I don't know if anyone is interested in my experiences with procuring inkjet ink? The prices are what I paid a few years ago, so they may be higher now, but the principles still hold...
Epson printers are often high-spec and cheap. They expect to make their money from selling ink cartridges. I though I would buy an Epson, and then get cheap non-Epson ink. I bought a CX6400, which is an all-in-one scanner/printer/copier. However, even the cheap non-epson cartridges cost a lot, and didn't seem to last long. They contain 15 ml ml of ink, and the CX6400 needs 4, at about £15 each for Epson brand, or £5 for other makes. The printer cost about £100, which meant that 2 Epson cartridge replacements, or 5 others, would match the printer cost.
Looking for ways to lower this cost, I found a number of cartridge refilling advice sites, and tried to disassemble the old Epson cartridges to see how to refill them. They are engineered to resist this, so it's a messy business, and I was only partly successful. You can buy ink for this process from a number of sites, at around £6 per 60ml - dropping the cost of a cartridge to £1.50. You also need to buy a cartridge chip resetter (about £5) to set the empty cartridge to full again. I used this bunch for some time - found them to provide good service -
http://www.proprint.co.uk/Then I found a Chinese company called SkyHorse, who were shipping two-part cartridges, which could easily come apart for refilling. I bought two sets, and found them to be quite an ideal way to refill cartridges.
http://www.inkhouse.cn/en/Product_list.asp?op=4&xop=1&id=844 refers...
One of the first things you notice about inkjets is that they achieve very high resolution by having very small holes in the print heads. So blockage is an issue. The inkjet handles this by having a pad where the heads rest when not being used, which is connected to a pump. When you call for a head clean, the pump operates, and some ink is sucked through the nozzles into a waste pad inside the machine. This causes two problems - lots of head cleaning mean lots of ink waste, and eventually the waste pad inside the printer will get full. This usually takes a few years of use, but annoyingly, many manufacturers simply set a limit on head cleans, and lock the printer when the limit is reached. Then the printer displays a 'request for maintenance' and you have to go and pay the manufacturer £50 to change the ink pad and reset the printer.
A Russian group became very annoyed at this and produced their own Epson utility, which allows diy limit resetting, variable strength and colour cleaning, and a host of other goodies. Find them here -
http://www.ssclg.com/epsone.shtml . I use this, and pipe the excess ink into a small plastic reservoir....
Other useful sites are
http://repair4printer.org/ , and
http://www.fixyourownprinter.com/When one of my sons took the CX6400 to Uni, I bought an RX700 (6 cartridges!), and looked for more SkyHorse cartridges. At this point Epson were taking lots of cartridge companies to court in order to force them out of business, and SkyHorse pulled out of the UK. I was stuck!
Then I found a Continuous Ink Supply (CIS) system on e-bay for the RX700. It was £20 (+£20 postage from the States) and came with 120ml of ink for each colour. That amount of ink would cost £48 if bought on its own - how could I loose?
I bought the system - was not impressed by the seller (pile 'em high - sell 'em cheap) but the system worked well. I had paid the equivalent of £1.25 per 15ml, and I had a CIS thrown in for free.
When I came to the end of the ink in the CIS, I started looking for replacement ink. The cartridge filling inks were still £1.50 per cartridge, and the few CIS companies in the UK who sold ink wanted £1.05 per cartridge equivalent, plus a huge postage charge. Besides, I didn't know whether the ink they sold was ideal for my printer. So I tried checking with ink companies.
In this way I found Promax Imaging -
http://www.promaximaging.com/ . They sold ink at around £6 per 250ml - the equivalent of 37p per cartridge, and seem to know a lot about the CIS products. I found them very helpful and able to sell small amounts of top-quality ink at low prices.
So I have moved from £15 per cartridge to 37p per cartridge - 1/40 of the original cost. If someone wants an A4 photo now, ink price is not an issue any more...