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.
