Are Refurbished Printer Cartridges Worth It?
11 September 2006I was browsing through the Inchoat Random Abstractions blog and saw this post noting that many of the printer cartridges she bought online seemed to have problems – they would run out of ink or not print at the highest quality. Her call to customer service convinced her that they were handling returns on a fairly regular basis.
On the other hand, I was looking through some of the costs here to compare them and it can be as much as 50% off for a refurbished printer cartridge. If you’re getting that big a discount, over time it’s well worth having a few failures. I also found this article that outlines a few steps you should take to check the printer – often, it’s not the fault of the cartridge itself when something is going wrong. It suggests that remanufactured cartridges are a good idea because many of the companies have 100% satisfaction guarantees.
What I would suggest is that if you do go the refurbished cartridge route, you should consider having a backup around. If you’re going to get your money back if it fails, the biggest hassle will be if you can’t print something when you need to. You can go to Kinko’s if it’s something small, but those costs can add up. If you’re printing things often, it might be better to just buy a spare, lock it in a drawer somewhere, and only use it if you have an emergency. That way you can save the money and never have to worry about not being able to print something.
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