Rapid Refill Ink for printers

[Craig D Peltier]

I was wondering if anyone here has used this ink from this discount store and printed pics with it. I bought some, recently I printed some pics and they came out horrible. It didnt print what the screen showed. In the past I have printed great pics with canon ink. Its a canon i950.
So im not sure if its the ink, or the changing of the two inks, or the combo of the two.
I did do a head cleaning an print test.

[David DeCristoforo]

Refilling ink cartridges is a total "crap shoot". They may or may not contain accurate ink colors. The computer and /or printer cannot know. They can only "assume" that the inks are "correct". Sometimes, if the refilled cartridges are not sealed properly, the ink can leak out after which your printer is "dumpster food".

[Pat Germain]

Consumer Reports tested refilled ink cartridges awhile back. They found even if the picture looks OK when it's printed, it doesn't stay that way. The refill ink faded and faded quickly. This is no big deal for something disposable, but a very big deal for a picture you want to display.

My advice is to buy a laser printer for B&W, and use Target or Costco for color picture printing. For top quality, use a camera store's printing service. Ink cartridges are just too expensive for their very brief service life.

[Craig D Peltier]

Consumer Reports tested refilled ink cartridges awhile back. They found even if the picture looks OK when it's printed, it doesn't stay that way. The refill ink faded and faded quickly. This is no big deal for something disposable, but a very big deal for a picture you want to display.

My advice is to buy a laser printer for B&W, and use Target or Costco for color picture printing. For top quality, use a camera store's printing service. Ink cartridges are just too expensive for their very brief service life.

Does costco or target do auto correction to your photos? Or is that up to you when you hand the file to them ?

[Joe Pelonio]

I gave up on them too, because HP seems to have found a way to make non HP replacement or refilled cartridges display error messages when attempting to print.

[David DeCristoforo]

"...because HP seems to have found a way to make non HP replacement or refilled cartridges display error messages..."

Lots of manufacturers have this now. There is a chip in the cartridge that gets fried when the ink level gets low enough to signal the need for a replacement. Once the chip is fried, the cartridge will never be recognized again. Gotta love it!

[Pat Germain]

Does costco or target do auto correction to your photos? Or is that up to you when you hand the file to them ?

By default, they don't do auto correction. There's an extra "Kodak service" offered at Target which I'm pretty sure is just an auto correction. You can also upload your photos to their kiosk directly from a CDROM or RAM device. You can just upload and hit "Send" or you can crop and color correct each photo if you like. You typically have to wait an hour or more, but to me it's worth it. Mrs. Pat visits Target so often that she's usually the picture printer.

My only complaint about the kiosks is the prints don't exactly match what I crop. I'll leave plenty of space on the kiosk, but the print will chop off the tops of heads, for example.

Printer cartridges are a real racket. It's no wonder Dell will literally give you a printer with a sticker reading, "To order replacement ink, call Dell at ...". A friend of my mom's was convinced she could only put Dell ink in her Dell printer. She got rid of it, which isn't a bad thing, but then bought another ink-jet printer. :rolleyes: