Digital photography is taking over the consumer world. People are able to do so much more with their pictures without even leaving their home. To take advantage of this, printer manufacturers are introducing new models by the truckload. Camera owners are snapping these up, printing a few dozen photos but then never doing more. The cost of printing just seems to be too high for them. Enter aftermarket ink. New brands are appearing in display cases all over, offering cheap inkjet cartridges for your home printer.
Depending on what brand printer you own, which model and how many inkjet cartridges it takes, going this route can save you up to half the cost of the printer’s brand. If you shop in the right places a cheap inkjet cartridge may save you even more then that.
A lot of people are skeptical of this option and most of them don’t want to take the chance to find out if their right. After getting used to a couple decades of having to pay up to fifty bucks to refill your printer, a cheap inkjet cartridge costing only twelve or twenty dollars looks rather suspicious. There are still people out there—I was once one of them—who have found it more attractive at times to simply buy a new printer instead of shopping for ink.
The truth of the matter is getting inkjet cartridges cheap doesn’t necessarily mean you’re compromising on quality. For the most part these aren’t being offered up to you because the manufacturers cut a lot of corners. On the contrary; brand name ink is offered to you at inflated prices. That’s how they stay in business. It’s not exactly an industry secret that when you buy a printer from a certain manufacturer, that manufacturer isn’t making a lot of money. With all the mail-in rebates you find around holiday season, the printers are often let go for cost. Much like the gaming industry they count on your follow up business to turn a profit. So it isn’t until you buy a couple of that brand’s inkjet cartridges that they make any money from you.
This isn’t to say the big brands are gouging you on their ink. They just aren’t offering any good deals or alternatives.
This is how the competition’s cheap inkjet cartridges come through. Because they don’t have to make up profit losses from the hardware, the margin on their ink can be considerably less. For the most part the ink is still high quality.
The only problem comes with the fact that each printer is configured to work with it’s own ink. Each manufacturer uses their own pigments. If you are ever able to get a close look at them then you’ll see that a yellow pigment from one brand is a lot different then that of another. This means that when you buy aftermarket ink, you are not likely to get the exact same result as if you used the original.
On the other hand, different isn’t always bad. Even though the final product doesn’t come out the way the manufacturer intended, you may find that it’s actually better. And if you only need black ink for what you are doing then there’s nothing to lose. I think everyone will find that for the few bucks it costs to try out that cheap inkjet cartridges, it’s worth the risk. Chances are you’ll like the quality and will be able to slice the price of a photograph in half. If not, you haven’t really lost much.
Christopher M. Luck has an extensive background in dealing exclusively with the industries leading inkjet cartridge companies and is now offering his free professional inkjet cartridge secrets to the public. If you are at all interested in Christopher's personal advice, tips, or secrets on inkjet cartridges you can visit his computer tips blog.
Copyright 2005 Christopher M. Luck