If you own a computer, chances are good that you own an inkjet printer. And according to a recent C/Net online survey, chances are almost 50/50 that your inkjet carries an HP label (46% of respondents indicated they owned HP, with Epson second at 21% and Canon third at 18%.) Regardless of the brand inkjet you own, if you’re like me, you cringe when your computer tells you it’s time to replace the ink cartridge. “Feed Me!” the printer seems to cry out, producing mental visions of Audrey II, the man-eating plant from Little Shop of Horrors.”
Unless you’re a chemist, you think of printer ink as black stuff, blue stuff, yellow stuff, and red stuff. You recall enough from kindergarten to know you can make most any color by mixing from that palette. Printer ink is in fact a custom blend of several ingredients, chiefly water which serves as the carrier solvent for the colorant, which may be color pigment but is most commonly a dye. Other agents are added to address pH, ink flow, and drying time. Some inks must be able to withstand high heat generated by the print technology used to fire the ink onto the paper, while cold-fired cartridges require ink with special buffers added to prevent nozzle clogs.
Dyes versus Pigments
Most home printers use dye based inks. They are less expensive than pigment based inks and, being water soluble, have a much less visible grain, resulting in sharp and vividly bright colors which are ideal for glossy prints. The disadvantages of dye based inks include vulnerability to humidity (don’t let that printed paper get wet or it will smear), slower drying times, and reduced life span when exposed to light.
Pigmented inks use chemically generated color plastic polymers ground to very fine particles and coated with a dispersant to help keep particles from clumping and clogging the ink jets. The colored pigments attach themselves to the fibers in the paper, making them less sensitive to humidity, and their thicker particle sizes aid in resisting deterioration due to UV rays. But these same characteristics make pigmented inks less desirable for photo printing, as results tend to be grainier and duller. Some newer ink technologies, such as Epson’s UltraChrome inks, create a hybrid product by encapsulating pigments in a dye dispersant in an attempt to gain the advantages of both dye and pigment based inks. (source: http://www.pictureline.com/newsletter/2004/november/inkjetcolor.html)
A few printers can use both pigment and dye based inks. Where a fixed print-head is used, the printer ‘driver’ (the software that tells your computer how to interface with the printer) must be smart enough to change the way droplets are layered, depending on which ink tank is being drawn from. Pretty amazing technology, when you consider the speed with which these machines operate, their high degree of resolution (up to 6,000 DPI – dots per inch) and the incredibly small size of the droplet of ink placed on the paper – as small as 1 picoliter. (A human hair is about 12 picoliters in diameter, though mine may be thinner.)
HP and Lexmark have traditionally differed from Canon and Epson in one key area – the print head. This is the electro-mechanical device through which the ink passes on its way to your paper. HP and Lexmark chose to build the print head into their ink cartridges. So every time you buy a new ink cartridge, you get a new print head. Epson and Canon choose to use a print head built into the carriage of its printers. As a result, HP and Lexmark cartridges are inherently more expensive. But from my viewpoint, it’s a bit like the old Fram oil filter ad: “Pay me now or pay me later”. I owned a Canon S820 printer whose print head gave up the ghost after a year. Cost to replace the print head? One hundred bucks, or $30 less than I paid for the printer.
Forget Oil – Drill an Ink Well
All this ink chemistry and technology does not come without a price. Everyone complains about the cost of their printer ink, but I suspect few recognize how incredibly expensive it really is. Consider that the average HP cartridge has about 15 milliliters of ink in it and costs between $30 and $35. (Granted, you’re getting a new print-head with every 15 milliliters, but I never heard of anyone heading off to Staples because they were running low on print head.) Now, one fluid ounce contains 29.57 milliliters. So an ounce of ink costs between $60 and $70. Multiply by 128 ounces, and you get a per-gallon price of, oh, about $8,000! Be grateful your car does not run on printer ink. One typical 12.5 gallon fill-up at the station would set you back $100,000! (source: http://naybob.blogspot.com/2005/03)
So what can you do about the price of ink? Here are a few options:
1. Conserve. Use your printer’s draft quality mode where possible. It’s faster and uses less ink, but the output is admittedly harder to read.
2. Shop smart. I surveyed members of the New Bern Computer Users Group (NBCUG) and most respondents preferred sticking with their branded inks. Those folks looked for sales or bought from clubs like Sam’s. Buy when you find a good price, ahead of when you are in absolute need.
3. Consider generic inks. Depending on your printer, this may or may not be an option for you. I’ve been using generic ink tanks in my Canon Pixma iP4000 printer for quite some time now with good results. Prices are a third to a half less. Consumers Reports magazine wrote in their 09/05 issue that they felt generics were not much of a savings. At least with my Canon, I disagree.
4.
Try remanufactured cartridges if you have a Lexmark or HP. One Taberna
resident, a member of NBCUG, reports having good luck
with remanufactured
cartridges for his HP printer from
www.printpal.com which also got good marks from CR. Conversely, my
experience with remanufactured cartridges has been pretty poor, and this was
echoed by several of the NBCUG survey respondents. The last remanufactured
cartridge I bought for my wife’s HP970 ended up leaking green ink (yellow and
blue mixed) all over my hands and jeans. Fortunately, it was around St.
Patrick’s Day so no one paid me much mind.
5. Try a refill kit (but wear old clothes). Some cartridges take better to being refilled than others. My experience refilling Lexmark cartridges was a waste of time and money, but I’ve had some measure of success with my Canon ink tanks. This seems to be a hit or miss affair; some people develop the knack, most don’t. Refill kits can drop the per gallon price of ink down to a ‘mere’ $100 to $350 depending on volume.
6. If you have the space and the money, invest in a black-only laser printer and use it for the bulk of your printing needs. Save the inkjets for when color is required. Though replacement laser toner cartridges cost a lot more, and the amortization of replacement drums needs to be figured into the equation, you’ll go a long time between replacements and the per-copy cost is often a fraction of an inkjet’s cost.
For a lot of good info on inkjets printers, refill kits, and generic cartridges, check out http://atlascopy.com which was the source for much of this article. And remember that your final printed output will only be as good as the media you print on. I covered that in my Jan., 2005 Tribune article which you can re-read by going to: http://members.cox.net/wamaruna/tribune.html