Anyone use Generic Ink Cartriges?

I recently purchased 10 Generic black ink cartriges for my old Epson Stylus 640. I plugged one in to my printer and I cannot get any ink on paper. Clogged nozzle? I used the clean function 15 times or so. I am debating if its the printer or the cartrige. I can try another cartrige or buy another Epson 640 printer for $30. anyone have any ideas whats going on? BTW, color prints out fine.

I have had good luck with megatoner cartridges in my Epson 880. Hope it holds because I just ordered 18 more. The black cartridges are only $1.85 a pop and the color a buck more. The ink was the main reason I snagged some 880s = cheap printing.

you probably let the printhead dry out.
try an eyedropper of alcohol or windex down the ink tube.
let it sit a while even overnight if needed.do a bunch of clean cycles to clear it out and get fresh ink in.
common epson problem.

I've had a horrible experience with generic ink cartridges a few years ago. That was the turning point that forced me to get a laser printer...

I bought a couple of generic black and color ink cartridges, forgot what name it was, and installed it into my Epson 740 printer. Long and behold, my first print didn't come out. No ink. Did the head cleaning operation, and then SNAAAAAP! Turned off the printer immediately, opened up the front and found, to my horror, that the cartridge had bursted open near the bottom! Ink all over the place! What's worse, was that the plastic rotor at the end of the rolling blade (pulling the cartridge) is broken. Printer toasted. And all this, THE EVENING of my research paper being due.

Good thing Fry's is open 'till 9pm...

I tried a $4 black cartridge in my Epson C40. It didn't print right. Nozzle cleaning didn't help. I immediately went to Compusa and paid $17 for the Epson ink. After another nozzle cleaning it started working.

I only use the Epson cartridges now.

Picked up a Canon BJC-1000 3 years ago (30-50 $, cheapest in the shop). No black cartridge. Bought a not-so-cheap generic cartridge (BC-02, the head is included). Output sucked big time after the first 100 pages (you should get 500 pages with BC-02). Switched to "high quality" from the driver. Good for another 100-200 pages (slower). Bought 3 times same canon ink (3-4$/100 ml). To make a long story short, the "original" generic cartridge printed ~6000-8000 pages ! And still works (only once I used hot water to clean the head). Surprinsingly, the mechanics still works (buy if I put more than 15-20 pages in the tray I have problems, if the paper is thin).

I used to service HP LaserJets. Not much work on desktop inkjets, just mail them off for replacement. But with the LaserJets, almost all problems could be traced to non-name brand ink cartridges. And this was in a department which produced 250,000 sheets of output per month. That's a ton of paper, literally, 2000 pounds. If I had an inkjet, I'd likely hunt down the cheapest price for factory ink. I'd also avoid those cheap, <$100 printers, because they often come with low-capacity carts, forcing you to buy new ink very quickly, but keeping the initial purchase cost low.

My 0.02USD, best of luck.

For about the past 4-5 years I have used non-OEM cartridges in all my printers (including when I had a good number of printers in commercial use for quick customer output, including photo proofs). I've had as good or even better results with cartridges from carrotink.com than with the OEM Seiko-Epson cartridges.

The Carrot Ink cartridges aren't really "generic" and they aren't "cheap" but they do save on a lot of money on printer supplies compared to the OEM units. To the best of my knowledge Carrot doesn't "refill" any catridges, but only used their own new product. I've not had a single failure of any of their cartridges in any of several models of Epson printer in heavy use over the years.

I suppose that's why they've gone from a mom-n-pop garage operation to the largest on-line printer ink cartridge supplier in 5 years - quality. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

As long as the ink cart is quality, I'm sure it's fine. We were always cleaning up after and tossing out carts refilled by companies we'd never heard of.

Just want to make sure I didn't sound like I was disparaging all non-manufacturer ink. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

Snakebite all I got to say is ''You da man!'' The alcohol idea worked!

I used some remanufactured Hp 45A and 78A cartridges (purchased 2 color and 5 black).
On one color cartridge, it leaked one color.
The other color cartridge wouldn't print cyan, even after cleaning with alcohol and other tricks.
I have had better luck with the 45As, but out of 5, I had two that the printer wouldn't recognize. It would tell me to immediately change the cartridge and wouldn't print.

These remanufactured cartridges looked like they had not just been filled once. They looked WELL used before I got them.

I went back to HP supplies.
After tossing 2 blacks and two colors, I was behind in money.