Are third-party printer inks worth the savings?

With money in short supply these days, everyone wants to find a way to trim costs. One expense that could be on the chopping block--and one that Macworld readers repeatedly gripe about--is ink prices.

Printer manufactures strongly recommend using only genuine inks they've created expressly for that printer so that you can get the best results and avoid damaging your hardware. The problem: Printer makers also charge an arm and a leg for these consumables. Sure, they practically give away the printers, but replacing the ink cartridges one time, in the case of a six-color inkjet can cost as much as buying a whole new printer. Take the Epson NX400. This inkjet multifunction device cost $100 when we reviewed it a year-and-a-half ago. (And if you search for the best current price, it's even less expensive.) But replacing the NX400's inks with genuine Epson inks will run you $58.

It used to be that stores like Staples and OfficeMax carried generic inks that cost much less than the manufacturer's own brand, but that is no longer the case. Thanks to lawsuits and deals, these office supply superstores carry only the name-brand, expensive inks.

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With money in short supply these days, everyone wants to find a way to trim costs. One expense that could be on the chopping block--and one that Macworld readers repeatedly gripe about--is ink prices.

Printer manufactures strongly recommend using only genuine inks they've created expressly for that printer so that you can get the best results and avoid damaging your hardware. The problem: Printer makers also charge an arm and a leg for these consumables. Sure, they practically give away the printers, but replacing the ink cartridges one time, in the case of a six-color inkjet can cost as much as buying a whole new printer. Take the Epson NX400. This inkjet multifunction device cost $100 when we reviewed it a year-and-a-half ago. (And if you search for the best current price, it's even less expensive.) But replacing the NX400's inks with genuine Epson inks will run you $58.

It used to be that stores like Staples and OfficeMax carried generic inks that cost much less than the manufacturer's own brand, but that is no longer the case. Thanks to lawsuits and deals, these office supply superstores carry only the name-brand, expensive inks.

If you're still looking for deals on ink, you can find them; you just have to look elsewhere--namely the Internet. I spoke to one online ink seller, Silo Ink, at last month's Macworld Expo. Silo offers a complete set of refillable cartridges with 320-page yield per color for just $25. That's about 8 cents per page. For $15 per color, Silo will sell you a 100ml bottle of ink that promises up to 4,000 prints, or 1.5 cents per page. That's much less than the 17 cents per page that Epson charges based on its estimated yields of 240 sheets for an $18 black cartridge and $40 for a set of 420 yield cyan, magenta and yellow cartridges purchased at Staples.

To get an idea of how Silo's inks compared in terms of print quality and page yield, I bought a set of Silo cartridges from the company's Website and a new set of Epson's Durabrite Ultra brand inks for the NX400 from Staples. I then set out to print a lot of pages to see how output using Silo's ink measured up to the ink recommended by the printer maker.

Installation

The Silo ink cartridges look the same as the Epson cartridges--except for the labels, of course, and two plastic plugs on the top of the Silo cartridges. After installing a Silo cartridge, you must remove the colored plug before printing to allow air to flow into the cartridge. The other plug is clear and is used for refilling ink from optional 100ml bottles. This clear plug remains in place while printing.

The Silo cartridges snapped into place as expected, and the NX400 went through the cartridge charging cycle without incident. I did find that several cleanings from the Epson utility were necessary to get all of the nozzle test pattern to appear.

One other quirk I ran into: Every 150 pages or so, the NX400 would stop recognizing a cartridge in the middle of a print job. When this happened, I'd open up the printer, remove and replace the same cartridge, and the printer would go back to work. A few pages later, the printer would stop recognizing another cartridge, and I'd go through the same process. Once all had been reseated, the errors would stop. Unfortunately, the printer doesn't try and pick up where it left off on that interrupted print job; it just starts over. That may not a big deal when you're printing a text document, but it happened twice about two-thirds of the way through a letter-sized photo on Epson Premium Glossy photo paper. It took three sheets, at about 70 cents a sheet to print that single page.