Fully functional and undamaged printer cartridges are required for remanufacturing
Unfortunately, normal wear and tear cannot be prevented
Burnt-out Nozzles in Inkjet Cartridges
Contrary to what the name suggests, ink in an inkjet printer does not come out of the cartridge in a stream, but rather in many small droplets. These droplets are ejected from tiny round nozzles, several hundred of which are hidden in the fingernail-sized nozzle plate.
Undamaged nozzles at 1,000x magnification:
In the image (red circle): Undamaged nozzles on a nozzle plate at 1,000x magnification. This cartridge can be refilled.
Each nozzle also contains a tiny heating element. To propel the ink toward the paper, the heating element vaporizes a small amount of ink, and the expanding gas bubble ejects the droplet. This is why the printing process is also called bubble jet.
As the cartridge runs low, less and less ink cools the heating element, until it eventually burns out. This generates so much heat in the nozzle that it blows away the exit area on the nozzle plate. Small craters form, and sometimes the metal even discolors from the heat. This happens when several adjacent nozzles are affected at once.
Burnt-out nozzles at 1,000x magnification:
In the image (red circle): So many adjacent nozzles have burned out here that parts of the nozzle plate have been blown off. This cartridge will never print properly again.
This problem occurs much more frequently with tri-color cartridges than with black cartridges, because tri-color cartridges have two additional colors that aren’t yet empty. As a result, a color cartridge runs dry faster than a black cartridge, and more nozzles run dry and overheat.
Whether it’s a black or color cartridge, burned-out nozzles cannot be repaired; therefore, the cartridge cannot be refilled and is unsuitable for our buyback program. But at least it worked in your printer until the very last drop.
More information on defects and damage to ink cartridges