I wish I had a dollar for every time a customer asked “Where’s my ink going.I hardly ever print and I’m always buying ink.” The complaining customers are usually the ones who have with print head printers, such as Epson and Canon, the printers that have a separate cartridge for each color.
Now we’re finding out that it’s a big, expensive problem with the recent publication of a Consumer Reports investigation of mysteriously disappearing ink. It turns out that some printers operate so inefficiently that only 20% of the expensive ink that we buy makes it onto paper–just 20%! 80% of the ink is used up in the printer’s internal maintenance cycles and ends up, according to CR, in the printer’s “diaper” or “spittoon.”
If you’re like me you probably didn’t know that your printer had a diaper or spittoon. It seems that the problem is not just big and expensive; It’s also messy and there’s not much we can do about it except buy a more efficient printer. CR did confirm what I’ve always suspected, that saving money on printing begins with the choice of a printer. You have to get one that doesn’t dump 80% of your ink into its diaper.
In the absence of a new printer Consumer Reports offers a couple of suggestions: First, you should keep the printer turned on to avoid the maintenance cycles that run when you turn it on. Second, you can print in draft mode. Its little consolation if your printer is spitting 80% of your ink into its spittoon.
When I ask my customers what they print most of them say emails, documents, text. Few report printing many pictures or high end color documents. That begs the question, if you’re printing B&W what are you doing with a printer that uses three or four expensive color cartridges that will have to be replaced whether you use them or not?
When I ask my customers why they bought their printers the answer is almost always the same. “It was on sale” or “I got a good deal” or “it came with my computer.” When you consider that 95% of the cost of owning a printer is the consumable (ink & toner) these are three very poor reasons for selecting a printer.
The cost of the printer is only 5% of the total cost of ownership. What about the other 95%? Here’s my suggestion–when it’s time to buy a new printer worry less about the cost of the printer more and more about the cost of the printer cartridges. If you manage to buy a printer with cost effective cartridges then, and only then, can you say that you got a good deal.
