My local office store salesperson said that an ink cartridge should produce about 250 copies if you use economy print. We tallied our usage on a sheet of paper, and only seem to get about 50-100 copies out of a new cart at most. Do the ink cartridge companies not fill to the brim?
Does the pope wear a funny hat?
Inkjet ink is the most expensive fluid on the planet
That said, the number of copies printed usually relied on some silly metric like “no more than 5% of the page covered in ink”
If you’re printing a lot of pictures, spreadsheets, whatever, that will reduce the page count some.
You might look into buying a good cheap laser jet if you’re just printing a lot in B&W
My hubby remanufactures inkjet cartridges, and no one ‘fills to the brim’, they aren’t made that way.
But you’re right, they do short the ink, especially if they came with your new printer. They look identical, but they don’t have near as much ink in them.
Original cartridges are often half filled now. The small print states this fact. Those are called starter carts and usually have a letter after the number like “e.” When you buy new supposedly full carts, they state how many mills are in the cart and I believe they have that amount. They are not full in the sense you would think of as “to the brim.” This can be for technical reasons. Still, you should be getting what you pay for, which is a certain amount of ink, not brim filling.
When the companies present printing capacities it is based upon a certain amount of ink per page, like 5% filled. You often print with greater usage than their test pages. So you receive fewer print pages per cart.
I have never purchased a new ink cart. I have older printers and I refill those carts with refill ink purchased off the internet and the dollar store. I used all dye based inks in my Canon and HP color. Then I use pigment based for the HP black. I can probably get 400+ pages from the HP45 cart. I think it must hold about 45 mills of ink compared to some newer carts with about 9-11ml. However, newer printers are supposed to be more efficient in ink usage.
Cleaning kills your ink usage efficiency. Don’t clean too much. Some printers love to clean, especially if they have been unplugged or dormant for a few days. Ink used by these extra cleanings is not considered in the manufacturer’s capacity specs.
Yes, the phrase was used as a figure of speech, and my question is along the lines technically of are we getting the amount advertised.
I have both an older and newer HP printer, and this confirms that the newer printers are much more expensive in ink usage although it wasn’t mentioned by the salesman.
I’m not aware of the cleaning feature. Is that where it takes its own sweet time making a bunch of noise moving parts around when you hit the on button? I thought it was calibrating.
Here is a post from Mangetout linking to an article he wrote describing just how much ink is wasted in the cleaning cycles. The fact is that inkjet printers are not designed to be efficient at printing; they are designed to be efficient at costing you money.
That was a really depressing video, Dewey Finn. One of the suggestions (in a link) is to use a discount store (Costco, Walgreens, CVS, etc.) to print photos. Might be a good idea.