Your Guide To Compatible Inkjet Cartridges

How To Cut Your Inkjet Cartridge Cost By 75%

Here's an interesting fact. It would cost less to fell a pool with champagne then it would to fill it with inkjet printer ink. Think about that and it will give you some idea of the real cost of the ink you're running through your printer each day.

For most of you this cost is something you're always looking to reduce right? Of course you are - nobody wants to be paying insanely high prices for their inkjet cartridges and consumables right? The cost of a few cartridges can often be more than the original cost of the printer itself. It's like buying a car for $15,000 and every tank of gas costs you another $1,000!

This is where the whole third party industry of inkjet compatible cartridges came from. A compatible inkjet cartridge is one that's not manufactured by the original company (HP, Epson, Canon etc) but is designed to work perfectly well in your inkjet printer.

Manufacturers usually try to scare people off saying that compatibles are inferior quality and could damage the printer - 90% of the time this is just nonsense. They just don't want you buying cartridges from anyone but them.

Companies who manufacture or refill compatible inkjet cartridges do their very, very best to make sure the ink in each cartridge is an exact match for the original ink - they're not going to stay in business very long otherwise are they?

In several tests end users have been unable to tell the difference between the compatible cartridges and the original ones provided by the manufacturer (HP and Epson for example).

How cheap are inkjet compatible cartridges?

This is the major selling point for this type of inkjet product. You can save anywhere from 50% to 75% on the cost of buying the original cartridges for your printer. So if your original cartridge cost $50 each you could get a compatible cartridge for as little as $12.50. This is what swings most people

The biggest question most people have is the quality of the ink being supplied with compatible cartridges. Sure it can be very cheap but you do get what you pay for. What many people find is that the super cheap compatible cartridges use an ink that doesn't last as long as the ink supplied by original manufacturers. This means that anything printed with these cartridges could fade away in less than 10 years.

Now this is not always a bad thing. If you're only printing documents that need to be stored for a few months or years then this is probably a bonus. But if you're printing family pictures or important documents that you want to keep forever then the ink quality is something you really do need to watch out for.

Something else to look out for is if the cartridge fails inside the printer. By this I mean if it breaks and clogs up the printer with ink. This can cause warranty arguments with the suppliers - most of them won't honor a warranty on a printer that's been damaged by a non-OEM product like a compatible cartridge.

In the end it's a case of maybe trying some compatible cartridges and seeing how you get on with them. All the advice in the world can't beat some trial (and hopefully not) error.

If compatible cartridges don't appeal to you then you could try inkjet refill kits or maybe some remanufactured inkjet cartridges for your printer.