A small percentage of people who buy ink for their printers don’t care about the quality of the job printed. If you’re someone that doesn’t care if their cartridge gives quality results, you plenty of low priced options to choose from. If you’re like me, however, you can’t settle with the most mediocre of cartridges. But if you think that buying the most expensive cartridges will get you the best results–think again! The highest prices don’t always equal the best results.

The most popular ways right now to save money on ink is buy refilling the cartridge yourself. Instead of wasting money going to store and getting a new HP ink cartridge (or whatever brand you have) you can buy a kit to refill them. While a first time buyer for an ink kit may pay the same price as they would for a normal set of brand name cartridges, they’ll get multiple refills out of one kit. So in the end, you end up saving a lot of money.

Having your ink cartridges refilled at your own home with a kit has its advantages and disadvantages. The money you save by having your ink refilled at home is the number one advantage. Most people can save over 60% to 70% off the original manufacturer’s price on printer cartridges. Unfortunately, beyond the money saving factor, there aren’t many pros with refilling. Ink refilling can be a very messy, risky, and time consuming process. You can end up getting ink permanently on your clothes. Quite a few people ended up permanently wrecking their printer because of leaky ink refills. Also, ink is very messy and can stain your clothes and hands very easily. The final disadvantage of refilling ink is you can end up wasting money. Some printers use special electronic chips that detect if a cartridge is a refill. In a few cases, printers wouldn’t allow people to use refills.

The best way to save money on your ink cartridges is through re-manufactured cartridges. Many local office stores and online stores sell this cartridges at prices much lower than the national brand name. If you’re like me and don’t want to deal with the hassle of ink refills, go with re-manufactured cartridges instead. They’re much more likely to work in your printer and also produce higher quality print results.

There are quite a few office stores and other similar stores locally that can sell you refilled ink cartridges or refurbished ink jet cartridges. OfficeMax is one those local superstores that has the ability to refill your cartridge in-store. They also have OfficeMax brand ink cartridges that you can buy if you want something a bit more quality for photos or marketing jobs. After local stores, the next best (and cheapest) way to buy compatible ink cartridges is on the internet. There are an almost unlimited number of sites that sell quality ink cartridges for cheapest prices. On the internet, you can save about 60% with off-brand cartridges.