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How Aftermarket Inkjet Ink Holds Up After a Year
An anonymous reader writes "About a year ago I found a link on here for a test of inkjet printer inks. The article compared original manufacturer inks against much cheaper third party stuff and the results were surprisingly in favour of third party products. They've now published the final part of this study, examining the prints produced a year ago. This time the printer manufacturers have come out far better, with some third party prints having disappeared completely! Cartridge World ink still seems worth a try though, if you don't want to pay manufacturers' inflated prices."
If you're in a business where you print documents for a meeting or which will be obsolete in a day or two, this may be of even more benefit than it remaining visible. Undocumented feature?
I have a Pixma IP4200 inkjet. Bought for about $150 (not on sale) and the individual carts are about 6$, for Canon ones, why bother with 3rd party? At this rate I can toss them out the window and still come out ahead.
This is why I love my Canon. HP could learn a thing or two about ink pricing from them...
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The summary neglects to mention that the third party inks failed in sunlight, but were fine in indoor or controlled storage conditions. It's still something to consider, but nearly as bad as the summary makes it out to be. Tons of photo processes produce photos that'll fade in a year of sunlight, so it's reasonable you'd have to put in a little more expense there for pigments instead of dyes.
I don't think third party ink providers are going to be around much larger. That whole industry is run like the mob. I don't say that to troll either, i'm serious. They are very competitive and the major manufacturers do just about everything they can to stop third party providers.
Ink is one of the most over priced products on the market today. Only Monster has margins that can compete.
A few years ago my father figured out that he could buy a whole new printer with new ink cartridges for about 15$ more then just the ink cartridges ALONE. Of course they got wise to that and I am sure many people are familiar with new ink jets being sold with minimal ink installed.
Now the "final solution" is about to be unleashed, which is the encryption being applied to the ink cartridges themselves. That has been coming for awhile AFAIK, and it will be interesting to see how third party manufacturers react when they have to break these new "DRM" like methods of protecting business revenue.
I have always told my clients that ink jets are for "suckers". Suck it up and buy yourself a color laserjet and you will greatly reduce the cost per page to print a report. Of course, I know there are some people that really need a good ink jet printer for their specific tasks, but does that really represent the mass market? I don't think so.
Really, who cares that much? If I want something to be UV-resistant to hang on the wall or something, I'll go get professional prints.
For the other 99.9% of the stuff I print, my cheap Chinese continuous inking system is the best 300 Yuan (~$43) I ever spent. The whole package, plus some extra ink, cost me less than a full change of manufacturer's ink for my Epson RX580.
On glossy photo paper, it looks just as good as the OEM stuff. Most of the time I'm just printing regular business graphics, though, and it does just as well there. I no longer hesitate at all to print lots of graphics-heavy stuff, and the kids get a lot of use out of it. My son got elected 6th grade class president thanks in part to a series of lolcats-themed campaign posters he printed. (lolcats... is there anything they can't do?)
I've been using it for several months now, and would normally have gone through a couple of cartridges. As it is, I can barely tell that the reservoir levels have changed.
Now if only some honest printer manufacturer would embrace this sort of thing - I'd gladly pay a lot more for a printer with easily replaceable heads and nice, big refillable ink reservoirs that the printer can't lie about and doesn't waste excessively. I don't expect to ever see that happen, though.
If only they could invent some sort of electronic device that acts like a hundred small scissors and cuts up your documents into little strips, making it really difficult to figure out the contents of the original document.... I'd call it The Scissorator.
Better yet, maybe, would be some sort of fantastical sci-fi method of applying an energy to the document in such a way that the very atoms of the paper disassociate from eachother, and combine with oxygen in the atmosphere to form carbon dioxide and liquid water. Of course, we'd probably need tiny nanomachines to do this atom-by-atom. It's still hundreds of years off, I'm sure...
Blood only comes in pretty much one shade, and it fades horribly.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Ink jet printers are stupid, especially for people who print occasionally and in black in white. A toner cartridge is more expensive, but is cheaper in the longer run producing far more copies and it never dries out.
If you need to print photos, a colour ink jet is a damned expensive way to do it... if do print photos occasionally, at least around where I live, photo printer kiosks abound.
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I had an epson photo printer for many years and always bought epson inks.
Then I found a link to third party inks at a great bargain. I bought 5 sets of color and black cartridges for about the price of one set of epson brand inks.
Within a relatively short period of time the print head got clogged up and the printer was useless. I tried everything I could to clean it, all the way to taking it completely apart. Nothing I did got the printer working again.
The printer was very old but never had any problems before. I think epson overcharges for ink but the third party ink cost me more. I wound up getting a color laser printer for normal printing and will be getting another epson photo printer at some point for photos. Though I mostly send out stuff to the lab since I prefer the tone and quality of lamda or fuji frontier prints over inkjet ones when I'm not printing them myself in my darkroom.
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I don't print things out from home too often now that I'm out of school, but when I do go to print things out, I expect a printer to WORK. After going through three inkjet printers in as many years, with ink cartridges that dry up, nozzles that CONSTANTLY get clogged and take several minutes to completely clean, blotches on my printouts, and so on, I came to the conclusion that inkjets are poor investments indeed, even with cheap third-party ink.
Three years ago I bought a laser printer. It cost around $200, quite a bit more than an inkjet, and doesn't print in color. But I am STILL using the original toner cartridge that came with the printer - I have yet to run out. Admitedly, I'll probably have to pay a good $75 for a new cartridge when the existing one runs out, but I'd say $75 for several YEARS worth of ink that won't dry up and/or clog is well worth it.
Prices have dropped a bit since then. You can buy a laser for around $100, around triple that if you insist on color. And it'll really LAST - every place I've ever worked has had laser printer that have been around forever.
I have just realized that my fantastical idea would be less fantastical if the by-products were carbon dioxide and water vapor, not liquid water.
No offense, but trying to tell other people what their goals are, or should be, is arrogant.
You don't like the primary vendor inks. I don't like them either. I think they're too expensive. In fact, I dislike the ink problem so much, that I've replaced all my printers with laser printers. But I'm not going to sit down and tell someone that it's wrong that they buy inkjets or vendor inks. I'll let them know that there are cheaper alternatives, if they want to know. But ultimately, it's entirely up to them how they respond to this.
Live your own life. Stop trying to tell someone else how to live theirs.
$.02.
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i just refilled my samsung ml1710 toner cartridge with a toner refill kit and i have to say i'm impressed. nearly 1/8th the cost of a full replacement cartridge, i can't see the difference. and replacing the toner was simple. it amazes me that more people don't go this route.
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Do you really expect us to take laser printer advice from someone who is apparently still using a typewriter?
I'm seriously considering taking home one of those black ink dot-matrix printers sitting in storage at work, which I could have for free. They're industrial printers that last, and for just black and white printing that will eventually get trashed, it would be cheaper than my HP inkjet, which is the only printer on my small LAN at home. My wife and kids are killing me on inkjet ink. I know I'll need to attach a print server to network it, but it still may prove to be useful.
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