The reason I bought this product is, after buying my printer and using it for about a week of average printing the thing said I had to replace all my printer cartridges, even though the printing I had done was 95% black ink (why did I need to replace the red, yellow and blue?). I looked up the prices and realized the company was making it way, way more expensive to buy ink than the printer, and while I don't fault them for that they just seemed to be getting a bit greedy about the whole thing (replace all cartridges after a week of average printing really? Also they set it up so its virtually impossible to fake the printer out into continuing with the old cartridges even though the old cartridges seemed to still have ink in them (especially the red, blue and yellow which were virtually unused). So, I went ahead and ordered regular cartridges and this. This came first so I set it up. Its a bit tricky to fill the cartridges and the enclosed instructions are mediocre to bad, but it do able.
Here are the instructions, the way I did it and DO NO OVERFILL THE CARTRIDGES, one full 10 ml syringe it what I used and seems to be working fine.
-Assemble the syringe (really, a syringe you feel a little like a doctor)
-There are 2 holes on the top of each cartridge, one with a colored rubber stopper and one with a clear stopper. You are supposed to put ink into the clear stopper but I just pulled out the rubber stopper and put ink in there (really by accident) and it worked fine.
-To put ink into the cartridge, carefully push syringe point through top foil covering of ink can and pull out a full 10 ml syringe of ink (you could remove the foil covering but I thought it might be easier/ less messy to leave it on and push the syringe through it like II've seen doctors do with medicine)
-Put syringe into ink cartridge and slowly depress to fill it up. Replace rubber stopper.
-Repeat for other colors
These are not the instructions they give (similiar but different in several points), but they worked for me. A couple hints, have paper towels on hand and you probably will get some ink on your hands. Wipe off syringe needle after each refill. Also if you refill cartridges in the order yellow, red, blue, black (lightest to darkest) you don't seem to have to wash syringe between cartridges but wash it throughly after you are all done (at least I did). When you are done you put the cartridges into the printer, carefully, and then remove the colored rubber stopper from each one (per instructions). Turn on the printer and it'll whirl about a bit and then start printing. On the very first page I printed there is a black smudge at the bottom (maybe from me fiddling with the old cartridge, not the new one) but no problems on the next 10 pages.
I suspect that when I need to refill the cartridges I can leave them in the printer as I do it, but I'm not sure and this may be a bit risky as if you get ink into the printer it might send out black smudges for the next 100 pages or more. They give you 100ml of ink and I used about 10ml to fill each cartridge (and I suspect you can get more ink cheap from an arts store or somewhere) so money wise this is way, way cheaper than buying new cartridges each time (though no idea how long the new ones would last if you bought them more than the week that the ones that came with it lasted, I assume).
I'm giving it 4 out of 5. I really love it, but its a bit messy and one small screw up and you might have ink all over yourself.
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