SHOULD YOU CONSIDER REFILL ABLE PRINTERS?
Printers are cheap and printing expensive – but a new generation of refillable devices is changing the rules
You don’t need us to tell you that printing is expensive. For the nine colour printers on test here, the average cost of an A4 page of mixed text and graphics is almost 11p. With a 500-page ream of colour printing likely to set you back more than £50, running costs should be a significant consideration when choosing a printer.
Consumers have long sought ways to reduce print costs, from third-party supplies to refillable ink tanks. Now, manufacturers are finally beginning to offer alternatives to consumers. HP’s Instant Ink is a subscriptionbased service where users pay for a certain volume of printing per month. When ink gets low, the printer itself orders more cartridges. Epson’s newer ReadyInk is similar, but works without the subscription.
Refillable ink
If low page costs are essential, there’s an interesting alternative to cheap printers and expensive cartridges. Refillable ink tank printers ditch cartridges in favour of large, static ink tanks in the printer itself. Epson pioneered the system for UK consumers with its EcoTank range of printers and multifunctions, and Canon has more recently launched its similar Pixma G-series range.
Refillable ink tank printers typically arrive with one or two sets of ink bottles that contain enough ink for several thousand pages. Replacement ink usually costs less than £10 a bottle, slashing ongoing running costs to under a penny per page. Naturally, there’s a catch: you’ll pay considerably more up-front.
Do the sums, though, and a refillable printer will almost certainly save you money in the long run. Recent examples such as Epson’s EcoTank ET-4750 or the Canon Pixma G4510 will set you back around £300. They’re broadly comparable to the typical small office inkjet MFP you might buy for £100. That might arrive with 200 pages worth of ink, but the G4510 comes with about 6,000 pages, and the ET-4750 with enough to print a claimed 11,200 colour pages.
“Unfortunately, we have been disappointed by the performance of many refillable ink tank models we’ve reviewed”
If you bought all three MFPs and printed 5,000 pages from each, the refillable models will have cost whatever you paid for them. Assuming that your £100 MFP had typical 10p-per-page running costs, the same amount of printing would cost you £580. In fact, in this example, you would only need to print around 2,500 pages for either of the refillable ink tank models to work out cheaper.
Life with a refillable
The savings are significant, then, but what are they like to live with? Epson’s EcoTank printers are on their second generation, with revisions and improvements to the tanks and the filling process. Ink bottles are now physically keyed so you can’t fill the wrong tanks, and they’ll slot in and disgorge themselves without help from you – we’re yet to spill a drop from the new design. Canon’s system is less sophisticated, but it offers similar reductions in cost, plastic waste and hassle.
There are two key limitations to the models we’ve reviewed so far. The first is that, as yet, neither Epson nor Canon’s system has a foolproof awareness of the tanks’ ink level. Allowing a tank to run dry could create problems with the capillary tubes feeding the ink heads, meaning you have to keep an eye on the fill level yourself. It’s also imperative to remember to keep an ink tank printer level and transport it very carefully: after all, nobody needs an impromptu home makeover from 300ml of escaped ink.
Both Epson and Canon’s ink tank systems reduce running costs in return for a bigger outlay on the printer itself. Unfortunately, we have been disappointed by the performance of many refillable ink tank models we’ve reviewed, which have either been slow or produced inferior prints to their cartridge equivalents. There have been exceptions – Epson’s A3 EcoTank ET-7750 springs to mind – but our general impression is that while ink tank printers end the cartridge rip off, consumers still aren’t getting everything they’re paying for.