Skip to main content

My experience with very cheap ink

In February 2016 I ordered a set of really cheap ink for our Canon Pixma printer: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/251740970361 . That is just over €12 for four complete sets of ink. Contrast that with the official Canon price of €57.99 for a a single multi-pack of four colours: https://store.canon.ie/pixma-mg-5650-cartridges/cp928eed/

I am fully aware of the razor and blade model  that inkjet printers use and I had often bought third party ink before but I had never gone so cheap. At some stage you do get what you pay for and that ebay ink is only 1/18th the price of official Canon ink so I bought it as something of an experiment. Well here we are 19 months later and that ink is finally running out. I would like to share some of the fears I had when buying such cheap ink and my eperiences with it. 

1. It won't work at all or have some annoying incompatibilty. Nope. Ink worked perfectly and is 100% compatible. Even has a little LED on each cartridge to show its status and it reports ink levels correctly to the printer softeware. 

2. Cheap ink like this will clog the jets and damage the printer. Given a brand new printer costs no more than a single refill of ink I was willing to risk this. Happily I can report that the printer has chugged along nicely on the cheap ink and doesn't seem to have suffered at all. To be fair we aren't heavy printers but with two adults and two school going kids there is probably something printed most days.

3. The print quality will suffer. If it has I haven't noticed but we aren't printing wedding photos. We are printing graphs for school projects and tickets for the cinema. We neither know nor care if the colours are a little off.  

4. The ink will fade. Again I cannot say if it does or not. The bar code I printed a couple of months ago has long been discarded. There are some craft things my daughters printed a few  months ago and they seem to have held their colour.

5. The cheap ink cartridges won't be properly filled. This hasn't been our experience. The twenty cartridge set has lasted us over 18 months (and only two colours have actually run out so far). It seems to me that the cartidge itself complete with circuit board and LED probably costs more than the ink inside it so there isn't much of an incentive for them to skimp on the ink. 

Overall conclusion: A very sucessful experiment. Am going to order the same set again.

Aside: I bought this printer just over two years ago and I remember that it cost about €60. That is pretty much identical to the price of a single refill of official ink. The thing is that the printer came with a free set of ink cartridges. I have seen suggestions that these initial cartridges are only half full but that has not been my experience. The awful truth is that if you insist on buying own brand printer cartidges you may as well just buy a whole new printer everytime you replace the ink. 


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

My First Gaming Mouse: Logitech G300

I bought a gaming mouse yesterday a Logitech G300, here my initial thoughts. What is a gaming mouse?  There are a wide variety of devices available classified as gaming mice but a few features  seem common: 1. Wired rather than wireless: Although some high end models are wireless wired connections are just better and faster than wireless so most gaming mice stick with wired. As a bonus wired mice don't need batteries so the mouse is lighter.  2. High response rate: 1 to 2ms response rate so the mouse immediately responds to input.  2. High DPI. Gaming mice invariable boast high DPI numbers from 2,000 DPI upwards. This makes the device very responsive to the smallest movements.   3. Adjustable DPI . High DPI improves responsiveness but reduces precision so gaming mice generally allow you to adjust the DPI down for precise work such as pulling off headshots in sniper mode. Generally the mouse allows dpi to be changed on the fly by pressing a button.  4. Extr

Android Tip 3: Sharing a Folder between multiple users of an Android device

Android has allowed multiple user logins for quite a while now. This is can be very useful for tablets which are shared by family members. Normally Android erects strict Chinese walls between users preventing them from using each others apps and viewing each others files. This is a useful security feature and ensures your kids don't mess up your work spreadsheets when screwing around on the tablet and should also prevent them from buying €1,000 worth of Clash of Candy coins on your account. Sometimes however you really do want to share stuff with other users and this can prove surprisingly difficult. For example on a recent holiday I realised that I wanted to share a folder full of travel documents with my wife. Here are some ways to achieve this. 1. If you have guaranteed internet access  then you can create a shared folder on either Dropbox or Google drive. Either of these has the great advantage of being able to access the files on any device and the great disadvantage of bein

Portal 2 two screen coop on one PC.

I mentioned before that I intended to try Portal 2 in "unofficial split screen co-op mode. Well split screen on a small computer monitor is a recipe for a headache especially when the game defies gravity as much as portal. However a minor bit of extra fiddling allowed us to drive two seperate screens from one PC. The Steam forums describes a complicated method of doing this that I couldn't get working so this simpler method which worked for me might be of use to someone. 1. First I followed the instructions in this post to get split screen multi-player working: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1847904 A minor issue not mentioned is that you need to enable the console from the keyboard/mouse options menu I am using keyboard and one wired Xbox360 controller as suggested. Getting the controller to switch to channel 2 was tricky at first but as Chameleon8 mentions plugging it out and in again during loading works. The trick for me was to do the plug / p