I've tried a variety of alternatives. A do-it-yourself refill kit from offered the best cost per page and print quality, but it also caused the most mess. 's remanufactured cartridges provided meager savings and middling output quality. The best option I've found so far is 's onsite refilling service, which saved me more than half the cost over the OEM ink, with little effort and acceptable print results.

This time I tried remanufactured cartridges from . The company sells toner and ink cartridges for assorted printers, including numerous HP, Canon, Dell, and Lexmark models. You've probably seen one of Cartridge World's 1700 retail stores, 650 of which are in the United States and Canada. You can also buy direct from the company's Website.

Because I used just one set of Cartridge World cartridges, and with only one printer, my experience is anecdotal and does not test the durability or archivability of third-party inks, nor how the printer will fare after repeated use with them. Nevertheless, my hands-on trials will give you a taste of what to expect if you try a third-party alternative with your own printer.

With both the HP and Cartridge World inks, I printed out a set of pages--ranging in content from plain text to a full-size color photo--over and over again until the ink started to run out (blank streaks appeared on the page). I counted the number of pages that printed before streaks appeared, to get a sample page yield. (In all my tests, such page yields will likely differ from those that HP or the third-party company quotes, just as your own mileage will vary depending on what you print.) I also compared the print quality of the pages using Cartridge World ink versus those printed with the HP cartridges.