicator" controlled by a chip attached to the cartridge and read by the printer. If this were an honest indication of the ink level I would be relatively happy about the situation but it appears that the "level" of ink reported by the chip has nothing whatsoever to do with the amount of ink left in the tank but more to do with how often Epson wants you to buy new cartridges.

I dismantled an apparently empty ink tank from my Epson printer and found over 2 milliliters of ink remaining in the tank. That's 25% of the original level sold to me. This means that as each refill tank costs me €11.80 and there are four in the machine I could be throwing away €11.80 every time I change my cartridges. That about $15 per refill!

Lying chips?.

The chip attached to each cartridge simply counts the number of times the print-head squirts out ink. When the printer feels like you need to pay for more ink it tells you that the cartridge is empty and you're supposed to trot off to Office Depot or Best Buy or PC World and buy another. A crafty firm in Korea has cottoned on to this however and they sell a neat little device that "refills" your ink-tank electronically and enables you to use the last few milliliters of ink. Figure 1 shows this device.

Figure 1. The Ink-Man chip-resetter.

The chip-resetter enables you to reset the counter in the ink-cartridge and at-least use the ink that you paid good money for. To reset a cartridge you simply have to hold the cartridge in contact with the special connector for a few moments. An LED on the resetter turns green when the ink has been "refilled". Figure 2 shows this process in action.

Figure 2. Getting the ink you paid for.

I bought my chip resetter for about $10. So far I've reset my cartridges tens of times.

When revenge isn't enough.

Not content with simply getting the most out of my cartridges I decided to try refilling them myself. This process isn't described in detail anywhere on the web for the TO45X ink-tanks used in the Epson CX3650 and there doesn't seem to be much in the way of descriptions for other types of cartridge either. Here's how I discovered how to do it. I hope this technique benefits you too.

Sacrifice a cartridge.

To understand how the cartridge worked and how to refill it properly I took an old one apart. This is the yellow cartridge that I originally dismantled to see how much ink was left over after the chip declared it empty.

Figure 2. The ink-tank revealed.

Obviously, if you have a printer that takes TO45x cartridges you don't need to break one apart because I've done it for you. If you have a slightly different type however, you might benefit from ripping one apart just to be sure that you're squirting the ink in the right place. Some cartridge refilling systems advocate drilling a hole in the top. Doing this might mean that you fill a void space such as that seen in the top-left of this cartridge

Once you've discovered the right place to refill the cartridge you need the following ingredients...

• The correct ink. Different cartridges use different inks. The Epson ones use an expensive pigment ink that's very opaque. An HP printer I have uses watery translucent inks. Be sure you have the right ones.

• A syringe with a non-sharp needle. These can be bought with the ink.

• Something to clean up with. Kitchen towel is good. Be very careful with inks. A little drop makes an awful lot of colour. Keep them well away from children and wear clothes that you don't mind staining or coveralls.

• A hot-melt glue gun. Many refill systems recommend tape to cover the refill hole. Don't be fooled. The ink WILL leak past the adhesive on the tape and if the type of cartridge is one such as the TO452 that has the filler hole at the bottom of the tank you can end up with a printer full of ink and an awful mess to clean up.

• A coffee-spoon. The reason for this will be revealed later.

Figure 3. A kit of refill gear.

Fill the tank.

 Make sure you know roughly how much ink should go into the tank. The TO452-3-4 is 8 ml. I usually fill it with about 6 because it takes a while for the ink to get into the other chambers in the tank so the main chamber has about 6ml capacity. Spillages are a pain to clean and while cheaper than a new cartridge they don't give it away.

On many tank and cartridges you can pierce the plastic membrane over the filler hole

Figure 4. Filling through the pierced membrane.

Figure 5. A close-up of the operation.

Once filled, be sure to clean off all the ink from the hole. This is to ensure good adhesion for the glue.

Figure 6. Spotlessly clean!

Now you can re-seal the cartridge or ink-tank. As I said, the filler on this tank is on the bottom of the cartridge so it's important that there is no leakage and that the seal doesn't interfere with the seating of the tank or the operation of the print-head carriage. To do all these things in one go I use a hot-melt glue gun to seal the hole and then flatten the hot glue with a coffee-spoon to make sure that the blob of glue is well stuck and doesn't protrude.

Figure 7. Blob of glue.

Figure 8. Flatten the blob.

Figure 9. The finished article.

Savings...

Using the method described above I have saved myself considerable money. The ink refill kit I bought was about $75 and included four bottles containing 60 ml of ink each. This is enough for about 10 complete recharges making $7.50 per complete four-colour recharge as opposed to $60 for four new cartridges. While writing this article I have been printing a 1000 page PDF manual and have had to refill my colour cartridges twice and the black tank four times. I've saved myself over 100 dollars in ink in one print run. The irony is that if Epson hadn't made me so mad with their obvious ripoff tactics I would have just gone out and bought the cartridges. If their extortion chip had been an honest and accurate representation of the ink-levels I would never have been steamed enough to write this article. I hope that sends a message.