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Ink costs exposed

Posted on 27 Feb 2006 at 11:37

We've compared notes with Spencer Labs, an independent testing company that's tested many of the printers we've looked at here, and the two sets of results are within a 10 per cent margin of error of each other at most. This is in spite of Spencer Labs using a different testing methodology. It's therefore safe to say that your costs per page will be comparable to ours unless you only print continuously.

Interpreting the Results

One thing became very clear from our results: the biggest single factor to determine efficiency is whether the printer has a permanent or removable print head.

The print head is the mechanical part of the ink delivery system that physically shoots drops of ink onto the page. In terms of mechanical precision, it works on a similar scale of magnitude to a hard disk - each nozzle in a print head is around 75 microns wide: about two-thirds the width of a hair. With such small nozzles, jamming the print head with dust becomes a real issue. If a printer uses cartridges with integrated print heads (see photo, left), once the cartridge is out of ink the print head is replaced. On printers with separate print heads and ink tanks, the print head needs to last the lifetime of the printer, which means more cleaning cycles to ensure it lasts.

This extra cleaning carries through to cartridge replacement. Replace an ink cartridge that has a built-in print head, and the printer will refrain from purging lots of ink because the cartridge has just come out of vacuum-sealed packing. On a remote print-head printer, the print head's condition can't be guaranteed, and so the cleaning cycle is more in-depth. It's fair to say that we saw greatly reduced efficiency on all of the printers with remote print heads - the best any of them managed was the Epson R340 at 63 per cent.

But it's not as simple as finding the most efficient printer - you need to factor in the costs of consumables like photo paper, as well as the actual cost of the ink cartridges. This is clearly demonstrated by Epson's R240, which placed second for cost per print thanks to incredibly good value packs of ink and paper.

Conversely, don't expect highly efficient printers to be excellent value for money: the Lexmark P915 wasted only 5 per cent of the ink we used during the test, but its rate of 55p per 6 x 4in print is due to high cartridge costs and relatively expensive photo paper.

Overall, printers with value packs turned out to be better value - find out which ones have them in our table. Just beware of 'customised' ink cartridges in some value bundles; these may have the same code name as their standard brethren, but often the customisation translates to less ink being put into the cartridge.

Size is important

Above, we list an at-a-glance guide to all the printers' running costs for 6 x 4in and A4 photos. These are based on our intermittent testing, and also include the cost of paper.

One obvious conclusion is that 6 x 4in photos are more expensive to print than we expect, especially if you own a Canon Pixma iP5200R. In fact, only one in five people in our survey guessed the 'right' figure of 30-40p. But it's also clear that if you buy the right printer, it makes good economic sense to print A4 photos at home rather than using an online service: 93p from the HP Photosmart 8750 is simply phenomenal.

How to save money!

Using our research, there are a number of ways in which you can save money. The simplest, which will save you anything from 15p to 48p per 6 x 4in photo, is to use an online photo service instead of your home printer. You don't get instant results, and quality may not be as good, but it's difficult to argue when it comes to photos-per-buck.