Are third-party and refillable ink cartridges worth it?
Updated 2026-09-24
Often yes on price, sometimes no on whether they will work at all. Compatible cartridges can cost a fraction of the maker's own, and plenty of people use them for years without trouble. But some printers check the chip and refuse anything that is not genuine, some do it only after a firmware update, and a few are permanently committed to the maker's supplies by a programme enrolled during setup.
The saving is real, and so is the variance
Third-party cartridges commonly cost a third to a half of the maker's price. The ink is not always the same formulation, and owners report more variance in colour accuracy and drying time than with genuine supplies. For documents that rarely matters. For photographs sold to someone it can.
Whether they will work is the bigger question
Printers sold under a supplies programme reject non-genuine cartridges in firmware, permanently, as a condition of enrolment. Others have historically accepted anything and, owners report, stopped after a firmware update. It is not a brand-level rule, which is why the model matters — our catalogue marks the ones with a documented lock, and there is a guide listing the ones without.
Refillable tanks change the calculation
A tank printer's consumable is a bottle of ink, and the maker's own bottles are already cheap enough that the third-party saving is much smaller in absolute terms. Owners do use compatible bottles, and there is no chip to argue with — but the reason to buy a tank printer is that the genuine ink is affordable in the first place.
The warranty question
Using non-genuine supplies does not void a warranty by itself in most jurisdictions, but a maker can decline a claim if it can show the supplies caused the fault. In practice, the printers where this matters most are the ones that would refuse the cartridge anyway.