Epson Ink – Why pay more? November 29, 2007 17:32 by John Sollars

Epson Ink – Why pay full price for an original cartridges?

Over a period of many years we have all got used to the knowledge that the cost of printer ink is more than its equivalent weight in Gold!. All the major manufacturers have adopted the Razor Blade principle – i.e. sell the Razor for nothing and make your money on the consumables, in this case Razor Blades. With the price of printers well below the cost of manufacturing, all the major printer Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM's) HP, Epson, Canon, Lexmark and Brother make their profit from the sales of their proprietary consumables – in their case INK.

The justification from the manufacturers for the high cost of their ink is always that the cost of development of new inks that match their particular printers requirements is enormous and that they have to recoup those costs. In their wake the third party ink manufacturers release compatible inks that generally produce acceptable results which means that the OEM's are in a constant battle to protect their designs and profits.

So what is the acceptable answer, the obvious one is that the OEM's reduce the cost of their ink. This allied with the obvious quality of the original inks should make the choice for the end user much more difficult. Epson are trumpeting that their new printers using multiple ink cartridges which are all selling for about £6.99 each give the consumer a much cheaper printing alternative.

However if you compare the cost of two cartridges, one black (T007)and one containing five colours (T009) used in early Epson Photo Printers like the Epson Stylus Photo 1290 with their latest Photo printers like the Epson Stylus Photo R265 and the costs of the ink cartridges you can see quite a startling cost comparison:

Stylus Photo 1290

T007 Black ink cartridge (Epson original)     £17.97

T009 Colour ink Cartridge (Epson original)    £20.32

Contains 66ml of ink divided by 5 colours = 13.2ml

Total                    £38.29

Epson Stylus Photo R265

T0807 Multipack Contains 6 inks          £37.73

Each cartridge contains 7.4ml of ink

I would agree with the claims that Epson make about the quality of the output it is breathtaking, but as far as printing costs go the cost of ink seems to be actually going UP. Ally this to the fact that they no longer indicate on their packaging how much ink is contained in the cartridge and there you are – it's all smoke and mirrors