Printer Supplies: Are you paying too much?

Both ink jet printer ink and toner cartridges are now widely recognised as one of the biggest aspects of the office supply industry, with an office of twenty people spending over £1500 a year on printer ink alone. The most common cartridges are priced around £87 per unit but this can fluctuate up to as much as £139 depending on the supplier you use to purchase them.

You might well be asking yourself, why it costs so much for a relatively small amount of ink. The marketing manager of printer manufacturer HP recently was asked this in an interview with computer world where the interviewer reported that ink technology is expensive to develop, and you pay for reliability and image quality.

There is a lot to be said for this as you do get what you pay for with most thing in life and you will all ways get the best results with an original manufactures cartridge as opposed to an unbranded one. However that is not to say that’s you should always use original cartridge, for most general office use a quality third party manufacturer of toner cartridge like 5 Star are more than sufficient.

The most widely over looked way of lowering the cost of printing is within the printer itself. Most of us know that regularly servicing a car gives you better fuel economy, the same goes for printers. When you run a regally serviced printer it will return more pages to a cartridge than one that has never had a service in its life. In a recent survey of some local companies we found that over 50% of them were only turning there printer on when they wanted to use them, this is one of the biggest false economies out there and when you turn a printer on it runs through a cleaning cycle where it cleans some of it internal workings, this however wastes a lot of ink if it is done excessively and could half the life of a cartridge.