I am participating in the #HPInkChallenge where we’ll put original and refill inks to a test to see the difference between the two. I received two free HP Deskjet 3510 printers and supplies from HP as well as a gift card to purchase refilled cartridges in order to participate the Challenge. All opinions and views expressed are my own.

Great news! I’m excited to announce that I’m participating in the HP Ink Challenge and for the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing my findings with you!

What exactly is the HP Ink Challenge? Basically, I’ll be comparing original and refill inks. I’ll be printing multiple documents in the span of a few weeks and, for each document, I will be printing 2 sets — one set using original and one set using refill. Every week, I’ll be printing at least 15 pages of text and image-heavy documents and I’m very excited to see the results!

You see, I love saving money. And if that means I’ll have to purchase refills, then I will do so. But the thing is, many people say that the hassles and the quality of refills isn’t worth the money and that purchasing original ink is still worth the money in the long run. Now, I actually have the opportunity to test that.

I received 2 reams of multipurpose letter-sized paper, a pack of HP specialty paper, 2 sets of original HP ink cartridges — one new and unused, and one that’s almost empty. I set the 2 printers up to see if both are working well. Since I’m not new to setting up printers at home, it took me just a few minutes to get everything set and ready to go. And after verifying everything, I had the almost-empty cartridge refilled at Costco (cost me $22 for both black and color inks).

For Week 1, I printed out 15 pages — 10 pages of which is image-heavy. Here are some photos of the documents I printed. For each page printed, I tried to see if there was any difference. But I found the Costco refills to be really good. There wasn’t much of a difference between the two and if not for the notes I wrote at the back of each page, I probably wouldn’t know which page was printed using the original and the refill.

So my findings for Week 1 is this: There isn’t much of a difference between the Original and the Refill for this test that I ran. The Refill is pretty much comparable to the Original in this 15-page test print.

Do you think I’ll get the same results for next week? Watch out for my next #HPInkChallenge update to find out!

I am participating in the #HPInkChallenge where we’ll put original and refill inks to a test to see the difference between the two. I received two free HP Deskjet 3510 printers and supplies from HP as well as a gift card to purchase refilled cartridges in order to participate the Challenge. All opinions and views expressed are my own.