It can be said that I tend to assume that I am right. I mean, I don’t mean to be that way, but it is an instinct that usually serves me well. And then there are THOSE times…

Well, recently I had one of the THOSE times. I needed to get new ink cartridges for an ink jet printer that I keep convenient to my MacBook, but I refused to pay the war price that the manufacturer charged for their original ink cartridges. So, armed with the inspiration that any remanufactured cartridge would work just fine, I ht the web searching for a cheaper alternative.

After a bit of searching I found a great deal online for a generous pack of remanufactured cartridges at a very good price. I placed the order, and in a few days the cartridges arrived as expected. But then things went sour.

The first clue that there was a problem is that the cartridges were a bit harder to get into place than genuine ink cartridges. Instead of a gentle snap of a new cartridge, it required extra pressure and resounded with a curious “thunk”. But everything seemed to check out okay, so I went ahead and closed the bay door and fired up the printer. I wasn’t pleased with the extra pressure needed to load the cartridge, but as long as it printed okay all was good.

Well, all wasn’t good. Printing a picture from the Preview app yielded a strange image with odd coloring in different areas. Applying a gazelle intense study of the printout convinced me that some of the brand new remanufactured cartridges were not properly dispensing ink as a good cartridge seemed to take a delight in doing. In fact, there was little delightful in the printout at all.

I switched out the suspected bad cartridges for others that I had received (I told you it was a good price, if not exactly a good cartridge source), and the same thing happened with a test run. Resolved to my fate for the moment, I went ahead and printed out a needed document using Word. And that’s when I was surprised – the printout worked.

For some reason, the only app that correctly printed with the cheap toner cartridges was Microsoft Word. Everything else I tried had the same dancing color effect. I even tried using Pixelmator, my usual go to app for anything graphical, and it too suffered the curse of the lousy cartridge. I gave up on the mechanics and decided that Word was doing a great job of half toning the image and in the process was working around the defect of the toner cartridges. I spent the next week printing EVERYTHING through Word by pasting it into a new document. Some things required much more effort to fit on the page than it was worth, but I figured it was part of the penance.

Finally I bought some new but better priced genuine toner cartridges and ink cartridges, and never looked at refurbished versions again. I had used Word as my end all printing proxy, and I didn’t want to go back. Needless to say, I changed my ways – I now buy printing supplies smarter, not just cheaper. Lesson learned and duly noted.