Save Money on Inkjet Printer Ink

Save Money on Inkjet Printer Ink


I'm not happy with the inflated cost of inkjet cartridges. I also despise the games inkjet manufacturers play to get you to replace cartridges that may still have ink inside.

Two issues: First, the sleazy way inkjet printer manufacturers trick users into dumping still-good cartridges. Second, the absolutely outrageous cost of those inkjet cartridges.

This week I'm passing along a few work-arounds, an alternative for high-cost cartridges, and a bunch of useful articles that'll tell you how to squeeze more out of your printer.
My Cartridge Won't Work

A couple of months ago George Siegel, a buddy of mine, e-mailed to complain about an old HP Business Inkjet 2230:

<blockquote>I bought it maybe three years ago for a specific project, but ended up leaving it in the box for 18 to 24 months," he said. "When I finally installed it at home, the black ink cartridge died after about a week. I figured it was empty (undersized cartridge) and replaced it. Then about a week later the cyan cartridge died. I knew I hadn't done much color printing so I got suspicious.</blockquote>

I've had e-mail from readers who have refilled their inkjet cartridges encountering the same situation.

I'm guessing you've figured out what the problem was. Yep: The inkjet cartridges had expiration dates.

There have been lawsuits against HP about this (and no, I couldn't find anything recent). As I researched the issue, I saw an upsurge in 2005 of angry users complaining about expiration dates.

Dig This: Artist Chris Jordan has a dramatic--and utterly distressing--way of representing statistics pertaining to American life. [Thanks, Emru!]
Some Expiration Solutions

George's work-around was to reset his PC clock back a few years to see what would happen--and maybe fool the cartridge. It worked and he claims not to have had any problems since.

"Well okay, just one. If I forget to reset the PC clock back to normal time, any new e-mail I receive is buried two years down in my In Basket when using Thunderbird."

Other solutions I found on an array of sites while browsing the Internet range from removing the printer's battery, turning off the bidirectional parallel connection features, using Microsoft's printer drivers instead of those supplied by HP, or fiddling with HP's .ini configuration file.

Dig This: One solution for expired cartridges and not-so-hot HP printer support comes by way of Iraq.
Cheap(er) Inkjet Printer Cartridges

Here's the Bass International printer inventory: I have an old Epson T009 (my mother uses an Epson T007), an even older Brother 1450 laser (the one I use most often), and a Brother inkjet MFC-640CW all-in-one.

You wouldn't have guessed it (ha!), but I wouldn't dream of buying Epson cartridges. SoI did a lot of digging online for a reputable source for replacements. There are probably dozens of Internet stores, and you have your favorites. But I decided on a brick-and-mortar shop because I wanted to be able to wrap my hands around the neck of the store manager if my printer stopped working.

I tried Staples and Office Depot, but their prices weren't low enough. (Costco, my first choice, didn't sell the cartridge I needed.) I choose Cartridge World for a couple of reasons: There's a store nearby in Pasadena and its prices beat the office supply stores.

For instance, at Staples, color cartridges for my Epson ran $25; Cartridge World charged $18. Black cartridges for the Epson were $8 cheaper than the chains. The savings on the cartridges for the Brother all-in-one were about the same as for the Epson.

I also liked that part of the deal was exchanging my old cartridge and putting it to good use. That's because instead of handing my empty cartridge to a recycling center, Cartridge World takes it as a trade-in on a new cartridge. If I didn't have an old cartridge to give them (they call it a "core"), my new replacement would cost an extra $4.

I've used three sets of Cartridge World refills so far, saved some money, and haven't had lick of trouble. The only problem, and this may be a showstopper for you, is that it's a walk-in store only. Check the Web site and maybe you'll get lucky with a store located near you.

Dig This: Whatever kind of mood you are in today, check out the Helsinki Complaints Choir. [Thanks to Eric Bender for this cool video.]
PC World's Smart Printer Advice

I never realized that besides the expiration hassles, roughly 60 percent of the ink in a cartridge is often thrown way. For details, "Study: Over Half of Inkjet Printer Ink is Thrown Away." Just as valuable--and equally revealing--are the reader comments generated from the article.

PC World's Paul Jasper has a lot of advice in "How to Spend Less on Printing and Get Better Results." Read it here. And Kirk Steers tells you how to "Get More Work From Your Inkjet for Less Money."

If you're thinking of buying a printer, we have a cleverly-named article: "How to Buy a Printer." Contemplating a multifunction machine? We have buying advice for those, too.

And if you're having inkjet or laser printer problems, take a look at FixYourOwnPrinter's forums before you call in a technician. Chances are good someone else has experienced the same problem and you might find a solution to yours.

How to Spend Less on Printing and Get Better Results - 3

How to Spend Less on Printing and Get Better Results - 3



How do I save money on ink and paper?

From the printer's driver-settings dialog box, you can specify draft mode to save on ink when you don't need the best quality. You can also save by turning off color printing--black ink and toner are usually cheaper than their color counterparts. To save on paper, print two pages side by side on the same sheet; and if your printer has a built-in duplexer, always print on both sides. Also, use cheap multipurpose paper for most jobs, such as printing Web pages and draft documents that only you will read. Keep your best paper for when you need the highest quality, such as for business letters and your r&#233;sum&#233;.

Whenever possible, buy ink and paper in bulk. Many manufacturers offer bundles of ink and paper that dramatically lower the cost of printing photos. HP's value pack for its Photosmart 375 and Photosmart 385, for example, combines one tricolor ink cartridge with 50 sheets of snapshot paper for $20--less than the $25 cost of the cartridge alone.

When buying toner for laser printers, look for high-yield cartridges. Many manufacturers produce cartridges in large capacities that let you print more for less. Dell, for example, offers cartridges rated for 3000 pages for its Laser Printer 1710n at $70, whereas a 6000-page cartridge costs $90 (with a discount for returning the spent toner cartridge).
Should I buy cheap generic ink or toner for my printer?

It's true that you can save significantly on printing costs by buying ink or toner made by a company other than your printer's manufacturer. And if you want just the cheapest possible printing for short-lived documents, that strategy is fine. However, you're taking a risk if print quality and longevity are important to you. For example, at the temperatures applied by your printer's engine, generic toner may not adhere to the paper as well as the manufacturer's compound. The result could be poorly shaped characters and gray banding across the page--not a great way to impress a potential customer.

When printing photos, you really need to use the ink and paper combination recommended by your printer manufacturer to ensure that your prints have accurate colors and won't fade quickly.
How do I recycle inkjet and laser toner cartridges?

Americans deposit millions of inkjet and laser toner cartridges in landfills every year. Manufacturing new cartridges consumes precious resources and energy. Many cartridges can be refilled several times, or they can be recycled in ways that are less harmful to the environment.

Laser printer manufacturers such as Dell and Lexmark sell toner cartridges at a discount if you return the cartridges for recycling when they're empty. Dell, for example, charges $90 per each 6000-page cartridge for its Laser Printer 1710n when you return an empty one; without a return cartridge it costs $130. In part, this pricing structure is meant to discourage customers from refilling the cartridges, but it can also help protect the environment.

Other manufacturers have programs for recycling their inkjet and toner cartridges. HP, for instance, includes postage-paid shipping materials with most of its printers, to make returning the used cartridges easier; you can also order these materials from the company's Web site. Brother and Oki offer similar programs through their sites. Konica Minolta includes prepaid shipping labels with its new cartridges for returning the used part.

Your local school or charity may participate in a cartridge-collection program that helps it raise money. You can also look for an office-supply store that pays you a small sum or offers a discount in exchange for spent refillable cartridges.

How to Spend Less on Printing and Get Better Results - 2

How to Spend Less on Printing and Get Better Results - 2



What type of printer should I buy for printing photos?

If you're printing only 4-by-6-inch photos, consider buying a snapshot printer that uses either dye-sublimation or inkjet printing technology. The devices take up little space, and they're often portable.

For printing larger photos, or if you also need to print text documents, you'll need a desktop inkjet printer. Models with four or more color ink cartridges generally produce the best quality. For high-resolution black-and-white photo printing, look for a model that prints several shades of gray and black.

Most photo printers have a PictBridge port that enables you to print directly from a digital camera without having to plug a memory card into either your PC or the printer. If you'll be printing most of your photos directly from your camera, you don't need an LCD on the printer itself--you can use the screen and controls on your camera to operate the printer instead. Many printers have media slots for printing from your camera's memory card, or for transferring the images to your PC. A good-size LCD on the printer is worth having if you intend to print directly from a memory card.

See PC World's Top Photo Printers and Top Snapshot Printers charts for our latest ratings.
Can I print high-quality photos on a color laser printer?

Color laser printers work well for printing documents that combine text, graphics, and photos. Most produce photos that are adequate for many purposes, such as real-estate brochures, car insurance claims, and missing-kitty fliers. Current models, however, lack sufficient color accuracy and print resolution to rival inkjet printers.

Many laser models, including the HP Color LaserJet 2605dtn, the Konica Minolta Magicolor 2500W, and the Lexmark C500n, let you print on glossy paper, which makes their images look more like real photos. A few lasers, such as the LaserJet 2605dtn and the Magicolor 2430DL, have either media slots or a PictBridge port for printing from a digital camera.
How do I print high-quality text on an inkjet printer?

To get the best text output from your inkjet printer, check the user manual to see what sort of paper the manufacturer recommends. Cheap multipurpose paper absorbs ink too easily, giving characters fuzzy edges.

Some inkjets, such as Epson's Stylus C88+ and Stylus Photo R800, use only pigment-based inks, which bleed less on more types of paper than do common dye-based inks. Other models, such as the Canon Pixma iP4300, the HP Deskjet D4160, and the Lexmark Z845, add a pigment black ink to their dye-based inks for printing darker and sharper black text.

How to Spend Less on Printing and Get Better Results - 1

How to Spend Less on Printing and Get Better Results - 1


Once you've bought and set up a keyboard or a pair of PC speakers, you'll likely never have to tinker with them again (or spend more money on them). When they finally give out, you'll simply buy new models. Not so with your printer. The purchase price is only the beginning of your investment, and figuring out how to get the best prints--and how to spend less on ink or toner cartridges--can take a lot of fiddling and thought.

To help, we've assembled answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about printers, paper, and--most important--how to trim the ridiculously high cost of ink or toner.
Should I buy an inkjet or a laser printer?

To choose the right printer, think about the output quality you need, and how much you'll be printing. These two considerations will dictate how fast the printer must be and how much you should be prepared to spend on ink and paper.

If you print a lot of business documents, letters, and other text files, a monochrome laser printer is likely your best bet. These devices are fast and inexpensive, and produce good-looking documents for only pennies per page.

If you'll be printing documents containing color charts and other graphics, a color laser printer is a good choice. Recent price drops make color lasers affordable for nearly any small office. And these models often print black-and-white pages at a cost per page comparable to that of monochrome lasers. Plus their color-photo prints are good enough to use in newsletters, marketing brochures, and other plain-paper documents that mix text and pictures.

Anyone who prints more photos than documents will get top quality from an inkjet printer. If you print a mix of photos and documents, though, the choice is a bit more complicated. A typical home user who prints, say, driving directions, shots taken with a digital camera, product recommendations from a Web site, and a few business letters a month will find that an inkjet printer offers a good compromise between quality and speed. A workload such as this will require a variety of paper. If you purchase a model with two paper trays, you won't have to swap paper in and out of the tray as frequently.

PC World's Printer Info Center can help you find a printer that delivers the speed and quality you need, and that fits within your budget.
Should I buy a multifunction printer, or a separate printer and scanner?

It used to be said that a multifunction printer was jack-of-all-trades but a master of none. That's no longer the case.

You can get good-quality prints and scans from a multifunction unit. Additionally, both operations usually work better together in one machine than if you bought a printer and a scanner separately. You can copy a document directly from the scanner to the printer, for example, without having to route the image through your computer.

Multifunction printers come in two varieties:

    Office-oriented models have an automatic document feeder for scanning multiple pages as a single task, and often include a built-in fax machine.
    Photo-oriented models let you scan slides and negatives, and usually have built-in media slots for importing images directly from digital camera memory cards.

Multifunction printers designed for offices can use either inkjet or laser printer technology. While inkjets suit both home and small-office users, the laser units can replace a small workgroup's printer, copier, and fax machine.

The Cheapskate's Guide to Printing

The Cheapskate's Guide to Printing



Melissa Riofrio was the first editor of PC World's Top 10 Printers. Yardena Arar is a senior editor for PC World. Special thanks to Jim Aspinwall, Gary Funk, Robert Luhn, and Rick Scheerer.

Whether your printer costs $40 or $400, the purchase price is only the first item on your new list of ongoing printing expenses. Over time, buying the ink or toner and acquiring media (paper, envelopes, transparencies) will very likely make a far bigger impact on your wallet. These costs will vary depending on what you print, how much you print, and what kind of media you use. Some expenses are unavoidable: Printing an 8-by-10 photo on premium, glossy paper will never be dirt cheap. Shaving cents off of other kinds of printing, however, involves just a little thought, effort, and advance planning. Read on for tips on how to choose and use your printer wisely--or perhaps not at all in some cases.
Know Before You Buy

Saving money on printing starts (ideally) before you buy the printer. Before you begin researching new models, make sure that you'll be getting the best printer for the types of documents you plan to produce. For more on the criteria you should use, see "The Right Printer for the Job," and read our comparison of pricing versus print quality trade-offs in "The Best and the Cheapest." Once you start looking at specific models, make a point of checking the recommended print volume; if you typically print 100 pages a day, for example, don't buy a printer that's rated for 500 pages a month.

How much is that cartridge in the window? Replacement ink or toner cartridge costs represent a major part of your long-term printing expenses. As we learned when we researched Hewlett-Packard's $40 Deskjet 3520 (see "$40 Printer, $40 Ink"), replacing the cartridges can cost as much as buying the printer (see "Pay It Again, Sam: Ink Costs Can Dwarf Printer Prices"). In general, expect to pay $10 to $40 for an ink cartridge, and $60 or more for a toner cartridge.

But don't judge a cartridge by price alone; its efficiency, or page yield--the number of pages it can print--matters just as much. Of course, that figure will vary depending on how much ink you use on a page, but the industry-standard assumption is 5 percent coverage per page for each color. Some companies make yield information available on the Web along with other printer specifications; others will provide it if you ask, either by e-mail or phone.

You can use yield information to calculate per-page costs, which can be useful in determining what your printing costs for different printers would look like over time. Laser printer toner cartridges may cost a lot more than ink jet cartridges, but their higher yields make per-page costs lower.

Some printer manufacturers offer multipacks of inks, which can knock a few dollars off the price per cartridge. The standard-capacity black ink for Dell's $79 J740 ink jet, for instance, costs $30 alone; a two-pack is $56.

A few colors more: Some ink jet printers produce superior photo quality by using additional colors beyond the usual cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. But all the color cartridges may not come with the printer. For instance, Canon's $200 i960 printer is bundled with all six of its inks (including Photo Cyan and Photo Magenta), and they cost $12 each to replace. But HP's $100 Deskjet 5150 includes only the standard HP 56 black and HP 57 tricolor cartridges ($20 and $35, respectively); the HP 58 photo cartridge is a separate, $25 purchase.

The incredible, shrunken starter cartridge: Many lower-cost laser printers come with starter cartridges that last anywhere from 60 percent to as little as 33 percent as long as a regular cartridge. Granted, if you don't print much, that first cartridge could last you a while; but if you know you'll be printing at least 100 pages per month, either find a printer that comes with a full-size cartridge or factor in the cost of an early replacement. Of course, if you get a great deal on the printer, your overall cost may still be quite affordable.

The cheapest paper for the job: The heavier, brighter (whiter), or more specialized the paper is, the more it will cost. You'll generally pay as little as a half-cent per page for typical, 20-pound office paper, or as much as a dollar for an 8.5-by-11-inch sheet of glossy photo paper.

Save the pricey stuff for final prints; for everything else, use the cheapest paper you can find. It will affect the print quality from your laser printer minimally, if at all, and it will work fine for producing drafts and other internal documents on your ink jet printer. Third-party brands often cost less per page than the printer manufacturer's media, but test ink jet-specific media on your printer to see if you like the results. You may have to buy a full pack to do this, unfortunately.

Cable not included: Some printer manufacturers save on costs by omitting the USB or parallel cable that you may need to connect the device to your computer. If you can't use the same cable you had for your last printer, shop around: You don't need the expensive models with gold connectors and heavy shielding unless you have a lot of interference in your work area from other devices.