Are there such things? I’ve tried two different types of no-name inks but they haven’t been up to scratch in terms of colour quality or reliability. Currently, the printer tells me I have a reasonable level of both black and colour ink left, but pages are coming out completely blank. I’ve done a ‘clean printer heads’ thing and printed out a test page – blank apart from a thumb sized smudge of red- so I’m guessing the ink has dried up?? We are only occasional printers, most stuff we print out at home or school so this probably doesn’t help to keep the ink ‘flowing’.

Has anybody had any joy with any particular brand/source? Or is it really a case of you get what you pay for and I should cough up for the Kodak ones?

I don’t know about Kodak, but we’ve tried several different brands in our Epsom at work and they’ve all been awful (to the point where we had to get the printer professional cleaned to unclog it). Now we only use Epsom genuine.

I wouldn’t put it past printer companies these days to detect non brand cartridges and mess up the print output deliberately 🙁

But like makeitorange, I gave up the fight and only buy original cartidges now. It’s just not even close to worth the hassle of dicking around with inkjets that don’t work. In fact at home it has now been replaced by a cheap laser which is brilliant (but not colour)

I use Tesco cartridges in an Epson printer and they’re fine.

We had a lexmark 3 in 1 thing. Used non-OEM cartridges and had exactly the same issue as you.
Printhead was blocked up, and couldn’t be cleaned.

Scrapped that (it pained me as so wasteful, but a new Canon was only £50 – it would have cost more to repair the lexmark) and got a canon.
Refills from Amazon only £8 for a set of FIVE! And they work a treat…

DrP

Had similar problems with both Lexmark & Epson. We also had other problems as we don’t use printers very often these days and the heads seemed to dry up pretty often.

I eventually binned both and now gone to a Kodak printer. The thing I really like about it is that the print heads are a replacable unit too so if I have any problems I can get a new one rather than dump the whole printer again. So far it’s been working fine though so not had to do that yet.

I’ve only had it for a couple of months so far though.

print heads are a replacable unit too

I didn’t know that, I’ll have a look into that…otherwise Dr P’s Canon (model/linky?) sounds like a good option

Thread epilogue: new kodak cartridges installed and all is well again. £20 quid for not much, they really have us by the short and curlies!

I buy refilled sh**e cartridges for the epson at work. Clogs all the time but… Genius

Cheers for the genius top tip, might be life in those old cheapo cartridges after all…

*scurries off to rummage through bin