With the price of gas (and just about everything else) on the rise, households and businesses alike are looking to cut costs anywhere they can. We think constantly about ways to save money while refilling our vehicles, so why not try to save money while refilling our printers?

It's no secret that most printer manufacturers make little profit—or even take a loss—on printer hardware sales, while making their profit on the sale of ink cartridges. Budget-minded consumers often consider buying less expensive third-party cartridges, despite repeated warnings from the printer manufacturers about the risk of reduced quality or the potential of printer damage. We at the SpencerLab Digital Color Laboratory performed some informal tests (only one set of cartridges each on one printer; not statistically significant) to see if a sampling of third-party inks were really worth the purchase price savings.

Ink cartridge yield testing was done using an inkjet printer from major printer manufacturer. Tested cartridges included a set from the same manufacturer as the printer itself, also known as Original Equipment Manufactured (OEM) ink cartridges, and two sets of ink cartridges from different third-party ink manufacturers. Off the shelf, the third-party ink set afforded its user a total average savings of $32.60 ($21 for the color cartridges, $11.60 for the black); seems like a savings of about half a tank of gas (if one is lucky). Savings at the cash register, certainly—but do those savings have hidden cost?

First, we tested the OEM cartridges. To their credit, there were no instances of clogging, streaking, or other cartridge failure. No user-initiated cleaning was required, as they worked perfectly out-of-the-box.

We had a somewhat different experience with the first third-party ink set: it failed due to excessive printhead clogging. After speaking to the company's customer service department a few times, we did manage to get a new set of inks shipped to us that printed successfully; however, they required user-initiated cleaning three times. How much that hidden cost matters can vary with the value the user puts on his/her time, but it's quite a bit of effort to put in upfront if all one wants to do is to print directions before running out the door.

The second third-party manufacturer's ink cartridges worked initially, but we needed to initiate cleaning processes five times during printing due to printhead clogs. All of the clogging we experienced with these third-party inks translated directly into ink literally being thrown away in order to get the printer to work properly (if we had to burn a gallon of gas every time we wanted to start our cars, we'd probably start walking to work).

What about Yield? On average, a set of third-party black inks produced 44% more pages than the OEM, although the OEM cartridge produced deeper blacks (translate that to sharper text and better image contrast). Color ink cartridge yield was another story: the third-party cartridges produced an average of 37% fewer pages than the OEM ink cartridges! Nevertheless, the average cost-per-page of the third-party cartridges was cheaper than the OEM.

Although print quality is still at risk, this test showed us that the trade-off between OEM inks and third-party inks hangs in the balance between two cost factors: the obvious financial cost, and the less quantifiable cost of time: time to call customer service, time to troubleshoot the printer, time to clean ink cartridges, and time not spent doing any of the other things we had planned on doing then.

Of course, one must keep in mind that not all third-party inks will perform as those we tested. As with any commodity, there are reputable players and some less-than-good players that can tarnish an industry.

Your mileage may vary.

The SpencerLab Digital Color Laboratory