Most of the printer manufacturers in the market like Hewlett Packard, Dell, Epson, Cannon, Brother, and Lexmark adopt the much practiced trick on the customers. They sell their printers at reasonably low prices that make the consumers very happy. Unfortunately such consumers find it extremely difficult managing the high price of the printer cartridges when the time for replacement comes. The fact remains that the manufacturers of the printers concentrate on making profit from the printer cartridges without which your printer will be rendered useless.
Add to this the practice of the manufacturers in making their cartridges incompatible to other brand printers and you will find what you are in for. Since the printer cartridge of one brand does not match other normally, you are forced to buy the particular brand whatever the price might be. A couple of solutions to such problems is the refill and third party filling of the cartridges.
High price forces many of the consumers opting to buy substitutes as replacements or go for refilling of the empty cartridge. There are numerous cartridge refilling companies as well as re-manufacturing agencies. Conversely, the consumers buy cartridges from the third party to save money instead of buying the new cartridges. Both these options are much cheaper in comparison to buying the original replacement. You have to pay for only the ink and some small raw materials.
Though the brand manufacturers tried to stop the practice with litigation in the Lexmark Int’l v Static Control Components but the court ruled otherwise holding that reverse-engineering process did not violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Only thing that you have to be careful about refilling your printer cartridges is that they should be quality ink. Otherwise the print quality would be inferior and low quality ink has the tendency of drying up untimely and that can create problems for you.