On Sat, 18 Aug 2012 18:46:20 -0700, Oren wrote:

The few ink cartridges I refilled (and my last) I used a
syringe to fill them. Messy is saying it lightly

Oh. I know. I know Oren. I have had blue fingers many times!

The HP cartridges I had were actually tanks with sponges in them.
So, you had to not overfill them, or they leaked.
But you had to fill them before they went too dry or they leaked.
Plus you had to drill the hole in the right spot or they leaked.
Even so, you had to deal with the time stamps that they burned
into the ink tank at the factory. There was no way around that.

You 'could' get past the time stamps they put in the printer
memory for the cartridge. I tried the CMOS battery trick and
shorting a pin on the motherboard ... but what worked best was
to have THREE cartridges because the printer would only remember
the unique id of the last two!

But all that effort simply turned me off because HP made it
difficult on purpose to refill the ink in the ink tanks.

Note: Technically, these weren't cartridges because the ink jets
were separate from the ink tanks in my HP all in one printer.

No more HP in my location....

I'm OK with my HP LASER printer ... but I too will NEVER ever
buy another HP inkjet in my entire life!

Contrast all that mess with the inkjets with the trivial refill
of the B&W toner on the laserjet and I'm a believer in laser printers!

Hence the quest for a refillable color laser printer.