Original and Compatible Inks – The Differences

It is a hard life, being a printer. #Cue violin# Constant demands to produce quality after quality print. Never thanked. Never patted on the head encouragingly. Yet always the first to be blamed when a colour goes awry or a margin cut off.

But are you actually giving your printer subtle love by the cartridges you put in it? Long has the argument over the benefits and drawbacks for compatible cartridges been raging, and we feel it is down to us to shoulder responsibility, do battle with consumer paranoia, throw myths to the fire, unleash the truth and set your worries free (engrossed by the drama yet? If not, here is a picture of an explosion to help.)

Back to reality. When viewing cartridge prices, many hearts will skip a beat when they see costs approaching the printer value itself. This ‘razor-blade’ pricing scheme is rife in the industry, yet many fear crossing to the realm of compatibles due to the stereotype of loss of quality, printer errors and an all round bad deal. This article will be split into sections you can jump to and from, outlining key points for all things we feel are important in the world of a printer cartridge. I will not go into prices too much between the cartridges, compatibles are always cheaper. But cheap is not always good, so we will be looking at cost briefly, then everything else! Whatever variable you find is important for you, read that section, make your own conclusions. This topic will never be a definitive answer, but steps can be taken so you know which side to come down on. To any who manage to read the whole article, hats off to you dear fellows, you have just passed one of life’s tests of resolve.

Areas Of Interest:

Cost:

I briefly touched on this in the introduction, and as far as price goes….. Compatibles are cheaper. Fewer English pounds sterling consumed. Less of your blood-sweat-and-tears salary invested in ink. You get the picture. However, sometimes it is worth looking into more than the unit cost (blasphemous in an article comparing products whose main difference is price, I know). There are countless providers out there who will source sub-standard compatibles, charge pittance, and laugh as a print of your new born child comes out looking like London Bridge. After all, who cares about customer retention if they get every customer once for a hefty profit. Whilst browsing with cost in mind then, you must limit your browsing to quality-assured websites.

  • One with testimonies citing a good service,
  • Who state a returns policy if ANY issue is encountered
  • That actually give evidence of testing procedures their cartridges go through to assure you.

You won’t be surprised to learn that StinkyInk is one of them. Compare our compatible prices as you are comparing quality tested goods which will be the best match to original cartridges for all factors outlined in the following areas. If cost is all you are interested in, then compatibles are the way to side.

Back to the list of interest – Or Read on

The Quantity that you Print:

Most users fall into two areas for quantity; some – lots. The more you print, the more potential you have of compatibles saving you money. I love basic math.

Total Saving = (Original Price – Compatible Price) x Quantity

Rearranged with my advanced algebra leaves us with:

Best Saving = StinkyInk + Order Placed      <– yay for shameless plugs

But really, the graph to the right shows how the more you print, thus the more you buy, the greater potential long-run savings will be

With compatible cartridges typically containing more ink than originals, at a lower price, your average cost per page will drop considerably. However, and if you remember one thing from this article/lecture let it be this, cheap is not always better. There are hundreds of retailers waiting to sell you compatibles online and you have to be careful. Cartridges can suffer from dodgy plastic casing, leading to leaks or drying out inks, and print head clogging. BUT, this only happens with poor quality compatibles. Sticking to a reliable retailer like StinkyInk, where we personally test all sourced compatibles for quality and reliability before listing them for sale to our customer’s, will mean you can avoid these pitfalls and safely consider compatibles for large scale printing.

If you only print small amounts, it is still well worth considering compatible cartridges. Odds on you have an Inkjet printer if you rarely print, and advances in these compatible ranges have lead to much higher print qualities. Whilst not reaching the threshold of Original cartridge quality, they are not far away, to the extent that a large proportion of our compatible visual image testing (explained further later in the article) has resulted in not being able to tell the difference. The only consideration for those who rarely print is the risk of ink drying out and blocking the print heads. Original cartridges typically have a chemical within the ink designed to prolong its life and protect the printer head from clogging up, but is not usually present within a compatible cartridge. This is not an issue when you print more than once every few months.

We typically recommend using one original cartridge every 3-4 cartridges anyway, just to clean and lubricate the print heads and guarantee no blockage building. However when you rarely print, print head flushing must be maintained more stringently and sticking to an original cartridge may be better for your peace of mind. Whilst you can purchase cleaning cartridges or the printers cleaning programs, this is both an additional cost and a waste of your valuable ink.

In conclusion: the more you print – the more benefits from compatibles. Indeed, if you ensure you buy compatibles which are quality tested, you will save money no matter how much you print, with the main concern residing in print head maintenance.

Back to the list of interest – Or Read on

What it is you are Printing :

The ultimate quality and satisfaction you can get from compatible cartridges is dependent on what you are printing. As you would expect, this issue is far more relevant when applied to image printing, but consideration must still be made for text. Just because it is a monotone document does not mean you will pass on rich blacks and crisp letters to compliment your Times New Roman drawl.

Text:

Compatible inks perform excellently in this area. Existing dye-based inks perform well in printing tests, being very close to the output of the original brand cartridges to the point that, unless it is the finest text print you are looking for, they will be more than acceptable. This is being compounded by the newer compatible pigment inks being released (unsure of the benefits of pigment ink? Read More Here). The output from these compatibles really is brilliantly sharp, and we struggle time after time to correctly select which print came from an original or compatible. Products like the compatible Pgi-520 we cannot compliment enough, and we believe people would be crazy not to give these at least a quick test…. £6.46 instead of £9.93 for the same size cartridge, bargain. If text printing is the majority of what you do, you should definitely consider moving into the compatible market if you haven’t already, there are savings to be made over that-there hill.

Image:

Things get a bit more complicated when in the company of image printing. When text quality drops ever so slightly, it is still legible, with the changes only being apparent to the keenest of eyes. Drop the quality of an image though, and it can remove any impact the image intends, drag your eye away from more relevant content on the page. All-in-all it can just make the image a pain. Couple this with the issues seen with the archival life of prints, and it is easy to see why compatibles tend to be avoided. This was a much bigger problem in the past few years than now. It reminds me of previous tests we have undertaken at StinkyInk on cartridges to ensure quality before looking to sell them on our website. In our light and air resistance tests (chemicals in the air, not resistance to a stiff breeze), some of the compatible images completely disappeared as little as up to a year from the print. Indeed a select few compatibles, that will not be mentioned to avoid shaming a certain third-party, went from the printed image at day 0, to a visibly blank page within 2 months. Imagine that, 60 days and the print is gone – beat that Cillit Bang!

More recent compatible cartridges are certainly an improvement on this problem, with image fade relatively low. The image still does deteriorate at a faster rate than an original cartridge print if placed in the same conditions, but with careful monitoring of where you store your image, you can still get a reasonably long lasting image for a cartridge that costs a pittance compared to the original counterpart.

A quick note must be made here of the importance of the printing paper. Any image printer worth having will be utilising dye-based colour inks. These are made with optical brighteners, providing vivid colours for your printers. Original inks are made to work with the original papers, with the matching of performance and the “construction” of the layers of the paper to enable focusing on aspects such as ink absorption, minimisation of spreading etc. However, a small amount of dispersion in the print always occurs, due to the nature of how the ink is applied to the page. Compatible ink, resulting from a slightly lower quality composition than the original branded ink, spreads slightly more whilst soaking into the page. Though this is not a major issue on quality paper designed to aid ink dispersion and let the ink soak into the pores of the paper, if you are utilising cheaper paper where the ink will take a longer time to absorb, there will be a greater “spread” seen from compatible inks. This will have a negative impact on your picture, making it a bit hazier to view. This is just a small matter to make note of as, if you are trying to save money on both your cartridges and paper at the same time, the images you experience might suffer. Most papers will still see a nice image with the quality compatibles we supply.

To conclude this section, fascinating research was done into original and 3rd party cartridges for image printing by Simon Williams, an individual heavily involved in printer reviewing and know-how. In his tests… involving the 4 major printer brands original cartridges and paper, with 4 competing third party cartridge and printer brands… the printed images were given to a panel to evaluate on a rating scale, and then left in differing conditions to analyse image deterioration. Staggeringly, the results favoured compatible cartridge outputs in pretty much every result.

While I do not want to dig too much into this articles findings (as it is 2 years old now and only aging further) it still shows the potential locked away in compatible cartridges, and that was before the huge steps were taken in quality improvement. To summarise this section:

  • For the best quality prints, originals are the way to go.
  • But if you are not using the cheapest paper, it is definitely worth at least a trial of the compatible ranges for your printer to see the potential they have for your pictures.

Back to the list of interest – Or Read on

How long you need your prints to last:

The image section of this article touched upon the archival life of prints. With regards to the archival life of printed text, the new range of pigmented ink compatibles being released should provide a very similar print life to the originals. With pigment inks tailored towards long lasting outputs, and going by the strength of the ones we have managed to test so far, you really can be confident in the text remaining clear and sharp for a significant time period.

When venturing into images though, it is more reliant on extraneous variables. Compatible prints will typically be slightly more susceptible to lighting and air conditions, due to the quality of the ink within the cartridge being just below that of the originals. Large steps have been made in the past few years though. In earlier tests we carried out in 2007, some compatible images  completely disappeared from the page within 2-3 months. It is safe to say we decided not to source and supply that product to our customers. Thankfully third party cartridges have come a long way since those days, and on numerous visual tests that we leave up around the offices now, to check reaction to conditions, most of the time we cannot tell the difference between them.  Those that fail do not reach our internet shelves, which means that you will never have to experience the disappointment we feel each time a picture of our beloved Mr StinkyInk fades away to nothing. (We actually use a rather demanding high resolution photo involving bright fish, vibrant waters, broad oceanic life, rather than a Mr StinkyInk calendar pose.)

Overall:

  • Original cartridges will experience a longer life, the manufacturer of inks have huge resources to throw into dedicated laboratories for testing ink life and output which 3rd party producers just cannot match.
  • Compatible cartridges still give a nice strong output though, and we source the strongest performing ones available to leave you with long lasting images you can appreciate.

If you take care of the images you print, and store them correctly, there is no reason a compatible cartridge can’t give you a picture that you will enjoy for a long time to come.

Back to the list of interest – Or Read on

My Printer is Old:

This is a topic that strikes fear into the heart of many, much like the response of the many admirers who find themselves in my presence! And it revolves around older printers being more susceptible to bad quality compatibles. In both cases this is completely unfounded.

  • A well maintained older printer is no more susceptible to awful compatibles than a new printer.
  • Sub-standard compatibles that have not been tested are just as likely to damage any age of printers, they do not discriminate by those beginning to go a little thin on top and long in ear.
  • If it is a well sourced compatible, an older printer will perform just as well.

The main consideration for this variable is supply levels.

When a printer is brand new, you may have no choice but to buy originals, as the market for compatibles will not have been established yet. This is especially relevant with refilled and remanufactured cartridges, which obviously rely on a supply of used original cartridges before they can be produced. Once demand for a printer is established, and third party producers have the necessary supply, compatibles can be considered.

In addition to this, newer machines are coming with chipped cartridges. The majority of the chipped compatibles we supply are ‘intelligent’ cartridges with a chip programmed to bypass low-ink warning messages on your printer. This means you can avoid the problem of original cartridges stopping printing, with a low-ink warning, when you know full well there is still ink left in the cartridge

To conclude -If looking at buying a printer:

  • Establish what cartridges are available beforehand so you know where you stand for consumables.
  • Remember compatible cartridges are a viable option which can actually save you more money than just the initial cost thanks to intelligent chips enabling the full ink level to be accessible.

Back to the list of interest – Or Read on

Environmental concerns:

A well maintained printhead should always have red warning lights *coughs*

I read a humorous opinion on this whilst researching this article, and it took this train of thought. Sadly, I have not made this up.

‘A compatible will break your printer. You will have to replace your printer more often. So more printers are made. So more things to go in the landfill.’

That did make me chuckle… the attack of the broken printer army. Anyway, a compatible is no more likely to break your well maintained printer than an original cartridge. All it requires is that a little extra care must be taken to maintain the condition of the print head. Recycling cartridges is highly worthwhile, with most managing to be reused up to 5-6 times before their performance suffers, in which event they are discarded. The more they can be reused, the less the need to use fresh materials – so more mother earth for the rest of us. Did you know that an average HP cartridge has an estimated decay time of 10,000 years?

To summarise this section:

  • Buying compatibles will be limiting the ‘apocalyptic’ flow of used cartridges to the landfill.
  • If there is demand for refills, supply will be provided, and a nice circle of ecofriendliness can be built!
  • In addition, StinkyInk is doing its own little part… Any cash generated from returned cartridges is immediately donated to our nominated charities. If you’re interested, find out who we support in our About Us section.

Back to the list of interest – Or Read on

The kind of cartridge – Compatible/Remanufactured/Refilled:

As this mind-boggling compatible marathon draws to a close, I would like to define what a ‘Compatible’, ‘Remanufactured or ‘Refilled’ cartridge is, as we get a large number of enquiries on this.

Compatible – This is a brand new cartridge, produced by a third-party manufacturer for certain printers. They have no affiliation with the original manufacturers of the printer, and the cartridges have not been used before.

Remanufactured and Refilled cartridges are essentially the same thing. They are original cartridges which have been used and returned, factory cleaned, refilled to max capacity then tested for reliability. You must check supply levels for these cartridges, as without a returns procedure for the originals, it is obviously impossible for a supply of refills to become apparent.

Back to the list of interest – Or Read on

Optimum performance:

I thought I would finish with the simplest section to deal with, to hopefully limit the potential for name-calling and abusive mail through my door from manufacturers with court summons in abundance. Original brand cartridges, used with the correct printer and manufacturer’s quality paper, will always beat compatible prints. Third-party producers will constantly be striving to minimise this difference, and a large number of them are succeeding on closing the gap, but you quite simply cannot beat the quality of the 3 original components (printer, cartridge, paper. I know your eyes hurt from reading but hang in there) being utilised together. The output will be breathtaking, but your wallet will be consistently empty following this printing plan. In most cases, the average user will not require this level of output, it is an ideal world kind of concept which only the few will enjoy. The correct use of compatibles for the aforementioned cases will suffice in a large number of cases.

Conclusion:

Well I hope you have found this article helpful, and feel more confident whilst browsing. Compatibles really are worth a go, so do not let past experiences hold you back, third party cartridges have advanced hugely in the past few years, with outstanding quality and reliability now being seen across hundreds of models. We offer a 100% guarantee on our products, so if you are not happy with its performance we can offer you a refund or replacement cartridge. If you are still paranoid, try a purchase of a compatible with your next originals order, a risk-free test! If it does not meet expectations, you have your new original cartridge to put in and print happily away with and you can contact us about returning the compatible…..

….but if they do impress, well now, just sit back and enjoy the savings, compliments of Mr StinkyInk himself.

Back to the list of interest – Or Relax, Celebrate finishing, and go save money in our Shop :-)