Save money on printer inks

Posted on 8 Apr 2009 at 15:19

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We don't have space here to publish details on which printers and cartridges are refillable and which aren't, so we'd recommend that you discuss your equipment with a refilling company if you do decide to take this route.

What the manufacturers say

Massive cost savings may be on offer to those willing to explore cartridge refilling, but is there a negative impact on print quality or reliability? We spoke to four major manufacturers of inkjet and laser printers: Canon, Epson, HP and Lexmark. In each case, we asked whether they recommended cartridge refilling services, kits for DIY refilling or remanufactured cartridges for both inkjet and laser printers.

All the manufacturers said that they would not recommend any of these lower-cost options, and that users should opt for new and branded cartridges. This is exactly the response we'd expect, as printer manufacturers make lots of money from the sales of consumables. Printers are inexpensive because the manufacturers expect to make money on ink and toner sales. Therefore, we asked each company to give specific reasons why branded cartridges are best.

Lexmark's response is rather vague: "Lexmark wants [its] customers to have the best printing experience possible. This is best achieved by using [its] printers with matched toners and inks designed and manufactured to Lexmark's exacting standards."

Epson does give one reason why remanufactured or refilled cartridges may not come up to the standard of its own branded products. Referring to inkjet cartridges specifically, senior product manager Mark Robinson says, "Our ink cartridges are filled in clean room environments through a patented low-vacuum process. Anyone entering an Epson clean room has to put on a special suit, go through an air shower and walk on a sticky floor to ensure that no foreign particles are taken into the manufacturing environment."

But how does all this affect print quality? Epson's Mark Robinson says, "Claria, Epson's Hi-Definition dye-based photographic ink set, has been developed to be much more resistant to light - up to 98 years in a photo frame and 200 years in an album. The use of cartridges and inks that are not as carefully designed for use in specific Epson printers could result in inferior image quality and printer malfunctions."

The quoted print longevity figures were taken from a report by an independent testing company that had performed tests under high levels of ultraviolet radiation to simulate longer periods of time under normal illumination. Despite what Mark Robinson suggests, the report doesn't provide a comparison with non-Epson inks. However, other independent tests have shown that branded inks often outperform third-party inks in this respect.

While Epson's claims about print quality and reliability were unsubstantiated, HP is able to provide evidence. It claims that remanufactured cartridges, refills and DIY kits "can significantly reduce the performance of a printer, deliver low quality output and may even damage a printer" and backs up these findings with an independent test report. This document, published in May 2007, reported the results of a large number of tests involving remanufactured cartridges from nine companies and refilled cartridges from seven companies used with two different HP printers. It showed that none of the third-party options matched HP-branded cartridges in terms of the number of prints or reliability.

It found that HP cartridges produced between 11 and 87 per cent (an average of 46 per cent) more prints than remanufactured cartridges, and between 69 and 324 per cent (an average of 152 per cent) more than refilled cartridges. As for reliability, no HP cartridges failed or were dead-on-arrival, according to the report. This compared to an average failure rate of 16 per cent for remanufactured cartridges and 33 per cent for refilled cartridges. If we take these results on face value, it would appear that the savings made on remanufactured or refilled cartridges are largely cancelled out by their reduced reliability and print capacity. The third-party refilling companies had a different view, though, as we're about to see.