Inkjet newbie
September 23, 2014 11:15 AM   Subscribe

I just got an inkjet printer (Epson) for the first time and need help choosing ink cartridges.

I bought the Epson WorkForce WF-3640 at Costco. It only comes with starter ink cartridges. I will mostly print black & white, so I want to get another black cartridge to use when the starter one runs out of ink. Amazon only sells the standard one (T252120) but I'd like to buy the high yield one (T252XL120) because it's good for 1100 pages instead of just 350 and is presumably a better deal on a per page basis. I looked on the web and saw that a company called Swiftink sells a re-manufactured one for only $6.99 (vs. $19.99 for standard one from Amazon and $34+ for high yield one from Epson).

Questions:

1. Are re-manufactured ones OK? Is the quality of the ink OK? Do they have as much ink in them as original ones?

2. Is this company Swiftink a reputable supplier?

Thank you!
posted by Dansaman to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)
 
Don't know anything about Swiftink, but...

In general, ink jet cartridges do wear out. This is because they push ink through a VERY small orifice to shoot the ink onto the paper. The orifice wears, gets larger, and the ink spray gets slightly more scattered, leading to fuzzy edges to fonts and images.

If you are mostly printing just for yourself, then a remanufactured cartridge is fine.

If you are printing to impress, stick with a new cartridge.

G
posted by gnossos at 11:38 AM on September 23, 2014


I don't know about Swiftink either, but gnossos is right that cartridges wear out. They also dry out and gum up over time, so this...

it's good for 1100 pages instead of just 350 and is presumably a better deal on a per page basis

...is only true if you'll actually be using that much ink over the course of about three months. Unlike toner, more ink is not necessarily better unless you'll use it all (like getting a great deal on milk at Costco if you can't drink it before it sours).
posted by whoiam at 12:01 PM on September 23, 2014


Unlike my old HP and Canon inkjets, I haven't found that my WorkForce has problems with cartridge drying, gumming up, or arbitrarily expiring (disapproval eyes there, HP). Having never used a remanufactured cartridge, I don't know if they do bad things to warranty or need to be 'chipped' like some printers.

What I do know, however, is that the large capacity cartridges last a very long time; over a year for me.
posted by scruss at 12:32 PM on September 23, 2014


In general, ink jet cartridges do wear out. This is because they push ink through a VERY small orifice to shoot the ink onto the paper. The orifice wears, gets larger, and the ink spray gets slightly more scattered, leading to fuzzy edges to fonts and images.


The print head has the orifices and either heaters which boil the ink to create pressure or piezoelectric actuators to push it out. It looks like this Epson uses the piezoelectric approach, but whatever. Some printers have this stuff in the replaceable cartridges, but it's also common for the orifices to be elsewhere in the print head, and the ink cartridges are basically just tanks, with some circuitry to detect capacity, remember how much ink is left, and maybe detect official Epson ink.

It looks like the WF-3640's cartridges don't have the orifices on them. This makes the ink cartridges a lot cheaper (which is important to Epson's because that's post-sale consumables is where the money is), it means Epson can use the same cartridges for more different printers, and it means you don't have to fuck around with alignment of the different colors of inks.

So, I wouldn't worry about third party ink cartridges in that regard. For a thermal inkjet, it's tricky to make an ink that has the right viscosity as it boils and so on. For those printers I'd recommend first-party ink if you care about print quality. I think piezo inkjets make the ink chemistry a bit easier though. So you'll probably be okay with no-name ink.

If you do care about quality, be sure and use good paper. For inkjet, that means the ink doesn't soak into the paper, but sits on the surface while drying out. Otherwise the ink bleeds and the color shifts (like those coffee filter dye experiments), so cheap paper may also showcase the flaws in cheaper ink. That's why photo paper is coated - so the ink can't soak in. Non-coated inkjet paper just tends to have short fibers. This is different from laser paper, where the key feature is the smoothness of the surface.
posted by aubilenon at 12:40 PM on September 23, 2014


I deal with printers and ink and the like pretty much for a living, and have for umpteen years.

Do not get remanufactured cartridges.

Get the cartridges that are made for your printer. Do not try to use anything else. I would especially be leery of off-brand toner cartridges that are $7 as compared to $20 for the genuine article. To me, that sounds way too good to be true. Especially if you'd be buying it basically blind. I might buy a $7 generic cartridge that got hundreds of great reviews on Amazon, or which was sold at my local Staples bricks and mortar, but a $7 generic ink cartridge from whothefuckknows.com? nope

I would also look twice at a generic "high capacity" cartridge if Epson doesn't make a high capacity option.
posted by Sara C. at 1:16 PM on September 23, 2014


- Stick with Epson cartridges. You can still save money (more on this later)
- Unless you're printing a lot and will use up a large cartridge in a few months, I'd use the small ones - cartridges seem to clog more with age, then you need to spend (a lot of) time running the print-head cleaning routine, which burns through your ink (squandering your expected savings) and you'll probably have to do it several times, checking output afterwards each time, etc, which wastes time.
- If you want to save money on ink, get a cartridge chip resetter tool. They're about $6, and will reset the chip in the cartridge to think it's full. When a cartridge is running low, the printer will pre-emptively claim that it is empty and refuse to use (thus ensuring that all prints will have all ink colors available, but leaving a fair amount of ink by the wayside to do so). When this happens, you can reset the chip using the tool, and continue the use the cartridge on non-essential print jobs until it physically runs out of ink.

Inkjets are a real pain in the ass if you don't have them running regularly. I've had a couple of Epson photo printers, I don't use mine much, so it really REALLY gets clogged, and can take hours to get a single high quality print out of it, once you take into account all the cleaning and testing and the lengthy printing times and maybe a test run on different paper. The quality is amazing... eventually. But I end up hating the machine and avoid (the immense hassle of) using it when possible.

Though, all that is largely not an issue if just printing some black text on a page. For simple black text, definitely get a chip reset tool. Just don't use it then forget you've used it and freak out when the printer won't print even though the cartridge is (apparently) new :)
posted by anonymisc at 3:31 PM on September 23, 2014


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