Are cheap inkjet refills worth it?

Originally published in GP magazine .

Written for GP magazine around 2005. This is the version I submitted - the published article may have been edited.

January is when all my Christmas bills come in, so anything that feels like a cost saving at the moment seems like a good idea. I am a keen photographer and take lots of pictures of the kids over Christmas, and now is also the time I start sorting through them and print out any that look particularly good. Unfortunately inkjet ink is very expensive and I am reluctant to print out too many because of the cost. I have always known that cheaper refills are possible but have always shied away from them, but I thought I would give them a go.

When I began to investigate the refill market I didn’t realise there was so much choice. As well as all the branded refills, lots of companies sell their own version, which is usually cheaper, and you can even manually refill your cartridges.

The refill market is complicated by the sheer number of printers and cartridges available. What I didn’t initially realise is that some makes of inkjet have the print head in the refill and this makes things very expensive. Some, like Epson, only have ink in the refills and this can reduce costs. Again, some printers have multiple cartridges, one for each colour; others have multi-ink cartridges that need replacing when one of the colours is gone. My home printer is an Epson Stylus Photo 950, which has seven inks including two blacks and special photo inks.

I initially compared the prices of branded products and was amazed at the variation. Prices varied from almost £20 a cartridge to £10. If I bought in bulk, some retailers were offering buy two get one free deals, making it even cheaper. The main problem seems to be making sure the refill is genuine - it can be difficult to tell on some websites - and making sure whether the price includes VAT and delivery.

I next looked at non-Epson refills. This is where the market goes mad and there seems to be a thousand different varieties, from big companies selling their own version to smaller companies who seem to buy old empty cartridges, refill them and sell them back to you. Prices here varied from £12 to £2.50 if bought in bulk. My worry here is quality. I have used unbranded refills at work, in an old Hewlett-Packard inkjet I have on my desk as a second printer for printing leaflets and any documents or letters that I feel the need to have on paper, and for this purpose they appear fine. We have also used them in the few non-inkjet printers that we have for prescriptions and they work fine there. We also use unbranded laser toners at work and have not noticed any problems, and these too can be significantly cheaper.

Even more esoteric is doing your own refills. Numerous sites recommend this. You need to spend some time reading about the different systems and find which is right for your printer. For example, my Epson refills have a chip in them that tells the printer how full they are and you need a special device (about £12) that will reset this to full. The Epson refills are meant to be easy to do, in that you take out your empty, without letting it empty completely or dry out, then block off the hole and pour in new ink from the top using a syringe or similar. You can apparently use a cartridge several times, and some companies sell a cartridge for you to use rather than the original that is meant to be easier to refill. You can buy the inks in large bottles that will refill numerous cartridges and certainly, looking at the prices, it can be cheap, though when you factor in the time and potential for mess I’m not convinced it’s that much cheaper than the cheapest already-filled refills.

In summary, you need to decide what you want to achieve when buying refill inks. My work printer is just for printed documents that may be thrown away the same day and I use it a lot, so I am happy to use the cheapest I can find. However, at home I want to print out the best quality photo I can and I haven’t convinced myself to try the alternatives, especially when I have found significant cost savings by shopping around. For those of you who fondly remember chemistry lessons, the self-refill may be the option.