I received a pretty cool Canon IP4500 printer as a gift when I left UCT from the UCTRF a couple of years ago, and it has happily sat in my home office ever since. Of course, now that Chantelle is running her own little business here from home, it has been roped back into action for all her invoice printing, meaning of course that pretty soon it was hungrily asking for more ink cartridges.
Sadly, Canon appears to still be charging a premium for the cartridges it uses (which is silly bearing in mind that this printer is now pretty old), meaning that to replace the cartridges with originals would cost a small fortune and as per usual, it far is cheaper just to buy a new printer which at least comes with some ink.
So instead I opted for the refill route, and after a bit of Internet searching came across Cartridge King, formerly part of the Cartridge Warehouse franchise, situated in the easily found Twin Oaks Centre down main road Somerset West. They specialize in printer cartridge refilling, re-conditioning and the import of generic compatible cartridges, and appear to have been around for a good number of years already.
A quick phone call to their landline at 021 852 8606 confirmed that it would cost me just over R220 to replace three of my cartridges with Chinese manufactured AcuInk compatibles (turns out that these have dropped so much in price that it is cheaper just to use them than to bother with refilling!), and one no hassles pick-up later my printer was back in action, happily spewing out all Chantelle’s printed invoices.
In other words, a business card worth keeping then.
