Now we have already discussed some of the disadvantages of refilling the Epson cartridges for the C80, C82, 960, 200 and other printers that use these cartridges.

Where is the light at the end of the tunnel?

In my opinion it comes in the form of aftermarket cartridges. If you have not yet purchased one of these yet you may want to try one. There are a variety of companies manufacturing aftermarket cartridges for the Epson printers listed above.

But this is only the beginning of the story. For the aftermarket industry to manufacture cartridges for the Epson printers they had to come up with a design that was different from Epson's design. Epson has a patent on this new design. The aftermarket cartridge makers could not simply duplicate the cartridges.

If you purchase just about any aftermarket cartridge and open it up what you will find is a sponge. Yes, the tried and true sponge that has been so beneficial for so many cartridges for so long.

Below I have images of two different cartridge manufactures aftermarket versions of the OEM cartridge. Both of these cartridges use a sponge material to retain ink instead of multiple chambers and pressure.

We all know that sponge based cartridges are easy to refill. The only thing you really need to do is replenish to existing sponge.

I have outlined below the refill process for these cartridges using a third party sponge based cartridge.

1. Tape the bottom of the cartridge. Using any decent grade adhesive tape seal the bottom of the cartridge.*
2. Locate the original fill hole on the top of the cartridge. This can actually be accomplished by running a screw driver along the top of the cartridge or even a screw eye (show on the upper right of the picture). Typically you'll find the original fill hole when you locate an indentation on the label. In many cases you'll also find that the cartridges have two layers of plastic seals. The first and topmost is not really a seal, but an identification label. The second one below the identification label is the true cartridge seal. In the case of the cartridge above I was able to completely remove the original top label and move it to the side of the cartridge exposing the original fill hole.
3. Once you have located the original fill hole you can use a screw eye or drill bit and reopen the original fill hole.
4. Fill your injector with the desired amount of ink.
5. Inject ink into the cartridge slowly (slower than that)
6. Seal the top of the cartridge.

A very simple process that is far less susceptible to failure.
As a matter of fact in our testing we were able to achieve at 96% success rate over 9 users refilling 45 different cartridges nearly 300 times.

Our success rate by the way with the OEM cartridges came to 9% (22 cartridges were refilled and 2 functioned).

This now brings us to the final problem and Epson's most infamous of late... The Chip.

To get an Epson cartridge to function properly your printer must be capable of seeing that the cartridge is present. This is done by the ridiculous intellidge chip. The chip located on the front of the cartridge will fail once a cartridge is used up (used up according to the printer).

Though resetters are available for these chips they are designed to work with OEM chips only and not the third party chips.

I would like to make mention that Epson printers are designed to recognize non-OEM chips. Typically when you insert a non-OEM cartridge a message will pop up stating the cartridge is not an Epson cartridge.

This is where the fun really begins. Take a look at the image below. This scan of three chips shows the Epson original chip and two aftermarket chips. If you are attempting to refill and want to be very successful at it you need to acquire aftermarket cartridges that are using the same sized chips as Epson chips.

Why the same size? Once you have refilled your aftermarket cartridge you are going to replace the aftermarket chip with the OEM chip from your original Epson cartridge. Then using a chip resetter reset the chip.

The image below simply shows the replaced chips. The cartridge below is an aftermarket cartridge that now contains the Epson chip. The real cool part of doing all this is that your printer will believe these are Epson cartridges. No warning message, no error message and none of those "bluish print problems"

Additional observation.
We have found that the typical refill is still about 14cc on the aftermarket cartridges. This is not due to the efficiency of the refill or the original cartridge, but the chip itself. The chip is designed to stop functioning at a certain point and this appears to be it.