Well this has been a lesson learned. Against my better judgment I put a refilled ink cartridge in my Canon 9100 printer, which has promptly stuffed it.

Just had to order a new printhead at £85. Thanks Cartridge World! :mad:

Before you do, can i suggest not to buy an Epsom or any other brand with a built-in cartidge head.

I picked up my printer (HP930c) for £85 if memory serves. On all HP, the print head is built in to the cartridge, not the printer so if anything goes wrong, at the very worst you'll only need to buy a new cartridge.

Of course there is a down-side... the cartridges themselves are more expensive obviously.

Now, I'm not sure if they're refillable but as happened to me (which is why I bought a new one), I didnt use my printer for AGES and so it all dried and got blocked up. Even a saucer full of diluted meths didnt clear it but instead warped the carriage.

So, both have their pros and cons... potentially happening again and ruining your printer versus more expensive cartridges.

I too tried the re-fill route, much poorer quality I think. I wont buy them again

I realise that it's easy to feel it's a case of once bitten, twice shy but there are some good refillable cartridges out there if you take the time to research...

It's a lot like car dealers/mechanics... If you don't do the groundwork you're taking your chances and might well get stiffed.

As for spending £85 on a new print head, you gotta wonder why you're not buying a new printer or even a cleaner cartridge to flush the system... it really doesn't require more than a couple of hours work...


I can't recommend any myself sadly because I actually went a stage further and ended up using a continous ink feed system (http://www.inksupply.com/cobra.cfm) and have been working with a school who've been using 4 printers that use this companies kits and saved a fortune... without mucking up the printers. The ink quality from the company I linked to is actually better than Epsons with archival quality inks available that double the lifetime of your prints with better fade resistance.


Oh and for the record I worked out that for an outlay of around £350 using a CFS system, you get the equivalent of £1,450 worth of printing using Epson cartridges..

Just some food for thought :)

Thanks for the link - I'll certainly check out the Cobra system. Not compatible with my current printer unfortunately but something to bear in mind for the future.

I tried all sorts to rescue my printhead but to no avail - the Canon heads are notoriously fickle (I now know). And it's a £500 printer so I didn't feel like replacing it just yet.