Inkjet printers have come down to almost no cost. You can purchase a really good inkjet printer for $70, and a still-respectable one for $30. However, they just SUCK up the ink. If you search the internet for information on the purchase of an ink jet printer, which I recently did, you’ll find everybody complaining about the cost of the ink. The fact is, you almost pay as much for the ink jet cartridges as you would if you bought a whole printer. That’s when refilling inkjet cartridges comes into play.

Printer costs $30, color cartridge costs $20; black-and-white costs $14. You think I’m kidding? Just look for yourself. Some inkjet printers have all of the colors the printer takes in one module and the black cartridge as a separate cartridge. The advantage of those is, when the color cartridge runs out, you don’t have to replace everything. Or, if the black-and-white is what you always use, you don’t have to replace the color cartridge. This is when refilling inkjet cartridges starts looking good.

The very cheapest inkjet printers oftentimes have only one cartridge. It will contain all of the color cartridges combined with the black-and-white cartridge in the same unit. The most expensive inkjet printers have six or seven colors and one black cartridge. Whether they separate out the various colors tends to have to do with how many colors the cartridge has. When you buy refill kits, they generally are either for refilling three-color cartridges (cyan, magenta, and yellow) or four-color cartridges (cyan, magenta, yellow and black). So, refilling inkjet cartridges isn’t a thing that everybody will be able to do.

Since the 1400s, people have known that you can mix different colors together to make the colors of the rainbow. However, they were incorrect as to which were the three additive primary colors. Back, then and in art schools even today, they will tell you that the three primary colors are Red, Yellow and Blue. They are wrong, of course. The real three primary colors are Magenta (what they’re calling red), Yellow and Cyan (what they’re calling blue).

They tell you that if you mix blue with yellow you get green; and if you mix that dark blue they say is the primary, you get a rather brown/green. It’s the easiest to fool yourself into thinking it’s really green at least. After that, things fall apart with their system of lies. You mix what they call red (closest color in art stores is called cadmium red) to yellow and you get a really brown/orange. Compare it with an orange and you’ll see the difference immediately. That isn’t orange. You get a pure beautiful orange, however, if you mix yellow with magenta. Poof, there it is, a beautiful orange. The reason they didn’t use magenta in the middle ages? There was no such color that you could get from minerals or vegetables that comes close to magenta.

To make purple is even worse, though. Mix that blue they suggest is ‘blue’ in the color wheel, which has its closest counterpart to ‘Ultramarine Blue’, and you get a very brown purple. On the other hand, if you mix cyan to magenta, you get a true beautiful deep purple.

So, that’s why they use the real primary colors of Cyan, Magenta and Yellow in an inkjet cartridge. If you mix all three of those together, however, you don’t really get black. You get a muddy brown color. IF all three colors were pure colors, you’d end up with black. Because they’ don’t, they need to also use black in order to print a black color. Kits for refilling inkjet cartridges, then, tend to either have cyan/yellow/magenta/black, or just cyan/magenta/yellow or black all by itself. The instructions are always included.