A Year with InkRepublic – by Bob Peters

$1,120 worth of printer ink for $170?  That is the promise of InkRebublic (www.inkrepublic.com ).  I decided to try InkRepublic refill system for my Epson P600 about a year ago.  Here is my review of that system.

How it works:  The ink kit for the P600 comes with 9 empty custom cartridges, 9 syringes, 9 bottles of ink and a pair of plastic gloves.  The cartridges, syringes, and ink are all clearly labeled with the color ink to use and matches the Epson color designations.  Each bottle contains enough ink to fill a cartridge almost 4 times.  The custom cartridges have an extra hole and a special chip (for ventilating?).  Epson puts chips in the cartridges so that you have to buy their cartridges.  InkRepublic cartridges use a custom chip which is accepted by my printer but with a warning when you print that you are not using genuine Epson cartridges. 

The good:  Most important, the colors were good and matched the Epson ink well,  I had no trouble using the InkRepublic cartridges.  An Epson P600 ink cartridge contains 25.9 ml of ink. Each InkRepublic bottle of ink contains 100 ml of ink, enough for about four refills of each cartridge.  The kit costs $170.  A single set of nine cartridges from Epson costs $280, so 4 sets of cartridges from Epson is $1,120.  That is quite a difference.

The not-so-good:  The biggest problem I had as with the syringes.  The plunger in the syringes was very stiff.   I needed to very tightly hold the syringe base while I pulled the syringe out to fill.  The first fill the needles go sufficiently deep.  Subsequent fills require the plunger base to be pushed down into the top of the ink bottle.  This is also a very tight fit and is air tight.   Thus as ink is withdrawn a vacuum is created in the bottle, making it even harder to pull the plunger.  I now have several spots on my floor (which Epson says should last 100 years).  The second problem I had was also with the syringes.  Three of the needles fell off into the ink bottles and I could not extract them. 

Another problem I discovered is that if an InkRepublic cartridge is used when it has run out of ink, it stops working even after being refilled.  This cost me $80 for a repair when I could not get a refilled cartridge to print even after 8 cleaning cycles.  The repair center replaced the InkRepublic cartridge with an Epson cartridge and the printer returned to functional.  That happened again and I was able to get a cartridge to work again by pressurizing it with the syringe.  This also had an unfortunate side effect of spraying ink over my shirt and floor. 

Conclusion: You can save a lot of money using the InkRepublic system.  However, do your refills in the basement, wear old clothes, do not let your cartridge go dry, and tighten the needle on the syringe after every use.  Alternatively you can buy a complete set of 9 Epson inks on EBay for about $130.  These are unboxed so there is no way of telling the expiration date.