When you think about the features you want in a printer, you have to take into consideration the devices you might need to connect to your printer. For example, if you take pictures, you might want to connect your digital camera to your printer. Or you may want to insert a memory card into the printer. For this, you have to make sure you get a printer with built in slots for such devices. If you plan to connect your printer to a home of office network, it must be enabled for the network. If you will be required to print documents with postscript fonts, you must buy a laser printer. Most inkjet printers aren’t able to print these type of fonts. These are a some special features you might want to find in your next printer.

There are a wide range of printers designed to fulfill different jobs. If you have a lot of photos to print out on a regular basis then you need to think about buying a photo printer. While you can print photos on a regular printer, the image quality won’t be all that good because they are designed mainly to print text.

You can often connect a digital camera straight to the photo printer, which means you won’t have to transfer the photos to your computer first. The model of printer you choose will depend on the quality of photos you need because there are lots of models available at different prices and qualities.

Most people tend to print on letter size paper but occasionally need unusual or legal sized documents. If you have a home business, for example, that needs posters, banners, engineering plans or odd shaped brochures, you may want to consider a large format printer. These are developed specifically to print out larger size pages for a number of purposes. Since these printers are expensive in relation to ordinary models they are not generally used for occassional uses but more in offices. In most cases it’s more economical to have your wide format jobs printed elsewhere. There are a lot of printers to choose from, so spend the time and browse through them. If you haven’t bought a printer before, or not in a while, you may be surprised how good a model you can get at a low price. The these considerations in mind when you look for your next printer. Don’t forget to choose the one that has your needed features.

Last but definitely not least, make sure you check the consumable costs of your printer.  It is not uncommon for the cheapest printers to cost many times more to run, in fact in many cases it’s a deliberate policy.  The printer is often sold as a loss leader with the expectations of making money through very high cost of inks and cartridges.  It’s seriously worth checking if you can refill toner , although you can with most printers some are much more difficult than others.  A printer that has cartridges that can be refilled easily can be run for about 80-90% cheaper than one that has lots of blocks to prevent you doing this.

Don’t be misled, there is no real reason that toner cartridges shouldn’t be refilled many times BEFORE they are recycled. This would cut waste dramatically, even if the cartridges were reused once there would be a huge saving in environmental costs. Multiplied across the world the world the benefits would be enormous. There is one main reason that the average toner cartridge is not refilled however, that is because the printer companies don’t want you to.

None of the components in a laser toner cartridge are so badly manufactured that they only last one print run, when the ink runs outs a printer cartridge would work perfectly well if it was refilled. In fact this is what used to happen especially with photocopiers in the passed, all the cartridges had little stoppers on them which you could pour toner ink to refill them. However the companies noticed if they took these stoppers out people had to buy new cartridges and their profits soared. Slowly over a year or two these all went, and the little stoppers seemed like a thing of the past.

But then many companies noticed that it was relatively easy to make you own hole and seal with a generic stopper by yourself and they started to sell kits. These kits allowed you to keep using the printer cartridge by refilling it with ink. It is something I do today, it takes a few minutes and involves no skill whatsoever (luckily for me). It is a great feeling to know that you can reuse these toner cartridges over and over again. Without the cost and expense of rebuilding, recycling or worse them ending up in landfill.

Why Printer Firms want Printer Cartridge Recycling

So how did our Green crusading printer companies react to this development, well it’s simple they put computer chips in their toner cartridges to stop you refilling them. They want you to use that cartridge once, and once only – by encouraging you to recycle that cartridge they maintain a ‘green persona’ whilst maximising their profits. Every time you refill a toner cartridge you are reducing their profits, the computer chips ensure that the toner cartridge won’t work until that too is reset. That computer chips sole purpose is to prevent you reusing and recycling yourself – by far the greenest option is actively prevented by the printing companies.

Sure you’ll hear horror stories about print quality, damage to your printer etc and even voiding of warranty. But let me reassure you about those, if you use quality toner the results will be no different to a new cartridge. There’s no risk of damage to your printer – you’re just refilling ink and even if there was in many instances the costs savings are so high you could buy a new printer after every other refill !

Fear not the companies who provide the refilling kits can in most cases. provide a replacement computer chip which will prevent the companies greedy practice of disabling them – it is annoying as it is another step but is pretty simple. So next time you look at the fancy green glossy recycling bag supplied to you with your expensive toner cartridge – remember at the heart of it is no environmental idealism, there is just the cynical maintaining of profits and their bottom line.

Give it a try, for the vast majority of printers you can add another stage before the printer cartridge recycling one. Refill the cartridges can save you hundreds believe me and it requires no special skill. There’s many firms around – the one I use is called Tonertopup but there are lots of others. Make sure they use quality compatible toner for each toner cartridge and you should save 80% of your running costs and do the world a favor.

Compatible Toner Quality Problems
Imagine you’ve set up your business to supply people and companies with compatible toner for them to refill their cartridges over and over. Customer will save so much money each time they do it that they’re bound to keep coming back for more. The costs will have to be significantly lower than the brand refills obviously but if the toner is of the same quality, there are no real issues.

Why try and make a few pennies by sending out inferior toner, you’ll get angry customers, no repeat business and lots of stress. The vast majority of companies in this line are very green minded and want to provide a good eco friendly service.

Take the Risk

Seriously have a look around, try and find some recommendations, ask a few questions of the supplier. The cost and environmental savings are so large it’s worth taking a risk. Even if you are really unlucky and get poor quality toner refills it won’t have cost very much. You can even put the cartridge away for when you need to do a big print run when quality is not that important.

Seriously in most situations where I have used toner refills in many, many printers the results have been indistinguishable from the brand toner refills. The average savings of about 80% make it a real boon in these days of rising prices.

I generally only use the one firm when I am buying compatible toner refills, of course if you’re in teh US it’s probably not worth using them – but use their checker tool to see if your printer can be refillled easily – you can find it here

You can then try and find a company nearer home, if anyone has any real experience of such companies outside the UK then I’d be really interested to hear about them.

But I’m afraid it’s actually quite a difficult question, it’s a bit like asking how long your car will last or how many years before my TV needs replacing. There is no specific correct answer as it tends to vary from cartridge to cartridge but for the vast majority of cartridges two or three is easily achievable. Many people keep refilling them until the printouts start being affected.

There are a couple of main reasons why you can’t keep refilling the toner cartridges indefinitely –

OPC Drum – inside your Toner cartridge, where the image is created before being copied onto the page. This will eventually wear our, however it will often keep going for many refills – it depends on the make. There are some printers where this drum can be replaced separately though, so that no longer becomes an issue.

Toner Waste – Toner cartridges all collect their own waste, the unused ink from a printout usually gets collected in a waste section of the cartridge. Eventually this will overflow and cause marks to appear on the printed page. You can empty this manually to extend the life, in much the same way as you make a little hole to refill. In most cartridges you can make a hole in the waste compartment to empty it. Personally I never bother with this step as normally I can get two or three refills without emptying this section.

Emptying the waste compartment can make your toner go on into double figures for some printers though which would save literally hundreds of dollars. Use any reliable refill firm and ask them their advice, they’ll know the average number of refills for your particular cartridge. Just remember even refilling once is going to save you a lot of money and more than half your printing costs.

So How Many Times Can I Refill a Toner Cartridge Then !

Of course it depends on what your printing and what for. I generally refill twice then the third time only put a little ink in and watch the quality. If the print out perhaps starts getting smudges or a reduction in quality then I’ll replace the cartridge with a new one and start again.

The printer companies will always discourage this practice, they’ll hint at damage to the printer which is simply not true (unless you do something incredibly stupid – like refill with something other than ink!). But remember the cost of a new set of cartridges often costs more than a new printer – incredible but true. My last Lexmark laser printer cost me $200 and the refills cost well over $300. Even if I had destroyed the printer every time I used a refill it would have made sense to do this.

The simple facts are that it saves money and helps the environment – check it out!!!

When you read the marketing information, I see yet again the usual rubbish designed to pretend to the customer that they’re using technology to help the customer and reduce costs. Whereas the reality is that the Canon FC 120 is designed to maximise profits, what do you think ?

Neat Little Copier - Canon FC120

When you are checking through the specifications of this copier, you might read the section about teh innovative new toner cartridges. The marketing pitch goes something like this,

Canon’s unique All-in-One cartridge includes the core copying elements (toner, drum, cleaner unit) making your copier virtually maintenance-free

They are trying to tell you that replacing all the core components of a toner cartridge each time it’s run out of ink, makes it easy to maintain. I guess there is some truth to that, but what it fails to take into account is that this means that the cost of each printer toner cartridges for the Canon FC 120 is significantly more expensive. Each time your copier runs out of ink you are forced to replace not only the toner but the drum and cleaner unit as well and of course this costs.

Two Canon FC 120 Cartridges = New Printer

That’s it buy a couple of FC120 cartridges and you’ll have spent nearly the same money as the cost of the printer. Does technology really need us to be producing such disposable, one use and wasteful products. Is there not a better way of doing this?

Well I’ll tell you there is, this Canon printer cartridge is actually easily refilled. When the toner runs out, the components are fine, they are not so badly manufactured that they can only last one print run !! Most laser toner cartridges are fine for several runs despite what the manufacturers would have you to believe.

The Canon FC120 takes a couple of minutes to refill, of course your not replacing the other components in the cartridge you are simply refilling it. Look for a toner refilling company who will sell you some toner and ideally initially a small kit which makes the process childs play.

Check that they sell specific compatible toner for your Canon FC 120 and not the cheap universal toner that some companies sell. It literally takes a few minutes and each refill will be saving you about 80-90 % of the cost of a new cartridge, that’s potentially hundreds of dollars. Of course the other components in the Toner cartridge will eventually run out and you’ll notice the difference in quality and then it’s time to buy a new cartridge and repeat the process. Just to give you an idea of the savings, the company I use is here and they charge about $13/£9 for a bottle of toner for the FC120, after which it prints perfectly.  There are many good companies doing the same though.

YOU WILL SAVE A FORTUNE and each time you do this, you are making an environmental saving and reducing the amount of landfill required for each toner cartridge. The printer companies could easily make cartridges like the Canon FC120 easily refillable out of the box, saving the customers money and the environmental costs would plummet, of course so would their profits, so I guess we will never see this happen.