How can I find a printer that gives me the best value for money?

It's impossible to tell just by looking at the cost of a set of ink cartridges, or by looking at the price of a printer that's on special offer, whether you are going to get good value for money when it comes to the number of pages you print.

The value for money is really calculated by the number of prints you are able to produce from each full set of ink cartridges. Some of the cheaper cartridges may only produce a few prints, and work out expensive in the long run.

A good way to calculate the value of the printer before buying is to calculate the cost of the printer ink and the number of pages you are able to print from a set of cartridges. This should help you to find the best value printer to buy. The cost of ink cartridges in Ireland generally is reducing for the home and business user but only if you make the switch to compatibles.

Typically, an inkjet printer whose printing costs are calculated to be more than 55% more than the average cannot be the best value buy irrespective of how well they print. So if you do your homework on the running costs of the ink cartridges the printer uses you can be sure that you’re getting a good printer that won't end up costing you 2 fortunes in ink.

Another reason a printer can sometimes seem expensive to run is because some ink will be lost when cleaning blockages. If a long amount of time is left in between printing the printer may automatically clean its print heads the next time you have a print run. The cleaning procedure itself will use ink - sometimes a large of ink can be used up if an ink cartridge is refusing to print properly. Printer manufacturers claim that automatic print-head cleaning procedures are necessary to ensure you get the very best prints every time, but independent tests have discovered that when it comes to print-head cleaning, some printers go through more ink cartridges than others.

The printer running costs should include the cost of the ink used for head cleaning. Independent test have shown that the most wasteful printers can use up to 500% more printer ink when leaving time between print jobs, and therefore having to run the head cleaning procedure. This is compared with printing an equal number of pages at one time. The former will dramatically increasing printing costs.

First Published at Printerinkcartridges.ie