Many inkjet printer vendors boast about how low their per-page print cost is, and it’s usually untrue. In response to growing customer concerns, printer vendors have come up with ink purchase plans they claim can save you money. Can they?
How Much Did That Page Cost?
Printer vendors are quick to quote an impressive per-page print and (on all-in-ones) copy cost. That figure is predicated on an “official” yield per cartridge, and the cost of any replacement cartridges. Yields are calculated using a test procedure developed by the International Standards Organization (ISO). In the U.S., the organization that distributes this protocol is the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
Published page yields—whether for ink or laser toner—only exist so you can compare printers. Just as your gas mileage varies depending on how you drive, your ink yields vary depending on the kinds of things you print.
These days, an average page yield of 650-700 pages per cartridge just doesn’t cut it anymore. Vendors are changing their approach to make printing more pages more attractive.
Brother International INKvestment: Go Big or Go Home
While some vendors in this roundup have developed refillable ink tanks, Brother has taken the somewhat different path of supersizing its ink cartridges for specific models. The company’s INKvestment printers and All-in-Ones present a silhouette that’s not much different from an ink tank model, with a slight bulge on the right side. That bulge accommodates slightly-wider-than-usual ink cartridges.
While most inkjet printer vendors offer extra-large capacity cartridges as an option, the INKvestment cartridges are even larger than most. For the base capacity cartridges, the stated page yield is 1,500 for the color and 3,000 for the black. For the Ultra High-Yield, it’s 5,000 pages for the color cartridge and 6,000 for the black. If you purchase the 6,000 page-yield black cartridge, which costs about $56, the per-page cost drops to just under 1 cent for black-and-white and about 5 cents for color, which is a pretty good deal. It’s not, however, quite as economical as the refillable tank models from Canon and Epson.
To make the offer even more enticing, Brother includes a set of cartridges in the box. The company claims these will give you up to a year’s worth of printing—that is if you print up to 150 pages per month (1,800 for the year). That’s a bit more than the basic INKvantage cartridge yield so, in essence, Brother’s giving you a set of their regular cartridges, rather than the low-yield starter set. Still, not having to change cartridges as often is nice, and the extra-large capacity ink cartridges provide a lower cost-per-page than standard capacity inks.
Epson EcoTank: Lots of Ink Means Lots of Prints
Epson was the first vendor to bring a refillable ink tank printer to the U.S. It’s now on the third generation of its EcoTank models. These printers and All-in-One models incorporate refillable ink tanks into the body of the machine. When the ink level drops to near empty, you twist off the cap of a bottle of ink, open the cap covering the ink tank, and then upend the bottle to refill the tank. The original iteration didn’t use keyed bottles, and it wasn’t always easy to judge how much ink you were topping off. That was solved a while ago, and today’s EcoTank Supertank models are as easy to use as printers that use cartridges.
The real attraction is that one bottle of ink goes a long way. A set of bottles is included with the printer and should give you up to 4,500 black pages and 7,500 in color. And when you run out of the original ink, it gets even cheaper to print massive amounts of pages. Refill bottles sell for about $13 for color and $20 for black. These refills give you up to 7,500 black pages and 6,000 in color, so you won’t have to shop for more ink very frequently, if at all.
Canon MegaTank: Little Bottles, Lots of Pages
Read the remaining 10 paragraphs
Source : Are Printer Ink Plans a Rip-Off? Surprisingly, Not Always
