Brits blow millions on over-priced ink
Branded printer cartridges, the new old enemy
British consumers are wasting £440m a year on branded printer cartridges rather than cheaper white label replacements.
How to avoid that freshly ripped-off feeling...
A survey from YouGov found half of all households always buy brand name cartridges, which are typically a third more expensive than equivalents from the likes of WH Smith. Switching would save an average of £44 a year.
Researchers spoke to 2,000 households. The average UK home gets through 4.85 cartridges a year. Cartridges from HP, Canon or Lexmark cost an average of £30 each - so the annual bill is £145.50 - the same as a TV licence.
Only 18 per cent of respondents stick exclusively to cheaper cartridges.
The survey was carried out on behalf of Environmental Business Products, which also noted that non-branded cartridges are usually better for the environment because empty cartridges are collected, cleaned and refilled.
Printer ink is of course infamously expensive - remember the old survey which compared HP's cartridges with Dom Perignon vintage champagne? ®
COMMENTS
cheaper ink
I've used cheaper non-branded ink in the past in my Canon printer ... however both times I tried I ended up with a clogged prnt head and on the 2nd time had to spend £40 to replace it which rather nullified the savings on the ink!
I sell non-originals!
It's interesting to see that , as I write this, so far virtually every post is anti non-original toners/inks.
I sell them and have regular commercial customers who buy from me month-in month-out. One customer is a printer company (as in they print stuff for their customers). They have a very high daily throughput as they use HP LaserJets for much of their work. They do have a failure rate which they say is EVER-SO-SLIGHTLY above that they used to get with HP originals, but as they're paying less than half of the price for the compatibles they are more than happy - which is why each month they send me a nice fat order.
I do not hear from the vast vast majority of my customers between their repeat orders - I have to take that as a sign that they are encountering no problems.
Perhaps we get no problems because we avoid the cheap and nasty Chinese suppliers and go for large specialist manufacturers.
Better for the environment my arse!
Every single time I've tried cheaper compatibles they've leaked all over my printer - on one occasion it meant getting a new printer for my father it'd managed to gunk it up that much.
Not only for inks but for toners too - part of an IT Service job I had a five year ago was printer support (fully accredited to service HP Laserjets) and the amount of toner compatibles dumped thus ruining image belts and fuser units was ridiculous - when the large financial institution rolled out they were saving over a million pounds switching the company from HP official toners to refills I bet they never included the increased service and parts cost in that equation as it would easily be the other way round! (the real reasoning they switched might have had something to do with the head in charge of the deal been given a free tour of their facility..in Africa?)
Now both me and me Dad use Kodaks which have nice cheap inks - yes they don't last /as/ long as my old Canons but at under half the price for a third less I can live with and the lower outlay every time I need a new set doesn't make me balk, plus for the price of three refills I got a shiny new scanner/printer with wifi into the bargain, a big step up on the old unit.
Warranties
"what's the point in buying an extended warranty"
There isn't one. Every time someone offers you an extended warranty put the money in a savings account instead. Then sit back and marvel at how quickly it grows.
What's the point of the OFT?
The article mentioning champagne linked to in this article is over 7 years old.
Since then, and the OFT's fluff, the situation has got a lot worse. Not only is the cost of ink higher than ever before, but with each new model, makers like Canon and Epson develop new ways to waste ink or introduce new ways of forcing you to spend a fortune on servicing.
Epson photo printers piss out as much ink as they can every time you switch them on at the mains (how many households switch their printers off at the mains because they're only used every few days or weeks?), and still waste a lot every now and then if you just leave them in standby. And when your printer decides its pads have soaked up enough ink from borderless printing, the whole thing just shuts down until you take it in for servicing. And of course, the cost of that deliberately points you toward buying a new printer. A lot more than hacking it and replacing the official pads with a 4p bog roll.
Remember when car manufacturers used to charge way over the odds in the UK, even compared to the rest of the EU? They eventually did something about that, so why not printer ink? If something does get done, you can be sure it'll be entirely down to the EU and not the OFT or any UK authority.
