Almost all inkjets type printers can be refillable.
People caught wind of it early, and started to buy bulk ink and pealing the cartridge stickers and putting ink back in the cartridge. (if you take apart a cartridge, most cartridges just have a sponge to hold the ink in side, and you soak the sponge to with new ink)…
Then…evil companies like HP started to get worried. Because the bulk of their print business is selling the supplies rather than the printer itself…(In fact, several printers they make are sold at loss, hoping that supplies sales will offset those losses….You think that $50 color printer from Fry’s HP is really making money on it, even if it’s made in China?)
These companies started to put a chip in the cartridges that would keep track of the date of when the cartridge was first loaded and/or the number of times a print was made. The chip would disable the cartridge after X uses or dates, rather than the ink running low. There were cases in which you bought a cartridge, put it in the printer, didn’t use your printer for a few months, and then when you did use it again, all the sudden your cartridge was “low on ink”…
These evil companies were sued… and lost…So now, all newer printers will only give you “warning” if you are “low on ink”, but if you take it out refill it, and put it back in, it *should* work.
However, if you are unfortunate enough have one of those printers made with the chip before all the lawsuits, chances are someone has figured out a way around those things via hacks…OR, another option is to buy third party “refillable cartridges”, like you see here :
….or convert the printer to a CISS system (continuous feed system) if you do a lot (and I mean A LOT ) of printing.
Actually, that’s the best way to totally screw companies like HP. But a $50 printer which you know costs more like $100+ to make, and then buy a third party refillable ink system for $20-30, and buy generic photo paper and find someone in the I.T. department to give you a free USB cable that HP will probably charge $20 for which most likely they did not include in with the printer…
