Words aren’t cheap with ink that’s pricier than Chanel

BRANDED printer ink now costs more than 32-year-old scotch whisky, Chanel No 5 perfume and high-end champagne, a survey by Which? has found.

One set of Epson Expression Premium XP-900 cartridges can cost up to £96 – meaning replacing them five times in a year could cost up to £480.

Consumer group Which? claimed cheaper options of “similar quality” could result in a saving of £410 a year.

The Epson ink works out at around £2.04 per millilitre, which places it above a 32-year-old scotch, which can average £1.71 per millilitre, and Chanel No5, priced at around £1.13. The ink is considerably more expensive than premium champagne too, which came in at around 30p per millilitre, it said.

Printers are staging something of a comeback thanks to a surge in people working from home. Home printer sales are expected to grow by 15 per cent this year to around $5 billion (£3.86billion), Deloitte has said.

And Britons are shelling out for topquality ink. Consumers fear that thirdparty cartridges could lead to a drop in print quality, be incompatible or, worse, damage their printers, according to a survey of 8,788 printer owners.

Which? found that 58 per cent regularly bought branded cartridges over third-party options. Around 41 per cent said they had never tried non-branded.

Which? said that a tenth of thirdparty ink users regularly experienced issues. Of those, 4 per cent reported leakage, and 3 per cent stated that print quality was lower than they expected.

Harry Rose, Which? magazine editor, said the high cost of ink needed to be addressed. “Printer ink shouldn’t cost the earth,” he said. “Choosing third-party cartridges should be a personal choice and not dictated by the make of your printer.”

HP said its ink and toner cartridges delivered the “best possible printing experience for customers”. Epson had not responded to a request for a comment.

King Gillette, the razor man, thought America should have just one big city, powered by the Niagara Falls. A good idea, perhaps, but it was not to be. A more successful business plan was selling razors cheap and making the profit on the razor-blades. It is that model that many makers of printers for home computers follow. As we report today, the consumer outfit Which? has found some ink pricier than 32-year-old Scotch and far less satisfying. Outrageous prices – costing £29.30 to print out a 300-page report – matter more now so many of us must work from home. And what about things like railway tickets? It is madness to entrust them to a fallible phone, but it costs honest sterling to print them at home. Sometimes it feels there’s just one big monopoly supplier – Ink Inc – when there should be 1,000 rival ink wells.