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The ink in your inkjet cartridges costs about $3,840 per gallon.
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Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983
T e c h n o f i l e
Saving money on the high cost of printing
April 4, 2004
By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, The Post-Standard
The companies that make inkjet printers must think we're just a bunch of chumps. They figure we don't mind trotting out to the computer store every now and then to pay $3,800 a gallon for ink.
If you just did a double take, welcome to the world of inkjet reality. The ink you buy for your printer usually comes in tiny containers, called cartridges, that hold about an ounce of ink. They sell for about $30 each.
There are 128 ounces in a gallon, so the ink in your inkjet cartridges actually has an equivalent cost of about $3,840 per gallon.
It's just ink, not liquid gold. I checked on the cost of bulk purchases of inkjet ink and did some quick math. According to the dollars-and-cents arithmetic lessons I got in second grade, printer companies are charging us 20 times what the ink costs. (Computer Business Works sells inkjet ink for $165 a gallon for black ink and $195 a gallon for color ink.)
What can we do about this as consumers? Here are five ways of keeping the cost of printing as low as possible:
1. If you do a lot of document printing, don't use an inkjet printer. Use a laser printer. Laser printers cost more to buy but much less to use. With all costs figured in, each document page printed on a typical laser printer costs from 2 cents to 5 cents; on an inkjet, the cost per page can run from 10 cents to15 cents, depending on the model. (This does not even count the cost of photo printing, which can cost up to a dollar per page on an inkjet when you include the high cost of photo paper and the additional ink that's used in that mode.)
2. Choose an inkjet printer based on the cost of ink and not on the cost of the printer. Ink costs swallow up all other expenses over a couple of years of use. For example, one study of inkjet expenses showed that a $50 Lexmark printer, the Z605, costs 20 times as much to use as it does to buy. In other words, the $50 purchase price almost disappeared in the total cost of use over 36 months. The total cost of ownership, based on typical printing use, was listed as $1,021. Epson and HP printers usually cost less to run than other models.
3. Refill your ink cartridges or buy already refilled cartridges from companies that provide that service. My advice: Try one or two at the most before you decide to save money this way. My experience has been spotty. Some of the refilled cartridges I bought worked OK for document printing -- but not for photo printing -- and others simply didn't work at all. I don't like the mess of refilling cartridges, but I know others who do it without a problem. (Note that newer printers might have "smart" ink cartridges that can't be refilled.)
A common question I get is whether the printer's warranty will be voided if you use non-branded or refilled ink cartridges. The answer is no.
4. Limit the use of your printer. In our home, we used to print out all kinds of documents whenever we felt the need. We printed e-mail we wanted to refer to later, Web pages we wanted to share with friends, drawings the kids next door created and so on. We've stopped most of that. Essential items get printed; everything else is left in the computer.
5. Print using "Draft" mode whenever possible. This won't help when printing photos, but can save a lot of money over two or three years when you print documents.
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