A few years back I used to refill the ink cartridge for an HP 3500 which I had bought at Target for a mere $30. The cartridges themselves cost $32. It's the old razor/razor blade scam which unfortunately exists with most printers today. A couple years ago I got tired of the ink supposedly running out on my HP wireless printer so I opted to get a Kodak printer because they were boasting a better ink life and reviewers said it was true.
The HP wireless printer seemed to run on a timer so after a few months even if you just printed 10 sheets it would say the cartridges needed replacement. The Kodak keeps a count of pages on their chip on the cartridge. That doesn't work so well when printing something like a web page or invoice that just happens to have just a blank page or maybe just the copyright notice (which you don't need). So this time around as the ink was getting low I ordered an ink refill kit that included some chips to replace the ones that hold the count on the cartridge. Note there are also some devices for sale on the Internet that can clear some chips of the count though there appears not be one for my printer model. So I set to work yesterday afternoon after printing out the one page of instruction from the PDF included on the CD that came with the kit. Funny thing was that page printing out fine but printing an addition all text page failed due to the black cartridge being out of ink (or so to say). Basically the instructions were for the XL cartridge so I was a little concerned that the chip might not work with the standard cheaper low use cartridge. What happened was ink did overflow out of the top which says the cartridge was NO WHERE NEAR out of ink. Worse yet the chip didn't want to clip into it's slot. Frustrated I grabbed another "empty" cartridge and instead of filling it with ink first tried replacing the chip first and it went right into place. So I cleaned that cartridge using head cleaner because it had been sitting around for awhile and probably clogged up. Then I put half the recommended amount of ink in the cartridge which is what another site said to use for the standard cartridge. I plugged the cartridge back into the printer and it reported a full cartridge and printed fine. What I had forgotten about the other times I filled cartridges was avoiding getting ink on my fingers by wearing cheap surgical gloves from the dollar store. However by today the black ink is all but gone from my fingers.
