OEM vs third-party ink cartridges

exampasser

Recently I got tired of my Epson printer eating though my ink so I bought cartridges made by a third party. So far it works just as well as the OEM cartridges at about 1/4 of the price. I also use a chip reseter to get more out of my ink cartridges.

I was wondering how other people have faired with using non-OEM ink cartridges/toners.

cyberguypr

I buy Brother LC61 equivalents for my wife. Out of 60 or 70 we have bought there was only one bad cartridge. Print quality is superb.

SteveLord

We always buy official here. Anytime I strayed from that at my previous job, it was a recipe for disaster.

PS-I hate printers.

-Foxer-

I'd always bought official cartridges in the past, but for my HP printer I got the refill kit. It was about 1/10 the price, and so far it's been working great.

qwertyiop

My company has always purchased refurbished toner cartridges from our reseller and have never had a problem.

MentholMoose

I buy toner for my color laser printer on eBay... you can get genuine toner for slightly more than the no-name stuff, though supply is inconsistent so you can't wait until your toner is completely empty before looking. I telecommute so I don't know what toner is in use at work, but at my previous job we outsourced everything printer-related to a major printer manufacturer so I think they used only genuine toner.

jibbajabba

Just as a sided note. I worked for Xerox a couple of years and Xerox refused warranty if they found out that third party ones were used. Basically cheap cartridges have obviously a different composition. A lot of them have either too much water, not enough or other components which make them 'cheap'. In xerox we have seen certain damage to the printheads (in models where ink and printheads are separate) which why they refused some warranty cases. But, this was

a. For expensive printer, but even more importantly
b. 10 years ago