Allan had noticed for a long time that his printer went through ink cartridges like they were going out of style. It is a colour ink-jet printer with individual cartridges for each colour. He was hardly using it for colour printing but it was asking for one colour cartridge after another way too prematurely considering how little colour printing he was doing.The thing is....it won't work at all even in Black and White if any of the colour cartridges are empty, so you have to feed it colours that it wants. He can go for weeks at a time and not do any colour printing but it would run out of a colour. He was complaining to me about this and how costly this was becoming and it seemed to wasteful. He swore it didn't used to do this and that he could get so much more printing out of his old Cannon Printer before it asked to be refilled with ink. I also noticed the printer was complaining for ink much sooner too,but I thought it was both our imaginations and we had so many other things to think about, that we didn't look into it any further.
Then,this past August, I heard him shout out "I KNEW IT" Allan gets the Consumers Report Canada subscription (Yes he does like to read magazines and I enjoy this one too-some fascinating little tid-bits and articles) and he happened to come across a piece called
"The Case of the Disappearing ink"
in the August Edition, and in fact it talked about just this...about how some printers use more ink than other printers just for maintenance alone. For example if you were to print 30 pages in a row you would use much less ink, then if you were to print 30 pages one at a time intermittently over 3 weeks. Each time the printer prepares to print, it goes though a little ritual using ink to clean the print heads and other things that are so called maintenance necessities. It seems that if you print 30 sheets using the second scenario and base it over one year's time, you can spend up to an extra $125 a year on ink on some printers. Even though Allan's was not one of the printers mentioned in the article, it was in the series that used quite an excess of ink so it does seem more wasteful to spend all that money on ink that only gets used up in between the printing process.
Here is a closer look at the "Ink Guzzler" Printer That Allan uses
It seems that Printers like this might be here to stay unfortunately, since building them like this seems to be a Great Money Grab.They used to be built more efficiently and they produced Great Quality Colour Printing too.
So Is There A Solution?
1.There are printers that use less ink and supposedly this one used no extra ink.
It is a very inexpensive Ink-Jet printer but it has other downsides that won't work
in the office.
2. Some people are buying their own ink and filling the cartridges themselves. I have to admit, we have not gone that route yet and not sure it works well for all the printers.
3. Another solution is to have a designated Black and White Laser printer for printing your Black & White and Greys only, and use the colour Ink-Jet for when you need it.
4. I read that the type of paper you use can make a difference in how much ink you go through also. I read that you should use paper made for ink-jet printers only since they will not absorb as much ink as paper made for photo copying. Again, not sure we have tried that trick recently to see if it does make a difference? Have you?.
If you have anything to add, please comment here.
