Printer ink is expensive; there is no getting around that fact. If you do a lot of printing on an inkjet printer at home you may end up spending more than you would expect.
We are going to look at why ink costs so much, whether recycled, ‘compatible’ or ‘remanufactured’ cartridges do the job, and at other ways to save money on printing.
Total cost of ownership
If you only look at the up-front price of printers, costs have come down significantly in the past 30 years. With the advent of inkjet and then laser printing for the home, prices have dropped and it is now possible to pick up a new inkjet printer for less than £40, or a new laser printer for less than £70.
Advertisement
The up-front cost of the printer is only a small part of the cost of printing. In fact, for some printers it is the least important part. Printer manufacturers use a measure called total cost of ownership (TCO), which measures how much a printer will cost over its lifetime, or over a set number of years.
If you are going to invest in a new printer, it is important to find out, as far as possible, what the TCO is likely to be for that model of printer. That enables users to make an informed decision about which printer is going to give them the best value.
Of course, the cheapest printer is not always the best. There are other factors such as print speed, quality and reliability (which also adds to the TCO. If you have to replace parts or pay to have it fixed, that adds to the cost).
Why ink costs so much
Modern ink cartridges are surprisingly complicated. The ink is fired from the cartridge up to 36,000 times a second to produce what we see on the page. A standard 4×6in photo can contain 35 million ink drops.
Thom Brown of printer and ink manufacturer HP told us that it spends three to five years perfecting each new ink it introduces, testing up to 1,000 prototype formulas and that it spends $1bn (£650m) a year on inkjet research and development.
HP’s most recent study, in 2007, showed that one in five recycled cartridges failed in some way, but no original HP cartridges failed in testing – we will look later on at whether those claims add up.
Printers themselves are quite cheap (some cost as little as £30 in sale deals), but it can be almost as expensive to replace the ink tanks once they dry up.
In part, the cost of ink allows the printer companies to offset some of the money they spend on developing their printers by making a higher profit on ink.
That has led to a healthy market in ‘third-party’ ink supplies, but as you might expect, with such an outlay on their inks, printer manufacturers see the trade in refilled and recycled cartridges as a threat.
Compatible or recycled?
There are two main types of third-party cartridges, known as ‘compatible’ and ‘recycled’. Compatible cartridges are made from scratch by a company unrelated to the printer maker. They are made to look and feel just like original inks, but they are cheaper.
These have been quite popular in the past but are less so now because of the complexity of the cartridges – partly as a response to compatible cartridges, printer makers have made their own designs more complex so they cannot be copied so easily.
The third-party companies’ response to that was to develop so-called ‘remanufactured’ or recycled cartridges. As the name suggests, these are original ink cartridges, made by printer makers such as HP or Epson. The other manufacturers collect used, empty cartridges and refill them with their own ink, making what is in effect a new cartridge.
Advertisement
Printer manufacturers say the cartridges they produce are delicate and the process of refilling could damage them and in turn the printer. They also say that the cartridges are only designed to be used once.
We spoke to the UK Cartridge Remanufacturers Association (UKCRA). Its chairman Keith Moss said: “We are aware of the delicate nature of the cartridges and we go out of the way to refill them delicately.”
Disputing HP’s assertion that recycled cartridges are prone to failure, Mr Moss said: “There are millions of people who are regular users of [recycled] cartridges who would disagree. If that was the case to a large extent, we would not have a business.”
Some ink cartridges have an integrated print head – the part of the printer that does the printing – so this is replaced along with the cartridge. Some manufacturers use this method, while others have simpler cartridges without their own print heads.
Some companies use a mix of both – cheaper printers use integrated-print-head cartridges to reduce the up-front printer price and expensive ranges use ink-only cartridges.
Fill it yourself
Besides ready-made cartridges, there are other ways to refill your printer, using either a refilling kit or a continuous ink supply system. Inkjet refills, often sold by the same companies as recycled cartridges, are supplied as large bottles of printer ink.
They come with syringes or other devices that allow the ink to be injected directly into your used cartridges. However, while the savings from such methods can be high, it is a complicated method that can get very messy.
Also, many ink cartridges come with a built-in expiry date. When it reaches that date the printer will no longer accept ink from that cartridge.
Advertisement
If you are interested in refilling your printer, check that it does not use cartridges that expire. If it does check if the expiry dates can be reset (many can), usually using a piece of software. Check your printer maker’s website for details.
A continuous ink system works in a similar way. The kit comes with large ink tanks that sit outside the printer and connect to a set of special cartridges inside the printer. When ink is required it feeds through into the cartridges in the printer. These kits offer big savings but some printers may not be compatible.
To see if yours is, search the internet for your printer’s model number followed by ‘continuous ink’ or ‘CISS’.
Quality matters
Cost is not the only important factor in printing. Unless you are only printing text documents for your own use, the quality of the finished product is also crucial.
You can see the results from a head-to-head test between original inks and recycled cartridges carried out by an Australian PC World website.
In many cases they show that inks made by the printer manufacturer beat the others, but in the end it comes down to taste.
Using one set of third-party cartridges is very unlikely to do any damage to your printer, so if you are curious, it may be worth testing the cheaper cartridges against the original ones, and seeing whether there is any noticeable difference in print quality.
