Follow these buying guidelines and you will be ensured quality results from your remanufactured ink cartridge.

Remanufactured ink cartridges provide a great cost-effective alternative to buying original equipment manufacturer (OEM) cartridges from the printer producer. Recycled cartridges are disassembled and cleaned, replacement parts added and the ink refilled to produce these cartridges. There are factors to take into consideration when choosing this option, and certain brands and practices will achieve better quality than others.

During the course of remanufacturing printer cartridges, the cartridges are rebuilt by hand meaning they must be checked for any errors following this. Some manufacturers do not test their cartridges due to the costs involved, and for this reason may not be a reliable choice in case of errors in a cartridge. This may not only affect the quality of printout, but also the correct functioning of your printer. It is also extremely important that the components used in the remanufactured cartridge are of high quality: if they are they will provide excellent quality printouts, though the components required will vary according to different printer models.

1. Check The Page Yield

One of the most important considerations when purchasing a remanufactured cartridge is how much you can print before it runs out of ink, otherwise known as the "page yield". The standard test of the yield of a cartridge is by noting how many pages can be printed at 5% page coverage. Some remanufactured cartridge companies may only quote the OEM yield, or will not quote a yield for their cartridge at all, so it is important to be wary when looking at this information.

2. Does The Manufacturer Produce Specific Models For Your Printer?

Check to see if the remanufactured cartridge seller uses one toner across all printer cartridges or different toners for different models. The toner used will work differently according to the model, and often the yield will be improved when a toner is used to match an individual printer model.

3. Verify Page Ink Density Is Up To Standards

You will also want to make sure that the quality of your printouts are up to standard, where the density of the ink will measure how dark text will be printed. This should normally fall between the range of 1.3 and 1.6, though this number should only be formulated after a number of cartridges have been tested and you must make sure that the manufacturer does so.

4. OEM Brand Labels Should Not Be Present

Importantly it is illegal to leave the OEM brand on remanufactured cartridges, so check that the cartridges are labeled correctly and informatively, letting you know exactly what you are purchasing and which models the cartridge is for.

Bear these factors in mind and there is no reason why you will not achieve top results with a remanufactured cartridge.

Where Can I Find Remanufactured Ink Cartridges That Meet The Above Criteria?

Carries a wide selection of remanufactured ink.

Conforms to strict remanufacturing standards to deliver quality ink products.

Today I'm going to go a bit into the more numerical side of determining what kind of performance you can get out of a given inkjet cartridge. I'll cover some of the basic terms that you'll encounter when purchasing and comparing inkjet cartridges, and hopefully give you a better idea of what exactly they mean so you can make more educated buying decisions.

Defining Page Yield

The straightforward and short definition of page yield is that it is the number of pages that can be printed out of a given cartridge. However, you may ask - wouldn't this number differ based on the type of printing that was done? For example, if "Draft" printer settings were used throughout the life of a printer cartridge, that cartridge would certainly produce more pages than a ink cartridge used on the "High Quality" setting.

The answer is that page yield is measured using a standard called 5% page coverage. The definition of 5% page coverage is approximately the amount of ink used to print a 8.5 inch x 11 inch page with a light heading and title, and three paragraphs of double spaced text.

Therefore, the amount of printed pages you'll be able to get out of your printer varies on how the average amount you print compares to this 5% page coverage. If you regularly print photos from your printer, your page yield will be significantly lower than the manufacturer's quoted page yield, and vice versa if you usually print on "Draft" settings with only a few lines of text on average.

How Is Page Yield Officially Determined?

If you're really interested in how exactly this figure is obtained, then check out the official International Organization for Standardization writeups for page yield, titled "Method for the determination of ink cartridge yield for colour inkjet printers".

Or you could just take our word for it...