Ink Cartridges: Original or Compatible

Desktop printers are not as expensive as they used to be. But maintaining a printer is still fairly high-priced because of the factor that ink and toner cartridges are relatively costly.

At this moment there are alternatives to reducing the printing cost of your workplace or company. Procuring a more accomplished printer, using compatible inkjet cartridges or completely refilling initial ones.

In this feature I'll take a closer look at original and compatible inkjet cartridges and try to decide which is the most price effective.

Everybody knows that compatible inks are less expensive than original cartridges. But to determine which is more cost effective we need to acquire the ink expenditure of both types of cartridges.

A method to do that is by weighing them. Lets assume we have two fresh ink cartridges, an original and a compatible one. Before all else we need to weigh them before installing them on a given machine and then weigh them at the end of experimentation.

Getting scales acceptable (and cheaply enough) to do the job shouldn't be a crunch: one litre of water weighs one kg, so scales that measure down to 0.1 grammes would measure to a determination of 0.1 ml - and scales that measure to a tenth of this are quickly accessible too.

The problem of course, is that you need to know the specific gravity of the ink. Assuming the manufacturer have this information accessible, all you need to do is deduct the final weight from the initial weight in order to find the ink consumption.

With so many printers and cartridges available these days it is difficult to address a specific one. So for a preferable accepting lets work on a fictional model.

Let?s make out the primary weight of a "tank" was 235.8 grams and after the test it weighted 227.4 grams, which gives us an usage of 8.4 grams of ink. Applying a specific gravity of 1.2 as a typical value then the quantity of ink used would be 8.4/1.2 = 7 ml or 7/32 = 0.21875 ml per 'standard' A4 print.

Now that we have found how much ink is used per A4 print we can determine the cost of each print. Again using a fictional example, if a cartridge nominally contained 17 ml of ink and cost ?10.99, then the cost per 'standard' A4 print would be 10.99*0.21875/17 = ?0.14 (rounded to the nearest pence).

The inkjet cartridge with the lowest cost per print will be the most price effective. I know it might sound too complicated for you to do this at home, but for those of you managing a business that relies on printing on daily basis this test might be worth the hassle.

I would love to hear your experiences, please share your test results or any other process to determine the ink consumption of original and compatible inkjet cartridges.

About the Author

Commercial printing expert with many years of research on inkjet printers and cheap inkjet cartridges.