Inexpensive Ink Cartridges

Back in my college days, I did a lot of printing. As a math major, I probably printed a fraction of the amount of pages that most students had to rifle off. Most of our work was done either by hand on paper, or done utilizing math software of some nature (Matlab, Maple, etc.) and submitted directly into a professor’s shared folder. Call it old school or just plain old, but that is the nature of the beast. Even with that on my side, I wound up printing all of the time…between my core course work and math reports (no kidding) I was constantly hitting Ctrl – P.

My sample size is sufficiently large to draw a parallel between ‘important printing task’ and ’empty ink cartridge.’ Every…single…time.

I don’t know how many times I found myself trying to get to Staples before closing time, in order to buy a replacement cartridge. Too many. To add insult to injury, brick and mortar retail prices are the stuff of nightmares. Those markups still blow my mind. Pretty much outrageous. Like my octopus drawing:

Not to date myself, but online shopping was limited in my day. Amazon was around, but primarily for books. Specialty places were popping up…and then subsequently bursting when everything hit the colloquial fan. Comparative online shopping stuck, however. One of the things I am jealous of now are the deal pricing that you can find on ink cartridges. Very jealous…that would have put me in Cup of Noodle instead of Ramen. But, I digress.

I have seen some creative stuff out there. You can buy bulk ink…shooting for the DIY fill-it-at-home crowd. Some models have cartridge reset units springing up…allowing the user to gain a few more prints per refill. The two main drawbacks of that are time (time is money) and quality. A lot of the replacements are prone to smudging…may as well pay for the real deal and do it right.

At the end of it all, I have had good luck finding ink cartridges for my HP and Kodak printer online. Hit that link to see my go-to site.