monsieur_jean

Look up your printer model number on Alibaba. Or better yet, on Taobao (but if you don’t speak Chinese it’s a bit complicated). Your options depending on the printer you have are going to be :

• Print heads conversion kits (a replacement of the complete print heads module with tubes feed from ink bottles attached outside your printer)
• Refillable ink cartridges
• Counterfeited Compatible ink cartridges that cost a fraction of the official ones while having 10 times more ink in them.

Now depending on where you live and the local laws it may or may not be legal to import those. In the country I live in there is no law against it. In most South East Asia the law doesn’t care about that and if it does, law enforcement doesn’t. :)

Since I’ve moved in South East Asia, I have discovered that:

• Almost every single printer that exists has a conversion kit available on Taobao to use big ink bottles
• There’s not a single firmware that hasn’t been hacked, nor a single part that hasn’t been cloned
• Therefore, most printer manufacturers have a specific line of durable products that allows the use of third party ink because if they don’t, other people will bank of their product maintenance and they won’t sell much.

The only reason we in developped country get scammed like we are, is because of IP laws and governments that allow manufacturers to abuse them with no consequences at the expense of the customers (and the planet).