Ink, Priced Like Liquid Gold

We have all seen and experienced this; buying a cheap printer and then spending a fortune on ink. You may be wondering, “Why is this?” Well, there is no concrete answer to this question. Ink manufacturers have adopted the ways of many other industries; for example cars, cell phones, and more. Let’s look at some of these examples. Car; you spend several thousand dollars initially buying the car, and then you spend multiple times as much in maintenance, gas and more, at least in most cases. Now, let’s look at cell phones; carriers usually trick you by giving you free phones and fancy features, but this all comes at a price. Usually you have to lock yourself into a two-year contract, and then end up paying large amounts of money for your service each month. Printer and ink manufacturers have the same philosophy. They usually sell printers at a loss of almost 20% (according to financial analysts) and then sell the ink at a profit of almost 60%. Interesting fact; HP ink is more expensive than Russian caviar by weight (at $22 per ¼ ounce). Now that we have pointed out that ink is expensive, many of you may be asking the question, “What can I do to reduce my costs?” Well, there are many things, and some of them are listed in this article.

First of all, instead of buying new ink, you can just buy a printer that comes with ink at purchase. This could possibly save you a lot of money, considering the previously sated statistic about profits and losses on sales of printers and ink.

Another thing that you can do to save money on ink is to buy third-party ink cartridges. This option has both pros and cons. The pros are that it is usually much cheaper than buying brand name cartridges. The cons are that print quality is usually worse.

The last way that you can save money on ink that will be listed in this article is refilling your cartridges on your own or having a service refill them for you. You can buy cartridge refill kits online for pretty good prices, but the downside of this method is that it is usually messy and you might also not get as good print quality. There are also stores that will refill your print cartridges for you, for example, Costco. They will refill your ink cartridge for a much lower price than buying a new ink cartridge, but once again, you might not get as good quality.

In conclusion, ink is outrageously expensive, but there isn’t really much that you can do without sacrificing print quality. The best thing to do is simply to print less, or with lower quality setting (this can be achieved by going into the preferences of your printer and selecting fast printing mode or draft printing mode).