My experience with ink refill kits...
About a week ago I asked what people thought about ink refill kits because I was getting a new Canon S9000 printer and wanted to try a kit on this printer. Well, I got the printer, the refill kit, and tried it all out and I thought I'd just let everyone know what my experience was.
The kit I ordered was from www.inksupply.com. The Canon printer seemed like it was setup almost specifically for using a refill kit. Each ink tank was clear and had a little plastic ball sealing a hole in the top. Once the ball was punched out it was very easy to refill the tank and then reseal it with a rubber ball provided in the refill kit. The first ink to go out was cyan, so I refilled it and kept printing. I had no noticable difference in printing photos after I refilled the cyan. Then the photo cyan, photo magenta, and yellow went out and I refilled those. After refilling those I can say that the print quality definitely degraded. It was as if the ink was blotching on the paper. Solid areas of color were fine and areas that had lots of detail seemed ok, but anywhere that had smooth color gradation was blotchy and looked bad. Overall I'd say the quality wasn't horrible and if all you are going to do is print on plain paper you probably wouldn't notice a difference, but for any kind of photo printing I felt the quality to be unacceptable.
As far as the ink damaging my printer I had no problems with this in the short time that I used them, but I will not be using them anymore, so I can't comment on long term effects of using ink refills in this respect. I still haven't refilled the black or magenta. I'd expect the print quality to only degrade even further once I refilled those.
I guess inside I knew that this would be too good to be true, but it was worth the money to find out from my own first hand experience. What's funny is that every refill kit company has listings for inks on their websites as if they are made specifically for individual printers. However, I wouldn't be surprised if it's all the same stuff and they just label the bottle with whatever printer you have to make you think that it's designed specifically for your printer. I could be wrong about that...I have no way of knowing for sure, but I wouldn't be a bit surprised.
So, I guess the bottom line is, for any non photo color printing I think that the ink refill kits are ok, but don't use them for any kind of photo printing.
Back to retail Canon cartridges for me...
