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Testing Cheaper Printer Ink
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "Computer users world-wide spend $22 billion a year on ink cartridges, and the big companies are getting stingier with the amount of ink they are putting into each cartridge, the Wall Street Journal reports. Entrepreneurs are seeking a slice of that market by undercutting HP and Lexmark with ink prices 20% to 50% lower. The Journal tested do-it-yourself refill kits, cartridge retail outlets and replacement cartridges from online stores to find the best way to save money on ink refills. One major finding: The quality often wasn't as good as with the name-brand cartridges."
Ok, first thought on the quality is .. Durrr .. obviously the quality is going to be lower. Any idiot could tell you that.
..
However
Does it actually matter? Certainly I find that any documentation I want a client to see has to be *perfect*, which generally means sending it out to a proper copy shop or in-house repro facility. Internal documentation doesn't need to be anywhere near as high quality, so replacement inks are ok assuming they actually last a few years on the paper, I find thats more important than a few lines here and there.
So really where I work there isn't actually a market for "premium" ink cartridges. They're too expensive for everyday things, and not good enough for top quality things. There isn't any middle ground.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Digital photos are printed on proper photographic paper using a web-based service which returns the (non-fading, and remarkably cheap) prints in the post two days later.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Honestly InkJets printers have the highest costs per print vs. Laser or Solid Ink. And the cost of these printers have dropped Rapidly.
Samsung Makes a Color Laser Printer for $600 that comes with full cartridges, which covers about 10,000 prints. vs Paying $80 for an Ink Jet and $70 for ink every 500 prints. If you do the math you find you are saving a lot of money in the long run. Also Solid Ink is really good too, just as good if not better then Laser for Cost/Page. (And for those you probably said they heat their old TekSolid ink, Solid ink has improved greatly in the past 5 years and are just as reliable as a good laser printer)
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I remember searching this out extensively when I took on a colour Epson printer from my brother. I don't have links to the sources, but I recall that the nutshell answer was that some manufacturers' prices were better or comperable to the generics, and some were worse.
Apart from factoring in cost of replacing print heads more often, and potential problems with DRM or voiding your warranty if they allege damage was caused by use of non-original ink (which I think in the US is in violation of the Magnuson-Moss Act, but I don't think is so here in Oz, tho I haven't checked) I recall there were two main factors:
One was capacity of generic cartridges - some have a smaller volume than the original, and hence this has to be factored in against their cheaper cost. Off the bat, this made the generics only marginally cheaper than the original for my printer. (I'm talking new cartridges, not refills).
The other was the quality of the print job. I was looking for a colour printer for photos, and it matters to me that the printouts would last perhaps 1-2 yrs before fading for the generics, versus a much longer (supposed) lifestyle for the Epson ink. Why save a couple of bucks if the photo will fade in its frame?
For me the answer was simple, and the Epson was much better value than the generic stuff. I recall finding material that suggested that it wasn't so clear cut for ink from other manufacturers, in particular HP. But I didn't chase that down.
fwiw, reading other peoples' experiences that it took a number of printouts before the generic ink replaced the original in the printer heads, and to expect smearing and poor quality until then, didn't exactly engender confidence that the inks were of comparable makeup.
-- "For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong." -- HL Mencken
I have used refill kits in the past and although they are cheap I find they tend to mess up your printer heads. I have lost two printers in the past to these refills. Now, I just use new cartridges.
Adventure City Tours
<disclaimer>I used to work for one of the online digital printing service providers.</disclaimer>
The quality of the prints was, I have to admit, pretty damn good. When I first started there the service was quite expensive and it was touch and go whether it was worth sending off to have them printed. By the time I left though the price had dropped greatly and the quality remained (at least in the basic prints anyway).
It's worth shopping round, you can get some really good deals such as a second set for free. The cheapest always used to be (in the UK at least) Bonus Print but they were cheap because they only did a very limited number of print sizes. There are loads of other services out there that will print you photos onto just about anything you can think (we even did a toy bear for a while!). The quality of the other stuff though is questionable at best. A 2MPixel camera will produce a pretty good A4 sized print.
I'm sure I will get shouted at for promoting it but there is actually a fairly good digital printing client built into XP. You select a folder with images in it and then select print from the left hand menu (you need folder view tured off). It will give you a list with a number of printing service providers. I don't know if it still works though - since leaving the company I have stopped using Windows.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
We had a group try this at my work. It was "ok" but just ok.. The color quality was much better than the originals. It was an epson 1280 at the time. We called it the borg printer because of all the tubes coming out of it :)
If you can believe it everybody here at the unamed government agency I work for has their own inkjet printer. Why? Because they are too lazy to get up and walk over to the $20K floor copier that nobody uses.
Sometimes the Federal Gov boggles my mind....when I worked in the private sector if I had asked my manager for a personal ink jet printer he would of passed out laughing and then after recovering would tell me to get back to work, use the floor copier and don't EVER ask for something so stupid again!