It might not seem important, but if you look carefully at the Epson SX215 printer you’ll see the problems facing the printer companies. It’s not obvious at first, just seems a bargain all in one printer, gets loads of decent reviews and a fraction of the cost you’d have paid for something like this a few years ago.

Epson Stylus SX215

The reason that Epson are selling these printers at such a low price is because their business model depends on it.     In the UK its currently about £50, which is very cheap in my opinion but no great surprise.

You see Epson and all the major printer manufacturers don’t make the majority of their profits on selling printers like the Epson Stylus SX215 at that low price.   They actually make very little, in some cases I suspect virtually nothing on the hardware cost themselves.

The model requires that they make money on consumables, which when you think about it makes a lot more sense from a profit point of view.    The paper and printer costs of the average ink jet printers is much more than the costs if the printer itself.

Why is the Epson SX215 so interesting?

I’ll tell you why, simply because it perfectly illustrates the dilemma facing the printing companies.  They are locked into this business model which is crumbling around them.  You see forcing you to buy something like consumables is fraught with dangers – here’s just a few of them.

• It’s not Environmentally Friendly – this is probably of least concern to the companies, who can always spin their approach into a green looking one.  The most environmentally friendly way to keep a printer running is to produce high quality toner and ink cartridges which can be easily and cheaply refilled by the user – unfortunately although entirely possible this massively cuts back potential profits.
• How to force consumers to buy your refills (legislation) – from a legal point of view this is actually quite difficult.  Many countries have legislation which stops you doing things like saying the a guarantee is invalid  if you don’t use their refills
• Technical Enforcement – like many printers the cartridges on the Epson Stylus SX215 have little chips on them to force you to use only Epson Inks, however these are actually very easy to copy and are being copied in cheap replaceable ink cartridges

Juts  looking at these three issue you can see companies like Epson have a problem from many sides with this business model, from environmental, legal and the technical sides they are under attack.  Let’s just look at the comparative costs to better illustrate -

I’m using the amazon costs for this printer just to illustrate properly

• Printer Cost at Amazon UK  - Listed at £49.99 here
• Epson replacement Cartridge Cost – 26.74 for four here – so that’s about £6.68 each.
• But freely available and actually pushed by Amazon are these inks 10.99 for 12 here – which is about £0.91 each.

That makes the cost of the Epson cartridges 700% more expensive than buying compatible inks with a built in chip, that’s one heck of a price difference !

There will of course the usual nonsensical arguments about printer damage and print quality of course. But let’s take print quality first – lets assume the Epson ink produces slightly better prints (which is by no means guaranteed) on the Epson SX215. But most people are not that bothered about fantastic print quality for every print out, in fact it could be argued that the average buyer of a cheap multipurpose printer like this just wants a simple printer that makes decent copies – are they prepared to pay 700% more for a possible slight quality boost?

The printer companies will have to make a decision soon, the problems of sustaining this environmentally unfriendly business model are mounting. The free market is hitting this rip off model used to overcharge buyers of their printers.

I hope they see sense and start making these printers refillable – stop wasting time and resources in producing killer chips in printers and cartridges just to make more money. If they did this and supplied quality refills at a reasonable price they might actually do rather well from it, people might stop refilling with compatible toner and use theirs instead.

In this world of ‘just throw it away’, we are being choked by plastics. If you look on the internet you’ll find that they have found continent-sized plastic islands out there. There are two of them, not just one. If you compare their size with the size of the United States, it is equal in size. It came as a surprise to them. Since they floated just below the surface of the water, and because they were rather spread-out relative to their neighbors in most places, nobody had much noticed these gigantic plastic islands. So, it is important that we start recycling printer cartridges.

One third of all businesses are now recycling printer cartridges, whether they be laser toner cartridges or inkjet cartridges. The amount of garbage that goes to landfills increases every day; and because huge cities such as Los Angeles and New York generate such a gigantic amount of garbage every year… they are deciding to get rid of their garbage in disastrous ways.

Many beaches are now as much as 70 percent plastic. If you separate the sand particles from the plastic particles, that’s what you end up with. These multi-colored plastic balls are slowly replacing the sand. How long will it take before they’re 100% plastic. Plastics increase the number of free radicals in the air. The more free radicals that we breath means the more our bodies have to try eliminating those free radicals via our Glutathione Peroxidase systems. One of the reasons we’re loading our bodies up with antioxidants such as Vitamin-C, Beta carotene, Vitamin-A and drinking so many drinks with Acai and Mangosteen in them is because we are a free-radical mess. How often do you change out your printer cartridge? Once a week? Every one of those has to go somewhere. Many are going directly into our oceans. Recycling printer cartridges is a way you can reduce the amount of plastics which are going into our oceans and into the air.

Free radicals are the things which age our bodies. They’re the thing which causes us to get cancer. They’re the things which tire us down, make us lethargic and increase the amount of pain that’s in our bodies. Why is everybody coming down with such ailments as fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome? Why have levels of autism shot off the charts? Will they find that all this plastic nightmare that we’ve created is related to plastics? Will all of these companies who rely upon the continuance of a billion tons of plastic a year ever change their minds about creating and dumping all those plastics into our environment? Probably not… so, the answer which makes sense right now is, recycling printer cartridges makes sense.

It’s really not that hard to recycle printer cartridges. Look on the instructions that came with your inkjet or toner cartridge and they’ll outline exactly the procedure you should use when you wish to recycle the printer cartridge. Contact Laser-tone International at 1(800) EARTH-58 and they’ll even pick up the old cartridge and deliver the new one back to you very quickly.

Also, with a little checking online you can find out about which companies in your area purchase printer cartridges. Some companies are creating cross-referenced lists which show your particular cartridge and how it can be remanufactured into another laser printer cartridge. There are things you can do, such as recycling printer cartridges, to improve the world and reduce the numbers of plastics that are being dumped into it.

Inkjet printers have come down to almost no cost. You can purchase a really good inkjet printer for $70, and a still-respectable one for $30. However, they just SUCK up the ink. If you search the internet for information on the purchase of an ink jet printer, which I recently did, you’ll find everybody complaining about the cost of the ink. The fact is, you almost pay as much for the ink jet cartridges as you would if you bought a whole printer. That’s when refilling inkjet cartridges comes into play.

Printer costs $30, color cartridge costs $20; black-and-white costs $14. You think I’m kidding? Just look for yourself. Some inkjet printers have all of the colors the printer takes in one module and the black cartridge as a separate cartridge. The advantage of those is, when the color cartridge runs out, you don’t have to replace everything. Or, if the black-and-white is what you always use, you don’t have to replace the color cartridge. This is when refilling inkjet cartridges starts looking good.

The very cheapest inkjet printers oftentimes have only one cartridge. It will contain all of the color cartridges combined with the black-and-white cartridge in the same unit. The most expensive inkjet printers have six or seven colors and one black cartridge. Whether they separate out the various colors tends to have to do with how many colors the cartridge has. When you buy refill kits, they generally are either for refilling three-color cartridges (cyan, magenta, and yellow) or four-color cartridges (cyan, magenta, yellow and black). So, refilling inkjet cartridges isn’t a thing that everybody will be able to do.

Since the 1400s, people have known that you can mix different colors together to make the colors of the rainbow. However, they were incorrect as to which were the three additive primary colors. Back, then and in art schools even today, they will tell you that the three primary colors are Red, Yellow and Blue. They are wrong, of course. The real three primary colors are Magenta (what they’re calling red), Yellow and Cyan (what they’re calling blue).

They tell you that if you mix blue with yellow you get green; and if you mix that dark blue they say is the primary, you get a rather brown/green. It’s the easiest to fool yourself into thinking it’s really green at least. After that, things fall apart with their system of lies. You mix what they call red (closest color in art stores is called cadmium red) to yellow and you get a really brown/orange. Compare it with an orange and you’ll see the difference immediately. That isn’t orange. You get a pure beautiful orange, however, if you mix yellow with magenta. Poof, there it is, a beautiful orange. The reason they didn’t use magenta in the middle ages? There was no such color that you could get from minerals or vegetables that comes close to magenta.

To make purple is even worse, though. Mix that blue they suggest is ‘blue’ in the color wheel, which has its closest counterpart to ‘Ultramarine Blue’, and you get a very brown purple. On the other hand, if you mix cyan to magenta, you get a true beautiful deep purple.

So, that’s why they use the real primary colors of Cyan, Magenta and Yellow in an inkjet cartridge. If you mix all three of those together, however, you don’t really get black. You get a muddy brown color. IF all three colors were pure colors, you’d end up with black. Because they’ don’t, they need to also use black in order to print a black color. Kits for refilling inkjet cartridges, then, tend to either have cyan/yellow/magenta/black, or just cyan/magenta/yellow or black all by itself. The instructions are always included.

I’m glad, it’s about time that the simple fact that it’s very simple (despite the printer companies best efforts) to refill most toner cartridges. The perception has that it needs some special skills, is very difficult and carries huge risks is of course nonsense and just perpetuated with those who would rather you waste your money.

At least now they’re appearing on big Review focussed sites like Amazon will mean we can all share experiences in different toner cartridges. Of course as I always say the best kits will be ones that use the best ink, compatible toner for that particular printer. I’d be very wary of the very generic toner kits but at least with Amazon you can see what people think about them.

I’ve just been looking and there isn’t the range as from the specialist toner companies so far but I’m sure they’ll all end up joining Amazon eventually. Good thing is we’ll find which are hopeless and which work well. Don’t listen to all the rubbish about destroying your printer it’s not true, and even if it was the money you save would easily buy you a new printer anyway for the cost of new cartridges.

It’s worth checking out, not that many reviews for some of the companies but hopefully we’ll find a few more decent companies to help cut our printer costs down.

Now I know despite being hugely ripped of for replacement cartridges, many people feel a little unsure about refilling their toner, so I thought I’d post a little refill toner review. Now the method will vary slightly depending on the printer cartridge your going to refill but essentially the vast majority now focus on one distinct method.

This method is the ‘make a hole’ and ‘pour’ method. Now if you are really lucky on the side of your cartridge their may be a little stopper that can be opened. If you have you’re in luck as all you have to do is open the stopper and pour in some replacement toner ink. Difficult huh ! Most cartridges used to have these little refill plugs but the printer companies now have helpfully replaced them as they realised they can make loads more money by selling you new ones or refurbishing your existing cartridges (the annoying thing is they pretend to be eco-friendly by doing this!).

If the printer companies put back these little stoppers it would have a huge environmental benefit, people could refill toner in their cartridges with no effort at all. Unfortunately I don’t think this is likely unless they are forced by legislation. The reality is most of us will be faced with the problem of the cartridge being sealed so will have to find a way of opening the cartridge.

Refill Toner Review – Some Steps

So let’s first start by looking at the tools needed, you can either put these together yourself or the companies who supply refill toners will sell you one. The picture here contains the standard items in kit, which is all you’ll need on most cartridges, they’re not expensive I think I paid about $14 for my first toner refill kit.

Typical Toner Refilling Kit

Review Toner refill Kit

You can see from the kit, there’s some gloves, stoppers, pincers, plugs and a soldering iron. The most important item is probably the soldering iron with a little adapter. To use this you simply let it heat up and touch the side of the toner cartridge. A little hole will be created and you use this to pour the replacement toner into the cartridge.

You can then use the stopper to reseal the hole and make a nice neat job, and that’s basically it. No really for many printer cartridges that is all you need to do. It takes a few minutes and provided you don’t pour the toner all over your shoes instead of the cartridge and use quality compatible toner your toner cartridge will be as good as new.
I’d like to say it takes great skill but actually it doesn’t – it can’t do I have done it on many occasions.

I’d like to say a little word in my mini toner refill review about the replacement ink. This is probably the most important part of refilling the cartridge, if you fill it with rubbish then you will get poor results. Fortunately most of the companies I’ve used all provide top quality ink which is exactly the same as the toner you will get in the original cartridges.

Compatible Ink

Toner Refill Bottle

When you shake the toner bottle, the ink is so fine that it behaves like liquid. This makes it very easy to pour into the hole you have created, obviously be sensible and don’t do this over your beige lounge carpet though! Most of the bottles are supplied with a pouring nozzle like this one in the image, it really is a very simple job to refill toner.

Once you’ve poured the toner in, then you just have to use one of the stoppers in the kit to seal the unit. It’s nothing fancy as long as the toner doesn’t leak through the hole you should be fine. Don’t worry if you don’t have any stoppers, you can use strong packing tape just as well, it doesn’t look as neat but works fine.

Here’s one that has been completed and ready to go back into your printer. So I urge you to give it a go, you will be making a big difference to your pocket and also it’s saving new cartridges being produced (takes about 2 litres of oil to produce each one) plus the old one going to landfill.

Example Toner stopper

You can often refill your cartridges many times and you’ll save a small fortune on replacement toner. The cartridges are all self contained so there’s no risk to your printer and if you buy quality ink you’ll not notice any reduction in quality of your printing either.

Many schools and businesses refill their cartridges routinely and literally save thousands every year, the savings do add up. I hope my brief toner refill review has given you the impetus to give it a go, it really is simple and the savings can be considerable! Here’s the company I use if you want a recommendation – Toner Topup