Desk top printers are not as expensive as they used to be. But maintaining a printer is still fairly expensive due to the factor that ink and toner cartridges are to a certain extent costly.
Presently there are alternatives to reducing the printing cost of your workplace or organisation. Acquiring a more efficient printer, using compatible inkjet cartridges or completely refilling original ones.
In this feature I'll be taking a closer look at original and compatible inkjet cartridges and attempt to choose which is the most cost effective.
Everybody knows that compatible inks are less expensive than original cartridges. But to determine which is more price effective we need to find the ink dispersion of both types of cartridges.
A way to do that is by weighing them. Lets assume we have two fresh ink cartridges, an original and a compatible one. Before all else we need to weigh them before putting them on a chosen machine and then weigh them at the end of testing.
Getting scales acceptable (and cheaply enough) to do the task shouldn't be a problem: one litre of water weighs one kg, so scales that measure down to 0.1 gram would measure to a conclusion of 0.1 ml - and scales that measure to a tenth of this are easily accessible too.
The problem of course, is that you need to be familiar with the specific gravity of the ink. Assuming the manufacturer have this information ready for use, all you need to do is reduce the final weight from the initial weight in order to find the ink consumption.
With so many printers and cartridges available nowadays it is hard to write about a particular one. So for a preferred accepting lets work on a fictional instance.
Let’s claim the primary weight of a "tank" was 235.8 grams and after the assessment it weighted 227.4 g, which provides us an usage of 8.4 g of ink. Applying a particular gravity of 1.2 as a typical value then the quantity of ink used would be 8.4/1.2 = 7 ml or 7/32 = 0.21875 ml per 'standard' A4 print.
Now that we have found how much ink is used per A4 print we can determine the cost of each print. Again using a fictional example, if a cartridge nominally contained 17 ml of ink and price £10.99, then the cost per 'standard' A4 print would be 10.99*0.21875/17 = £0.14 (rounded to the nearest pence).
The inkjet cartridge with the lowest cost per print will be the most price effective. I know it might sound too complicated for you to do this at home, but for those of you managing a company that relies on printing on daily basis this test might be worth the effort.
I would love to hear your experiences, please share your test results or any other method to determine the ink consumption of original and compatible inkjet cartridges.
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