Why does printer ink cost so much?

Printer ink is expensive; there is no getting around that fact. If you do a lot of printing on an inkjet printer at home you may end up spending more than you would expect.

We are going to look at why ink costs so much, whether recycled, ‘compatible’ or ‘remanufactured’ cartridges do the job, and at other ways to save money on printing.

Total cost of ownership
If you only look at the up-front price of printers, costs have come down significantly in the past 30 years. With the advent of inkjet and then laser printing for the home, prices have dropped and it is now possible to pick up a new inkjet printer for less than £40, or a new laser printer for less than £70.

The up-front cost of the printer is only a small part of the cost of printing. In fact, for some printers it is the least important part. Printer manufacturers use a measure called total cost of ownership (TCO), which measures how much a printer will cost over its lifetime, or over a set number of years.

If you are going to invest in a new printer, it is important to find out, as far as possible, what the TCO is likely to be for that model of printer. That enables users to make an informed decision about which printer is going to give them the best value.

Of course, the cheapest printer is not always the best. There are other factors such as print speed, quality and reliability (which also adds to the TCO. If you have to replace parts or pay to have it fixed, that adds to the cost).

Why ink costs so much
Modern ink cartridges are surprisingly complicated. The ink is fired from the cartridge up to 36,000 times a second to produce what we see on the page. A standard 4x6in photo can contain 35 million ink drops.

Thom Brown of printer and ink manufacturer HP told us that it spends three to five years perfecting each new ink it introduces, testing up to 1,000 prototype formulas and that it spends $1bn (£650m) a year on inkjet research and development.

HP’s most recent study, in 2007, showed that one in five recycled cartridges failed in some way, but no original HP cartridges failed in testing – we will look later on at whether those claims add up.

Printers themselves are quite cheap (some cost as little as £30 in sale deals), but it can be almost as expensive to replace the ink tanks once they dry up.

In part, the cost of ink allows the printer companies to offset some of the money they spend on developing their printers by making a higher profit on ink.

That has led to a healthy market in ‘third-party’ ink supplies, but as you might expect, with such an outlay on their inks, printer manufacturers see the trade in refilled and recycled cartridges as a threat.