Save money on printer inks

Posted on 8 Apr 2009 at 15:19

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Printers may be cheap, but you could spend a fortune on ink and toner cartridges. Mike Bedford considers the hidden costs of replacing your inks and how refilling saves you cash.

Personal printers are incredibly inexpensive to buy, and even colour laser printers are well within the reach of home users. You can get an inkjet model for just £25, a budget monochrome laser for less than £50 and a colour laser for £99. Put simply, there's never been a better time to buy a new printer - or has there?

When you look more closely at the printer deals available, you might have second thoughts. Your new printer will come with ink or toner cartridges, but in many cases these will be special starter cartridges that are far from full. When that meagre supply of ink or toner runs out, you'll find that the low cost of your printer is not reflected in the price of its consumables. If you buy the manufacturer's branded supplies, filling up your printer could cost you as much as it cost to buy the printer in the first place and, in some cases, considerably more.

There is an alternative. Rather than throwing your old cartridges away when they're empty, you could try refilling them. In doing so, the chances are you'll make considerable savings. But how can you be sure that the print quality will be up to scratch? In this feature, we'll look at the different approaches you can take to refresh your printer's ink or toner supply.

The cartridge family

The most expensive option is to buy new cartridges branded with the name of the printer's manufacturer. Then there are the so-called 'compatible' cartridges, which are third-party clones of the branded cartridges. Although compatible cartridges will look identical to the branded variety, the chemical composition of the ink or toner will probably be different. In fact, a cartridge sold as compatible may actually be a remanufactured cartridge; this is often the case with laser printer cartridges, for example.

A remanufactured cartridge is a used cartridge that has been dismantled and cleaned, with any damaged parts replaced, before being refilled with toner or ink. Products sold as 'remanufactured' sometimes cost more than those described as compatible. Refilling a cartridge can involve sending your empty cartridge away or taking it to a high street shop for refilling. The cheapest option is to refill the cartridge yourself using a stockpile of ink and a refill kit.

There is another ink option available. A continuous ink supply system (CISS) keeps a printer's ink topped up, but it applies only to inkjets. Rather than periodically replacing or refilling cartridges, you could use a CISS to continually supply them with ink. A CISS kit comprises bottles of ink (which are external to the printer and can be replaced or refilled), special cartridges and plastic tubes that connect the bottles to the internal cartridges. The kit could cost almost as much as the printer and, while it may only be as much as a new set of branded cartridges, it's expensive compared with the other refilling options mentioned here. It's cost-effective only for heavy users, so we won't be covering it here.

Saving graces

It's the prospect of making considerable savings that makes refilling such an attractive proposition. But do the figures add up? Let's compare the prices of cartridge replacements with the costs of refilling.

Two of the most popular inkjet cartridges are the Canon CL-41 (cyan, magenta, yellow) and the PG-40 (black), which are used together in many of Canon's Pixma printers. You can pick up new branded Canon cartridges for around £18 (cyan, magenta, yellow) and £16 (black). Compatible versions of these cost £12 and £11, while remanufactured versions cost fractionally more, at about £13 and £12. Refilling costs only £9 and £8.