How to refill Canon 210 and 210XL ink cartridges

This post will teach you how to refill your own Canon 210 and 210XL ink cartridges and make them last even longer.

It’s a known fact that these ink cartridges have lasted the longest in Canon printers, and have also been chosen by two printer generations: the PIXMA and MP series. In all honesty, they are great ink cartridges with high print quality, which I believe has a lot to do with the fact that they’re manufactured in Japan.

Japan’s a country we’ve all come to know for their product quality, a factor that could be related to the very elevated prices these ink cartridges run for. This has led many people to consider refilling their Canon 210 and 210XL ink cartridges.

Further down below, you will find every instruction you must follow in order to refill these ink cartridges, and several suggestions just in case any inconvenience should arise after the refill process has been completed.

Instructions to refill Canon 210 and 210XL Black ink cartridges:

1. The most important thing you must do before refilling an ink cartridge is placing it on a surface that can take an ink spill.

However, due to their high manufacturing quality,  these ink cartridges don’t seem capable of causing an ink spill: the ink cannot escape the cartridge even if it has been overfilled. We do recommend you place it on a napkin or piece of cloth, preferably a black one.
2. Remove the upper label on every single ink cartridge. We do recommend you take it off completely rather than leaving it one, as many other people do. By moving them in this manner, we gain control over the ink cartridge and can leave it exactly as it was when it left the factory.

canon black 210

3. Now you must look out for a small orifice that will allow air to enter the ink cartridge and contribute to the printing process. We suggest you introduce the syringe’s needle through this same hole; if this is not possible, try piercing it. However, we’d prefer it if you didn’t drill it unless absolutely necessary. This is what drilling looks like.

drilling ink cartridge

4. Fill the syringe up with 15ml of ink, the proper amount of ink you will need to inject into the ink cartridge. Please keep in mind this is all the ink you’re supposed to use, and that adding more than this is completely unnecessary.

To find out the exact amount of ink your ink cartridge uses, take a look at our post Page yield, or how many pages you can print out of your ink cartridges.

5. Very slowly, inject the entire amount of ink through the orifice. This ink cartridge may start releasing a bit of ink from the bottom, near the ink head. It’s okay if this happens, it’s perfectly normal and you don’t need to be surprised if it actually happens. This is why we suggested you kept a napkin or piece of cloth around.

ink for canon pg-210 cartridge

6. You can now place the labels back on the ink cartridges, trying to put them exactly as they were before. We recommend you have the printer execute a cleaning process by printing test sheets, just to make sure everything’s working out properly. 

We also suggest you leave the ink cartridge inside the printer for about 8 hours, allowing the ink to flow through and saturate the entire printer.

7. After refilling this kind of ink cartridge, the printer may need to be restored every single time they’re removed from it. In this case, we suggest you reset them.Right now we’re working with a restoring procedure that may not suit your actual printer model, but that is compatible with your ink cartridge type:

• How to restore Canon MP280 printers

If you have any other question, please post a comment in the section below this post. We will answer your every inquiry as soon as possible.