by Stuart Le Grice

Created on: September 24, 2010

If there’s one thing that bugs me about ink cartridges it’s that when one of the colours runs out you have to replace the whole cartridge. No matter if you still have plenty of red and blue ink, if you’ve been printing plenty of yellow rich pictures then there is no way around it, and you have to waste the lot. This is a pricey and wasteful approach to printer cartridge management, especially in this day of recycling and frugal awareness where we are all trying to make the pennies stretch just that little bit further. Thankfully HP 364 ink cartridges offer a solution to this, thanks to the clever idea of having different cartridges for each colour – that way when you use all of the blue ink before the red or yellow you simple replace it individually, eliminating ink

waste at a stroke. I cannot believe I have only just started using a printer and cartridges like this, and dread to think how much perfectly good ink I have had to dispose of while using the old style cartridges.

Installing the Cartridges

Usually I only have to think about changing ink cartridges and I end up covered in the stuff. It’s not that I’m particularly clumsy, and I know my way around printers and computing hardware, I just for some reason get it on my fingers, hand and face no matter how careful I am. Thankfully this hard to clean up messiness seems to be in the past now, thanks to some simple click and press installation. For my HP Photosmart printer there are five cartridges to install – the usual black, magenta, cyan and yellow are joined by a cartridge called Photo-black, which I am reliably informed is used to elicit professional print lab quality pictures, while resisting smudging, fading and water damage. To install, all you have to do is remove an orange plastic tab from the cartridge and slot it into the corresponding port in the printer, where a reassuring click confirms proper installation. Depending on the printer model some even show a video demonstration on the touch screen to walk you through the process; it really doesn’t get any simpler than that! Once the cartridges are installed you have the option to calibrate or print a test page to make sure all of the cartridges are fitted and working as they should be. During use Ink levels are displayed on screen and on the printers display, and they seem pretty accurate in displaying the correct levels. You get a warning when the cartridge is getting low, and then another when it

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