Order of the Bath

There is a saying that printer ink is more costly than gold. I haven’t done the sums but don’t doubt it.

When you buy a printer, apart from quality, cost is a major consideration. But it is not just the original purchase price, but the ongoing cost of consumables. The paper is a known factor and you chose according to need; most papers will work and you pick the one you like. What you have little control over is the ink, because they use proprietary cartridges that are not interchangeable.

There is a bit of an argument at the moment about who’s system is cheapest to run with lots of statistics and studies being published to prove one case (260K PDF) or the other (1.9MB PDF). The factors that come into play are

• how much of the mechanism you have to replace with the cartridge
• how much is actually left when the printer decides it is empty
• in a multi colour cartridge, how much is left of the other colours when one goes empty
• the actual cost of the ink

Logic would suggest that a separate colour system should be more efficient than a multi colour system. In practice, it helps, but doesn’t make a huge difference unless you print a lot of stuff with a limited range of colours—the company logo for instance. The exception is that it makes sense for the black to be separate because plain text and pictures, especially photos, have different requirements.

Similarly, replacing the print head with the cartridge would seem to be an extravagance but for very light users this may be a sensible option because blockage is more likely to happen and this is an easy way to solve it without replacing the whole device.

Mechanisms that decide when the cartridge is empty have been the cause of complaints when they are too cautious. Also, if they rely on some proprietary chip, then this can hinder refill companies reusing the cartridge because they can’t be reset to “full”.

My personal preference, and that of Which, is the Canon ink tank system where the refill consists of nothing but a plastic container with the ink and a bit of sponge. No electronics at all and a separate tank for each colour. I believe the “out of ink” warnings are done by photo-cell, one on the tank for the “running low” warning and another on the feed to the head for “right out” and when they say out, they are really dry. We have never had a problem with it but we do a reasonable amount of printing which keeps the heads clean. After half a dozen colour refill sets we [correction] are ahead by one magenta cartridge which was a surprise as a regular print job has a lot of red have used one more magenta and one less yellow catridge which seems reasonable considering what we print most.

BUT, when it comes down to it, the main factor on cost-per-page is marketing. It is well known that the initial cost of the printer is subsidised. The manufacture costs of the cartridges are very much lower than what you have to pay and the price is set by how they recover this subsidy. Competition is fierce and, now, how they figure in the cost war will have a major impact. You can control this to some extent by going to a refill company or third party supplier. The manufacturers, of course, claim that their ink is special, but I have never found a problem with using cheaper supplies. So when you do your research, see what is available and how much it really costs.

Thanks to Windows Secrets for some of the background links and the topic idea.

This entry was posted on 9 Jul 2007 at 13:36 by Rick and is filed under Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.