Work top printers are not as high-priced as they used to be. But maintaining a printer is still quite expensive because of the factor that ink and toner cartridges are quite high-priced.
Nowadays there are alternatives to reducing the printing expense of your home or organisation. Acquiring a more effective printer, using compatible inkjet cartridges or simply refilling initial cartridges.

In this article I’ll be taking a closer look at original and compatible inkjet cartridges and aspire to determine which is the most price effective.

Everybody knows that compatible inks are less expensive than original inks. But to elect which is more price effective we need to find the ink dispersion of both types of cartridges.

A method to do that is by weighing them. Lets claim we have two new ink cartridges, an original and a compatible cartridge. To begin with we need to weigh them before putting them on a given printer and then weigh them at the end of experimenting.

Getting scales acceptable (and cheaply enough) to do the task shouldn’t be a problem: one litre of water weighs one kilogram, so scales that measure down to 0.1 grammes would quantify to a determination of 0.1 ml - and scales that measure to a tenth of this are quickly accessible too.

The issue of course, is that you need to be familiar with the specific gravity of the ink. Assuming the manufacturer have this information accessible, all you need to do is deduct the final weight from the initial weight in order to attain the ink consumption.

With a multitude of printers and cartridges available these days it is hard to address a specific one. So for a better accepting lets work on a fictional model.

Let’s pretend the initial weight of a “tank” was 235.8 g and after the analysis it weighted 227.4 grams, which provides us an usage of 8.4 g of ink. Using 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 decide the cost of each print. Again using a fictional example, if a cartridge nominally contained 17 ml of ink and cost £10.99, then the price 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 cost effective. I know it might sound too arduous for you to do this at home, but for those of you running a business that relies on printing on day-to-day basis this test might be worth the bother.

I would be keen to hear your accounts, please share your test results or any other process to determine the ink consumption of original and compatible inkjet cartridges.