There is no way printer ink is worth this kind of figure, but it could well be that this is how much you paid last time you purchased an inkjet cartridge for your printer.

There is no doubt that the price of ink cartridges is high, but that has always been true, the reason the cost of the printer ink has risen to the above frankly ridiculous price is that less and less of it is being put in the cartridge by the manufacturers.

As an example, a three-colour HP inkjet cartridge used to contain a minimum of 18ml, 6ml cyan, 6ml magenta and 6ml yellow.. HP currently supply a cartridge as used in many of their Photosmart printers contain only 5ml of ink in total,Thats less than 2ml ink of each colour, print a few photos and low and behold you need a new cartridge.

Hp are not the only manufacturer to be offering less ink in their cartridges, Lexmark and Epson cartridges today also hold less ink than those manufactured in the past.

As printer manufacturers make most of their profit from selling cartridges and not printers, it is easy to understand this trend. When you buy your printer as new, it will come supplied with a low capacity cartridge which will quickly run out, do not be tempted to replace it with the same version, instead check for the largest capacity cartridge suitable for your model.

You can also find the volume of ink in Canon and HP cartridges printed on the boxes and this used also to be true of Epson but this information was deleted from their latest packaging, surely not a good sign.
Lexmark have never published the volume of printer ink contained in their cartridges and it perhaps comes as no surprise that in test and reviews their printers are often the most expensive to run.

Tags: Computers, DHCP, Mac