Ink cartridges aren’t exactly the most exiting nor beautiful objects in the world, but the big ink companies like HP and Canon sometimes have to make their products look just as good as they can. And Canon have done this very well with their latest campaign for the Canon PIXMA Range, they worked with Dentsu and photographer Linden Gledhill to create a very artistic campaign. They used ink and a speaker with a membrane over it to create these awesome ink sculptures.

Check out the videos below to see just how they filmed this and to see the final product.

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One of the things I didn’t know until today is that Legacy Effects used an Objet Geometries 3D printer to create some of the parts of the physical Iron Man suit. The Iron man Gloves are one of the parts printed using the Objet printer. All parts that were made were perfectly adapted to the actors that had to wear them after the actors’ bodies were scanned for the perfect fit.

Legacy Effects bought the 3D printer for $114,000 after having used one when creating the suit from the xbox 360s’ halo ad. campaign.

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But what about the ink itself? OK it’s true that most of the devices above don’t use ink, but when looking at the everyday printer, the ink it uses has pretty much stayed the same. Maybe it’s time to invent something new and exiting and of course more Eco-friendly. Well there are actually many types of ink out there apart from your everyday HP ink.

For example, have you ever heard of edible printer ink? No? Well there are many sites on the web selling just that. Ink cartridges for your printer filled with edible ink. They are used for printing onto icing sheets for cakes, etc. Just pop a edible ink cartridge into your printer and a sheet of icing paper into the paper tray and print away.

Another interesting example is actually glow in the dark printer ink. I havn’t been able to find any pre-filled glow in the dark cartridges, but below is a video showing how to make one yourself. Imagine the wonders you could print using glow in the dark ink!

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This handmade epson ink cartridge lamp is made from just that, and it looks wierdly cool. Its fairly expensive if you want one at $200, but so are the cartridges that its made from. Its the second best thing you can do with your empty ink cartridges, the first being sending them in to us to recycle.

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The Pencil Printer by Hoyoung Lee may only be a concept but it’s a great idea. It grounds down pencil stubs to create a fine lead powder similar to the powder used in toner cartridges. Aswell as printing it can also erase in the proccess if you have made any mistakes within the documen. It’s a great concept for anyone who wants to print of documents that would need to be edited alot but is also eco-friendly.

If only the big companies would sponser some of these eco-friendly concepts.

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Think Conservation!  It takes more than 90mls of oil when producing an average hp ink cartridge. For every cartridge that has been recycled it means that one less new cartridge has been sold, less sales means less production which means less oil being used!

Think of the Environment! Hp printer cartridges are made of plastics and metals that will take 100’s of years to decompose when buried in landfill sites, that’s if they decompose at all. These days we are more than aware that land filling Hp ink cartridges is not a good idea at all.

Other reasons to recycle your printer cartridges….

• If the empty cartridges that people throw away each year were stacked end to end they would be able to circle the earth – that’s over 38,400 kilometres!
• Printer Ink is dearer than Space Shuttle Fuel!!   It’s true…….
• More than 30 million inkjet cartridges are dumped each year in the UK alone, the equivalent weight of 18 blue whales.
• Around 14,000 tonnes of ink and toner cartridges are dumped in UK landfill sites each year!  We are only a small island, how long can this continue?
• Having your cartridge professionally refilled can save you up to 70% on your printing costs.
• Printer ink remains one of the most expensive liquids on the planet more valuable than expensive perfumes (New York Times 18.08.09)

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Buy an original HP 350 ink cartridge here.

Buy a remanufactured HP 350 ink cartridge here.

Is it just me or is everything getting smaller in life? From the latest nano-gadget to the humble Mars bar smaller seems to be better these days…or is it?  One thing that has got smaller, and not for the better is the HP printer cartridge and the level of ink that is in it. We are constantly looking to add value for our customers so we decided to run some tests on the ink levels of original ink cartridges and how they stand against our own remanufactured cartridges.  We will be running more tests on other printer cartridges but on this occasion we are looking at the HP 350 CB335EE standard ink level cartridge.

Here is how we did it…….

We started by removing the top of an empty HP350 genuine ink cartridge. After removing the top we found a single chamber filled with a square shaped hydrophobic sponge. The sponge is used to hold the ink until the print head calls for it when printing. When removing the sponge and  examining it the first thing we noticed was that the ink level where the OEM ink had been only covered less than a quarter of the sponge from the bottom upwards, the top ¾ of the sponge was totally ink free and clean. HP spec’s state that the HP 350 cartridge has 4.5ml of ink inside, we have a hunch that this is more related to price than the physical cartridge capabilities and to prove our point we decided to see just how much ink we could get into the hp 350 without flooding the sponge and affecting its hydrophobic properties.

We started with a bunch of empty original HP 350 CB335EE cartridges that had been used only once, using one of our vacuum filling machines we set about filling cartridges at different levels of ink and vacuum rates, we steadily increased the ink levels until we overfilled cartridges and then worked backwards until we found the optimum limits without compromising the ink cartridges functionality. Our test showed that between 18 and 20ml of ink, yes 18 to 20ml! (Depending on the vacuum and vent rate) could be safely added, quite a difference from 4.5ml’s don’t you think?

Physically filling a cartridge with ink is one thing, making it work in the printer is another, pleased with the progress so far we then took the cartridge to our test bed of printers, the printer we chose to test it on was the HP Photosmart C4480 . After a quick clean of the circuitry we popped it in the printer and waited it for it to finishing whirring, whilst we waited the conversations between our technicians were “will it actually print so heavy with ink?” “Can the sponge hold the extra ink without a flood of ink on the page?” The printer was ready so it’s time to find out. We ran off pages of our black test sheet on DRAFT, NORMAL and HIGH dpi setting and the result was good news, the cartridge didn’t leak on the page and it showed no problems carrying the extra ink. The print was just as crisp and sharp as the same cartridge filled with HP’s recommended 4.5ml. Hp guide lines on actual pages per cartridge are based on 5% coverage with the printer set on Default or Normal mode. To test this HP 350 we used our specially designed test page that has coverage of around 80% to check the cartridge at high level output, the print was clean and consistent without any lines.

Now that we had discovered that the cartridge can physically hold more ink the question is how long our maxi filled HP 350 will last compared to the original? We continued to run tests but this time we adjusted our Photosmart printer to match the settings quoted in HP’s guidelines and Suprise! Suprise! we found that our remanufactured/refilled cartridge lasted on average 3 to 4 times longer than the HP original ink cartridge. Our conclusion was that just as we thought the HP’s 4.5ml of ink in the HP 350  is more about money! We found that recently emptied HP 350 when filled with the correct ink formula under the correct vacuum conditions produces unrivalled quality equal to the (OEM) original brand.

More tests coming soon so please come back and check frequently, please feel free to leave a comment.

Buy an original HP 350 ink cartridge here.

Buy a remanufactured 350 ink cartridge here.

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