Ink Cartridge Hell

Small yield ink-slingers are the bane of my existence. By small yield I'm talking about the home and small office inkjet printers. At work they are primarily used in the lower school. Each (LS) classroom will typically have one printer shared among the 3 or 4 workstations while the other divisions better utilize the bigger centralized printers like the networked lasers and copiers. Not a week goes by where I don't get a few calls about these stupid printers not working, jamming, dried up ink, etc.

Typically speaking, the smaller capacity the printer, the more expensive it is to run. We go through a decent number of ink cartridges so this year I thought I'd try to save a little money by using recycled cartridges. There is a pretty big effort to make Harley "greener" so I figured I do my part. I also decided to go with a local company (which shall remain nameless) to support local business and to get things moving a little faster by cutting the shipping cost/time out the equation. That decision is starting to turn around and bite me on the ass.

These recycled cartridges are less than stellar in performance. Don't get me wrong, when they work they work great but a significant percentage of them don't work. No big deal; I can just call up the local company I bought them from and they'll drive out replacements for any duds. Recently I've gotten a lot of duds. Between Friday and today (Monday was a holiday) I probably went though 8 cartridges between 3 printers and I still haven't gotten 1 of them working at an acceptable level. With new ink I can just hand the person a cartridge when they ask for one and they'll put it in themselves and it'll just work. With these refills I can't do that because chances are the first or even second cartridge won't work. It's infuriating; it takes like 1000 times longer to perform the simplest of jobs.

I've already decided I'm never going to use recycled cartridges after this year, but I'm still debating on trying to return what cartridges we've already purchased.