The Expense Of Ink Cartridges
- Date: 2008-11-20 - Word Count: 391
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Ink Cartridges are strange things, innocuous vessels of a substance that seems so common and disposable - on every daily newspaper, on every flyer stuck to your car windscreen, even on those little sachets of silica gel you find in every box of new Nikes. Yet, if we want to buy ink for use in our own homes we seem to pay well over the odds.
Today, a gallon of the stuff would set you back nearly £3000, and the outraged consumer is no longer standing idly by. In 2003 640,000 members of The Dutch Consumer Association started a month-long boycott of Epson Inkjet printers, whilst The Office of Fair Trading has also carried out its own investigation into the cost of ink cartridges. The OFT found three main problems with the printer market: 1. Consumers are unaware of the future costs of cartridges when they buy their printers, 2. There is no standard test to show how many pages should be printed by which cartridges, 3. Printer warranty information is unclear.
The OFT investigation led to a test carried out by Which? magazine. By printing different types of typical pages, from letters to photos, Which? tested how many copies could be made and suggested that the results should be made easily available to consumers, in order to offer suitable transparency.
Recently however, consumers have been looking for different options when it comes to running out of ink. The idea of refilling your cartridge yourself is viable, with many companies offering to do so for you at half price or thereabouts. Although is not widely promoted to be much of a benefit for those who want to print very high quality documents, and according to the New York Times there is a 70 per cent failure rate for a refilled cartridge to meet the amount of pages that a new one would.
Consequently, cartridge manufacturers such as Epson now include information on their website to detail ink yields from each model, a fact that they were previously accused of hiding. But the price of new ink cartridges remains high. So are there any other options? Ink saving software such as Ink Saver (inksaver.com) seems a good idea, failing that, it seems that the more time you invest in shopping around for a new ink cartridge (or printer), the less likely you are to get ripped off.
Today, a gallon of the stuff would set you back nearly £3000, and the outraged consumer is no longer standing idly by. In 2003 640,000 members of The Dutch Consumer Association started a month-long boycott of Epson Inkjet printers, whilst The Office of Fair Trading has also carried out its own investigation into the cost of ink cartridges. The OFT found three main problems with the printer market: 1. Consumers are unaware of the future costs of cartridges when they buy their printers, 2. There is no standard test to show how many pages should be printed by which cartridges, 3. Printer warranty information is unclear.
The OFT investigation led to a test carried out by Which? magazine. By printing different types of typical pages, from letters to photos, Which? tested how many copies could be made and suggested that the results should be made easily available to consumers, in order to offer suitable transparency.
Recently however, consumers have been looking for different options when it comes to running out of ink. The idea of refilling your cartridge yourself is viable, with many companies offering to do so for you at half price or thereabouts. Although is not widely promoted to be much of a benefit for those who want to print very high quality documents, and according to the New York Times there is a 70 per cent failure rate for a refilled cartridge to meet the amount of pages that a new one would.
Consequently, cartridge manufacturers such as Epson now include information on their website to detail ink yields from each model, a fact that they were previously accused of hiding. But the price of new ink cartridges remains high. So are there any other options? Ink saving software such as Ink Saver (inksaver.com) seems a good idea, failing that, it seems that the more time you invest in shopping around for a new ink cartridge (or printer), the less likely you are to get ripped off.
Related Tags: technology, computer, laptop, printer, hardware, notebook, ink cartridge
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