It's now possible to buy a good-quality, colour inkjet printer for under £30. Moreover, that deal will include ink cartridges in the box.

If this state of affairs didn't cause befuddlement at the time of purchase then its peculiarity will certainly dawn when you come to replenish the ink supplies: the replacement cartridges may cost as much or even more than the price you paid for the printer in the first place.

That being the case, wouldn't it be easier to just buy another printer, replete with the aforementioned, thrown-in ink cartridges? Another good question.

Consumer demands
The most important considerations for any consumer in the market for an inkjet printer are price and print quality. Manufacturers are aware of this and with each passing year the performance and quality of inkjet printers improves while the cost diminishes.

This is a seemingly win-win situation for consumers. Whether purchasing a printer for the first time or replacing an older model, the buyer can apparently be assured that new equipment will be cheaper than before and yet will be faster and produce better-quality output.

Well, that statement is at least half true - print speed and resolution are improving all the time. But cheaper prices? Cue the sound of someone opening Pandora's box.

Pay now and later
The fact is, that, while the initial cost of purchasing an inkjet printer can be very low indeed, an exceptionally attractive purchase price like this may obscure an ugly truth about the actual expenditure you can expect to make during its lifespan.

To calculate the real outlay, the buyer needs to consider several other factors, not least of which is the cost of the consumables - ink cartridges, in other words. Obviously, the quantity of ink you get through in any given period will depend on how much printing you do, but even the most casual printer owner will need to replenish their ink supply a couple of times a year.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that ink cartridges are not all equal, meaning that while one firm's tanks might be cheaper than those of a rival, the competitor's cartridges might last longer. This is all but impossible to discern at the time of purchase, as the only information that tends to be writ large on sales materials is the price of the printer itself.

To a greater or lesser extent, all inkjet manufacturers use sales of ink to subsidise the cost of the printing hardware. The straightforward reason for this is because there exists a price point below which the sale of printing hardware alone becomes unprofitable.

Facts and figures
We tested printers from the four best-known manufacturers: Canon, Epson, HP and Lexmark. Two models were chosen for their low initial purchase price, while the other pair are 'mid-range' (in other words, they're neither eye-catchingly cheap nor prohibitively expensive).

Our aim was to find out if cut-price printers represent a good investment, or whether costlier models work out cheaper in the longer run. To moneymen, this kind of study is known as the total cost of ownership; to the rest of us, it's a tricky but commonsense calculation for anyone concerned about the price of printing.

We began our investigation by looking at two low-cost inkjets: the Epson C44UX and the new Lexmark z605. The Epson has a suggested retail price of £49 while the Lexmark is almost a tenner less at £40.

Remember that these are the price tags suggested by the manufacturers; by shopping around, you'll find that some retailers are prepared to discount even these already low purchase costs. For example, we found the Lexmark z605 on sale in a London store for £34, while its predecessor the z601 was on offer at a mere £25.

These two printers exhibit similar speed and quality characteristics and, as is to be expected, both manufacturers include ink cartridges in the box as part of the deal (one three-colour cartridge and a second tank containing black ink only). The low price of these models means that they're likely to appeal primarily to buyers on a budget.

Respectively, standard-capacity tanks for these Epson and Lexmark printers cost £12.85 and £20.99 for black ink and £18 and £22.99 for three-colour cartridges. But this is still only part of the picture.

Testing times
In order to ascertain the actual running costs our Labs technicians devised a test that would time and time again exhaust the printers' ink cartridges, measuring the life in terms of the total number of pages each was capable of producing. These tests were repeated for both colour and mono (black) ink cartridges.

Factoring in a figure of an average weekly output of 30 printed pages (the result of votes submitted to an online poll on the Computeractive website) and extrapolating the pages-per-cartridge test data allowed us to tot up the total cost of ownership over any given period, for either mono or colour printing purposes.

Another Computeractive poll revealed that the largest percentage of our readers keep hold of their printers for between one and two years, so we settled on 18 months as the average likely life expectancy of a printer before it is replaced.

On this basis, over the course of a year and a half the true cost of buying and running the Epson C44UX could work out at £415.70, while Lexmark's offering ups the ante considerably. An owner of the z605 who prints up to 30 monochrome pages per week can expect a total outlay over an 18-month period of £585.73.

On average, the z605's black ink cartridges were spent after 90 pages, while those for the C44UX managed 82 pages (but don't forget that the Epson's black ink cartridges are considerably cheaper). We stress that these figures are based on extrapolated data drawn from the average life cycles of cartridges tested in the Computeractive Labs; therefore they should be considered only as a guide.

Look at colour output and the costs rocket. With Epson's £18 colour cartridges managing an average total output of 38 A4-sized colour pages, a C44UX owner who prints 30 colour sheets per week could shell out as much as £1,157.42 over an 18-month period (remember this figure includes the purchase price of the printer).

However, that number is as nothing compared to the same calculations applied to colour printing on the Lexmark offering. The z605's colour cartridges, costing £22.99, dried up in our tests after an average output of 31 pages. If you've just bought a z605, you might want to sit down. Over a year and a half, our 30-colour-pages-per-week user can bank on a total cost of ownership of £1,775.36.

These figures are significant for a variety of reasons, not least of which is because the most recent survey of the inkjet printer marketplace by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) concluded that 78 per cent of consumers use only the cartridges recommended by the manufacturer.

Put another way, printer manufacturers know that the vast majority of their customers are worried enough by warnings of the potential problems caused by the use of non-branded cartridges to cough up for the recommended ink tanks regardless of cost. That such cautions may be groundless is academic.

Buy high?
To further understand the significance of the results from the low-cost models, let's shift focus to the costlier printers in our test. The HP Deskjet 5150 has a suggested retail price of £89, while the Canon i560 is £129.

Again, by shopping around it's easy to pick up these models at a discounted price. At the time of writing PC World was selling the i560 for a penny short of £100, for example. However, to ensure a level playing field, we're basing all our calculations on the price information supplied by the manufacturers.

HP quotes £16.99 for a standard black ink cartridge for use in the Deskjet 5150, with the three-colour ink tank weighing in at a seemingly hefty £26.99, but hold that thought for a few sentences. Pricing of the Canon cartridges is marginally more complicated, as the i560 relies on individually replaceable colour tanks alongside the usual black cartridge.

This is not a problem in relation to our tests because during the colour print run, the inkjets are required to output an equal amount of cyan, magenta and yellow inks. By averaging the capacity of the individual tanks, for our purposes they can be considered as one three-colour tank.

It should be noted, though, that a user reliant on a particular colour tone or hue - perhaps someone who prints batches of magenta-coloured letterheads, say - could make considerable savings by investing in a printer with individually replaceable colour cartridges. With that understood, the price of individual colour cartridges for the i560 is £8.89 (or £26.67 when viewed as one three-colourcartridge package), while a replacement black tank costs £11.19.

As before, to find the total cost of ownership we tallied these numbers, factoring in the average life of the ink cartridges, to work out the price of buying these models and using them to output 30 colour pages per week for 18 months.

The results were quite something. With an average normalised figure of 69 sheets per three-ink cartridges, the 18-month cost for the Canon i560 added up to £1,029.11, which compares favourably to the £1,157.42 notched up by the Epson C44UX.

However, the HP Deskjet 5150 proved itself the star of the show: this model's three-ink cartridges yielded 102 sheets on average, leading to a total cost over a year and half of £708.18.

The numbers game
Enough with the statistics. What does all this really mean? Well, it's actually very simple: the ink cartridges required for the super-cheap printers tested here are extremely poor value. They cost more to buy but run dry sooner than the equivalent consumables for the higher-priced printers we examined.

Of course, this isn't a fact you're likely to be aware of at the time of purchasing the printer. Nor would you necessarily notice the ongoing costs mounting up as you bought replacement ink cartridges; that's all part of the illusion staged by the manufacturers.

A survey by the OFT noted that 75 per cent of ink cartridge shoppers had no idea about the cost of running a printer. Moreover, the report concluded that such is the dominance of the four printer manufacturers represented here, that they are free to "effectively set the prices of ink cartridges in their own after-markets".

If the OFT didn't actually use the word cartel, it was certainly scathing in its summary of the leading manufacturers' stranglehold. Indeed, the report stated that if within 12 months retailers and manufacturers had not taken action on its recommendations to bring more transparency to pricing in the inkjet printer market, then the OFT would consider taking further appropriate action against them.

The report was dated December 2002. Well over a year later, our results suggest that consumers are still at serious risk of being ripped off.

Prints of thieves
From the evidence of our tests it's plain that low-cost printers don't stay low-cost for long. Indeed, the figures for the ongoing cost of running these apparent bargains surprised even us, with the total for colour-printing expenditure using the Lexmark z605 effectively being twice that notched up by the HP Deskjet 5150 over an 18-month period.

This is not to suggest that bargain-basement inkjet printers always represent a bad buy: someone who prints just a few sheets each year will likely get very good value out of one of the low-cost models tested here.

However, if you intend to keep your printer for two years or more while printing an average of 30 sheets each week, the purchase of a cheap inkjet printer should be viewed as false economy of the highest order. Within weeks you will have spent more on ink cartridges than you paid for the printer.

WEEE woes
It's possible that you've considered the purchase of a low-cost inkjet as a cheap insurance against equipment breakdown: if your bargain-basement printer gives up the ghost, simply dump it and buy a replacement. But watch out - WEEE's on its way.

This snigger-inducing acronym is short for Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment, and it alludes to an EU directive concerned with the same. In a nutshell, WEEE is designed to reduce the amount of high-tech junk that ends up in landfill sites, while at the same increasing the level of recycling.

WEEE is needed because many electronic components contain non-biodegradable materials, such as cadmium and lead. It comes into force across Europe in August this year, although in the UK at least its full effects aren't likely to be felt until a year beyond that date.

On an individual level consumers have little to fear from WEEE, as the directive targets producers rather than purchasers. The idea is that the same organisation or company supplying a product should be held responsible for the product's disposal or recycling at the end of its life.

For the inkjet printer market, this could mean that when your printer fires its last droplet you'll drop it back to the store where it was purchased and buy a replacement (or walk away and forget it if you prefer). Manufacturers will arrange en-masse collections of dumped printers.

However, these new arrangements will cost printer manufacturers money. And you can bet your empty ink cartridges that it won't be them footing the bill.

The laser squad
If you saw our recent Lasers on stun feature, you might like to compare and contrast the running costs against those listed in our table. To do so makes interesting reading.

The lasers we looked at were monochrome models - colour lasers are still rather costly, both to buy and particularly to run, so we can only consider the cost of printing black-and-white output - but the difference is marked. In this test, the Canon i560 produced the cheapest monochrome output, with a per-page price of just over 9p.

To put it another way, the ink required to print 100 A4 pages would cost a little more than £9. This compares very poorly with the output from the most economical laser printer we tested, the Brother HL 1430, which dished out monochrome A4 pages at a fraction of the price - just 1.13p per sheet or £1.13 for a print run of 100.

This in itself isn't a reason to choose a laser printer over an inkjet, but it's food for thought. If you're going to produce a lot of mono output and only very occasionally need to print something in colour, then it might be wise to consider the purchase of a laser printer and a low-cost inkjet.