The Printer Ink Price Game

[MickinMD ★]

The Wrigley company originally sold laundry detergent and, to spur sales, decided to give away sticks of gum with the boxes of detergent.

Eventually they realized they'd make more selling gum.

Computer printers follow the Wrigley strategy.  They originally charged a lot for the printers: now printers are relatively cheap and they make their money from the ink!

As my printer approaches 6 years old, I thought I'd share my experiences with what the printer manufacturer considers dangerous-to-your-printer, cheap 3rd-party inks.  The cheap Amazon price for four cartridges, one each of the official Black, Yellow, Cyan, and Magenta inks is $63.90, an avg. $15.98/cartridge.  But you can get 24 same-as-official-size cartridges of 3rd-party ink, 12 Black and 4 of each color for $15.54, an avg. of $0.65 per cartridge!

While I had the new, official inks in my new printer, I went online and found a number of printer test pictures from Kodak and other sources, the best -with instructions for evaluating the various parts of the printer image - is here: http://www.outbackphoto.com/printinginsights/pi049/essay.html

and the test image (3700 x 2600 pixels) that goes with that site is here: http://www.jirvana.com/printer_tests/PrinterEvaluationImage_V002.zip

and here's a reduced-size version of it:

I printed the above image plus some other color and text images with the official ink and filed them away. I replaced them with the cheap inks from the 12-pack (below) and after using the 2nd cheap ink cartridge in each of the 4 cartridge colors to make sure no original ink remained, I printed the same photos.  They were virtually identical!  People who looked at the above image found three very small places where there was a slight difference between the original and the cheap inks - and they liked the cheap ink better in two of the three places!  Neither the cheap nor original inks did the strawberries really well (on plain paper).

I've been using the cheap inks for about 5 years, with no clogging or other problems.

So my advice is to try 3rd party inks, making a test print of original and cheap inks.

 

For those interested in the boring minutia, Here are the details:

The Brother Printer I bought in 2013 was their top-of-the-line home and small business full-page-copier/fax/printer and on sale at Amazon for $113.93:

Brother does use 4 cartridges, Black, Yellow, Cyan, and Magenta, which saves money over printers with one color cartridge that needs replacing if just one color is out.

Right now, the printer's software is warning me I'm low on yellow ink: actually, looking at the cartridge the yellow ink level is higher: it reads 0 ink at a point higher than the bottom of the cartridge!

If you "Visit the Genuine Supplies web site" you get this b.s. to con you into buying their ink, which is $28.99 for one Black cartridge or $16.99 for one color (Yellow, Cyan, or Magenta) cartridge, including the warning you need to protect your printer with official, high-priced ink:

You can buy one each of the four cartridges for $63.90 at Amazon.  But even these are outrageous prices!

You can get 24 same-as-official-size cartridges of 3rd-party ink, 12 Black and 3 of each color for $15.54, an avg. of $0.65 per cartridge:

When I go through colors faster than Black, I order 3 of each color - 9 cartridges for $8.50:

 

[a bunch of numbers]

I stay away from refurbished ink cartridges.  All of our sales guys have an inkjet printer so I started getting the refurbished to save money.  But the failure rate was too high.  We were wasting money on unused ink, plus at times leaving the salesman unable to print. 

In the past I had one ruin the printer because it leaked ink everywhere.

I will buy aftermarket toner, but never ink.

[jsharr ★]

I always look at consumable cost before buying a printer.  We have a brother at home and we do not use it that much, maybe 20 pages per week.  We use the amazon refurbished ink and no problems yet.

At work I have a Konica Minolta printer, copier, fax, scanner thing that does everything we need.  Bought it through Technifax and we have maintenance with them, so I pay a monthly bill based on usage and all consumables other than paper are paid for by them.  Proabably a bit pricier than other options but pain free and if we have any issues, they bring out a loaner machine.  Has only happened once when a card in the copier had a bad connection and was causing gremlins.

[Ralphie ★]

What I don;t understand is why our pretty old Canon multi-function one has a big and a small black cartridge, and I think it is the small one always gets used first.  The worst part is you can only buy a pack with all colors and black, no mixing and matching.  Lately I've just been ignoring the low ink notice because I don;t want to pay $70 for a package of ink.  Other than the ink cost, it has been a phenomenal printer.  I was so pissed at the way HPs always jammed.  They sure trashed their reliability reputation between that and laptops that were supposedly not that great.

[JerrySTL ★]

I just bought some 3rd-party cartridges from Amazon for my Epson. Haven't installed them yet. In the past I bought some on EBay and they didn't work well at all. I also attempted to refill my own cartridges back in the day with mixed results.

[late]

I've never done any sort of test, but the OEM inks are robbery.

So we get ink from LD, have for years, no complaints (although we don't care about photo quality, we do documents and recipes, mostly)

https://www.ldproducts.com/

[jdc2000]

No ink for me.  Laser printers/MFC units only.  The "toner out" message can also be reset so you only buy toner when you actually need it.