Worry about Page Yield and not the Leftover Ink
We carried an article earlier this year on the amount of ink left over in cartridges after your printer throws ink empty messages. It was found that many printers flashed such messages while the ink cartridge contained enough ink to print several hundred pages. Staying afloat on the same topic, PC World has conducted a series of tests on various printer brands to determine the amount of residual ink in each case. The findings are alarming, but, are consumers, bloggers and reviewers missing the bigger picture?
The magazine picked the top four inkjet printers in the market today; HP, Canon, Epson and Kodak for conducting Ink Leftover tests. These tests were conducted on OEM cartridges as well as aftermarket ones.
The results varied over different brands. While HP inkjet printers continued to work even after signaling low messages until the HP ink cartridge went dry, Epson inkjet printer shut down with over 40% residual ink. Aftermarket cartridges had more leftover ink than the OEM counterparts. HP inkjet printer never threw up the ink low message on non-OEM cartridges.
What are we trying to achieve by researching over the residual ink? Nothing! At the end of the day, all that a consumer cares about is the cost he/she pays per print out; the page yield. This is a direct resultant on the price of cartridge against the number of pages the printer spits out; residual ink is nowhere in the picture.
An earlier test conducted by PCW showed that Kodak inkjet printers that claim to produce lower priced prints actually printed 10% lesser than its projection; while the usually expensive HP inkjet cartridges over ran the projection by over 17%. So, the bigger picture that I mentioned earlier is the cost per print that a consumer should care about rather than the amount of ink that’s left over in his/her cartridge. It is a known fact that a certain amount of residual ink is required to protect printer heads. HP is an exception in this regard as the printer head is disposable as it’s built into the cartridge; so consumers can utilize the entire amount of ink in each cartridge, and maybe that’s the reason for its expensive pricing.
Let us know where you stand on this longstanding debate.
About the author:
Abhinav has been blogging about printing and related technologies on CreativeCloud for several years. He is also a project manager for a large technology company.
