Petrol is expensive but it’s nothing compared to the cost of printer ink. If you compare the cost of ink in an inkjet cartridge it can cost £9,825 per Gallon!.
Here’s the proof. A Hewlett Packard 22(C9352) Tricolor Ink Cartridge holds only 5 ml of ink – one 757th of a gallon. Multiply that £12.98 price tag by 757 and you’re paying £9,825 a gallon for ink.
That particular cartridge, according to HP, yields 140 colour graphic pages at a cost of nearly £0.09 a page, which actually isn’t that bad by printer industry standards. Some cartridges from HP and other companies cost less per page and some more, but the cartridge you get to buy and the cost per page depends on what printer you own.
For years, printer manufacturers have been offering low cost printers only to make it up on ink but that’s starting to change now that consumers are becoming a bit savvier about how much printers actually cost to use. Finally, the industry is starting to listen.
Just like miles per gallon figures for cars, estimates of ink cartridge yields are also approximate and subject to all sorts of variables including the density of your documents and photos, the type of paper you use and the quality settings for your printer.
For example, with almost any printer, you can save ink by using the “draft” or “fast/economical” setting in your printer driver dialog box. That’s a good idea if you’re just printing documents for yourself. For text documents draft mode is usually quite readable.
Things are begining to change in the printing market though. HP’s new Officejet Pro L7000 series of multi-function devices, yields approximately 2,350 black pages on one £25.00 ink cartridge.
That’s about just over a penny a page which is actually cheaper than most laser printers. These HP printers are incredibly good for both black and color business documents. They can print glossy photos, but this line of printers aren’t optimized for this purpose and don’t have a special tray for 4 by 6 photo paper.
Thanks to new printers like the Officjet Pro L7000 from Hewlett Packard, it’s possible to use an ink jet printer for about the same cost per black page as a laser printer and still have the advantage of being able to print in color.