By Peter on 11 July 2024

A great replacement cartridge for my 17 year old Epson Stylus Pro 3800 photo printer. I bought a whole set of 9, but have only had to install the Yellow today. Worked perfectly! Printer LCD menu ink guage says 100% and no complaints about non-genuine cartridge. The Epson v6.63 Windows printer driver also shows the new cartridge as full on the gauge. Epson Status Monitor 3 ink info interrogates the Yellow cartridge as being 'EPSON genuine' and with a production date of '2015/06' (the date of the chip?). After a cleaning cycle and printing a full colour A4 photo, the Yellow gauge on the printer LCD read 99%, so is working. At a 45% saving to a set of OEM Epson cartridges, they are a bargain. Arrived next day and well packaged in boxes with air tight bags and foam. The label on these cartridges say 'Do not install beyond the expiry date', but there is no date printed on them. But as the OEM cartridge I swapped out had an expiry date of 2009 on it but still worked fine down to 4% when I swapped it today (July 2024), I hope these remanufactured ones will be just as long lived. The OEM cartridges do not dry out as the ink is in an air-tight bladder inside the cartridge body and has a spring loaded one way valve. The printer squeezes ink out of the bladder (like a tube of toothpaste) by pumping air into the cartridge body. I can't see ink sloshing around in the remanufactured translucent plastic cartridges, so I assume it's in a bladder as well. Some cartridges are translucent white and embossed 'made in China' in the plastic. Others are opaque dark grey and embossed 'made in Japan'. Which you get seems random.