Syringe filling ink cartridges

Waaay back in the early 1990:s I was using a very nice Canon Color Ink printer. I loved the little thing but alas ink was very expensive so what I used to do was buy my own ink and use a syringe to fill the cartridges up a few times before exchanging them. Now fast forward to 2012 and here I am with a nice not-so-little (read huge) monster of a HP Laser Jet color printer. And alas the toners are expensive. So I thought to my self wonder if there is a difference between them cheep toner that InkClub sells or if it is just a matter of price?

Discovering the difference…

Well, A while back I was going to replace all toners in my printer and though hey: lets give it a shot and picked a cheep toner as a replacement for the black color. I have used it for the odd month or so and have though “well seems to work ok” and forgotten about it. But alas yesterday I was going to print a photo and lo and behold it looked horrific. So I though damn it printer is broken! And spent some time trying cleaning, calibration and what not without any improvement.

So I went to the local store and purchased an official HP toner and printed the same exact photo and the improvement was astounding.

The problem

It seems to me that the problem is that the toner cant deliver enough color. If I look at the edge of the photo the first few centimeters contain a nice dark blackness but then it goes away and ends up as grayish patterns. And I think this is why t “worked ok” because when you print text you don’t need as much color so the toner can deliver enough to work.

Another interesting fact is that the cheep toner leaks oil and has a lot of taped on parts and generally gives of a cheaper feel. It is also scratched and looks much older then the HP tooner. And yes the InkClub toner is “older” but if I compare the even older color toners I also have in the printer they are spot on exactly like the brand new HP toner so I doubt age is the issue.

But to conclude the post:

Hence forth I will stick to HP toners!