![]() For instance, some printers use separate cartridges for each ink, while others use single, tricolor cartridges. We didn’t test color inks because that would have introduced too many variables that might skew the results. We researched both online and brick-and-mortar tech outlets to find printers that are being used now by high numbers of consumers. “Over the life of the printer–and by that I mean three years–you can easily spend $800 for the printer and ink.” “In some cases, we found that the printer could be 1/8 of the total cost of printing,” says Pociask. Pociask recently coauthored a 50-page study on the ink jet printer and cartridge market. “I personally think that consumers are getting ripped off,” says Steve Pociask, president of the American Consumer Institute, a nonprofit educational and research institute in Washington, D.C. For some perspective, gasoline costs about $3 per gallon (at the moment), while a gallon of Beluga caviar (imagined as a liquid) costs about $18,000–surprisingly, only about four times as expensive as good old printer ink. If you bought a gallon of the stuff over the life of your printer, you’d have paid about $4731 for a liquid that one aftermarket vendor told us was “cheap” to make. ![]() ![]() An average black-ink cartridge contains 8 milliliters of ink and costs about $10 which translates into a cost of $1.25 per milliliter (or more horrifyingly, $1250 per liter). And that’s a problem, when you consider how expensive the precious fluid is. Judging from these findings, printer owners are probably throwing away a lot of usable ink. Other people, however–both journalists and independent researchers–have reported very different experiences with ink cartridges.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |