What makes used ink cartridges so valuable?

Factual Questions
21

I’d use the drugstore photo service for colour pictures, because they offer a special photo editing software and have the necessary special photo paper and ink along with it.

That your local printer shop is staffed by idiots I’m sorry to hear, and a bit baffled: do you live in a small town? Around here, the university quarter has half a dozen copy shops for the students, there’s a special shop for the State library (colour prints starting at 0,35 Euro/page) as well as a small shop out in my suburb which is very generous with trial prints.

22

Is they really that expensive in the EU? Most consumer-level low-end inkjet printers here take one black cartridge and one tri-color cartridge, and they run about $25 apiece if you buy them at a retail store. Probably cheaper online.

The more expensive ones that have separate cyan, yellow, and magenta ink cartridges usually seem to charge about $20 for each color, so you spend a bit more but you don’t have to replace the tri-color cartridge when one of the colors (usually yellow in my experience) runs out.

ETA: the university bioinformatics lab that I work at bought a color laser printer last year for $499. The high-capacity toner cartridges cost $38.99 apiece; we need to buy four of them, but they last 4000 pages.

23

I believe that constanze was referring to the price of laser printer toner cartridges, not inkjet cartridges.

24

Not in the post I quoted. Or at least, not in the part I quoted.

25

Yes, I was giving the price for normal inkjet cartridges, but the last time I looked in the retail stores was several years ago. Prices may have gone down due to competition, but I haven’t looked recently. I have seen several shops offering re-filled cartridges spring up over the last year (which also offer buying empty cart.s) but haven’t looked to see how they’re doing now.

26

Here in Australia, the average yield on a black laser cartridge for a “standard” (ie the sort most people would buy and not a commercial-scale one) laser printer is between 1,000-3,000 pages (cost $60-$200 or so), in my experience working in computer & electronics retail for the last too many years.

Also, you can’t generally print onto photo paper using a laser printer, so if you want super nice photos then an inkjet is still the second best option after going getting them printed from a kiosk somewhere.

There’s a whole heap of other factors at play, but the edited highlights are if you plan on doing colour printing, an inkjet is still the most cost-effective way to do it for most people.