The High Cost of Cheap Ink Cartridges

The extreme competition in the low end ink-jet printer market has been a wonderful thing for consumers. It has brought high quality color output, once the exclusive realm of high end graphic designers, to the personal desktop. In many cases, these manufacturers are selling the printers AT, OR BELOW THEIR COST! Their strategy, of course, is to make their profit on the ink and specialty papers. If you have ever purchased these ink cartridges you know they can be fairly costly. Of course, to a lot of amateur chemists this smells like an opportunity. They now offer a wide range of  "generic" cartridges and refill kits that sell at huge discounts off of the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) product. These products all claim to be "as good, or better" quality than the OEM formulas and you are made to feel foolish to spend those high dollars, needlessly.
DON'T YOU BELIEVE IT!

Our experience as a repair center has been that these cheaper alternatives do indeed cause the printers to work unreliably, with clogs, leaks, and inconsistent color representation. In many cases, they can damage your printer to the point that repair is not an economical alternative and the printer must be scrapped. Then, to make the situation even worse, consumers expect the OEMs to cover failures caused by bathtub ink. So the OEM, who didn't profit on the printer, didn't profit on the ink, now has to pay the repair bill for damage caused by customer misuse of the equipment! The OEMs invest heavily in the development of their inks. The ink is considered an important technical component of the print system. It is formulated to function properly with the other technology of the printer to achieve maximum print quality and reliability.

The bottom line is that regardless of which inkjet printer you own, you will always get the best results using OEM inks. Think of it as a maintenance contract on your printer and an investment in its long term reliable operation.