Like the razor industry, which sells you a cheap razor then robs you blind on the blades, inkjet vendors used to sell their printers for a song, then charge incredible prices for ink. I once owned a Lexmark inkjet whose black ink cartridge cost more than the printer. I never refilled it.

Over the years, ink prices have dropped from the absurd to mostly affordable, but not before spawning an entire industry based on lowering those ridiculous ink costs--with cheaper cartridges and ways to refill old ones. It's the latter practice that spawned SSC Service Utility. This free program that allows you to reset various parameters on Epson Stylus printer cartridges, including the ink counters that generate out-of-ink messages.

Why reset the counters? So that after you've refilled a cartridge, you don't have to live with warning messages that the printer is low on ink when it isn't. In some of these cases, the printer might not even let you print. The SSC Service Utility has one other very nice feature. It allows you to clean the color and black print heads separately. This saves ink when only one or the other is clogged while the built-in routines will clean all the heads whether they require it or not.

Alas, SSC only supports the older Epson Stylus printers of the models listed on SSC's Web site. However, those are the printers that may still carry hefty ink costs--or even worse, may have no available consumables, forcing you to refill your own or buy refurbished cartridges.

Whatever your reason for refilling your cartridges for one of the listed printers, the SSC Service utility helps you eke out that last bit of ink. Please note that if by some chance, your older Epson Stylus is still under warranty, using non-Epson cartridges may void it.

--Jon L. Jacobi