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Is Printer Ink Worth $20,000 A Gallon

If you are not careful, this is the price you could be paying for the printer ink in your inkjet printer. This would make the ink in your replacement cartridges just about the most expensive liquid on the planet.

Why is the printer ink so dear? Printer manufacturers make very little money from selling printers, they rely on the profit from repeat sales of cartridges to compensate and this leads to high prices.

Remember when a bar of chocolate was so thick you could hardly break it, as opposed to now when it is in pieces by the time you have got it home. Well the same thing has happened to ink cartridges; a few years ago a three-colour ink cartridge from HP would contain 18ml.
The equivalent cartridge as supplied with a new Hewlett Packard printer can contain as little as 5ml of ink in total, that’s less than 2ml of each colour, little wonder it doesn’t last too long.

And HP is not the only manufacturer to have employed this tactic in maximising their cartridge sales; capacities of Lexmark and Epson cartridges have also seen reductions in the past years..

When you purchase a new printer it will come complete with a set of ink cartridges, however these cartridges will be have the lowest capacity of ink in them and if you order the same version as a replacement, you could be paying $20,000 a gallon.

Most printers will accept several capacities of ink cartridge, the physical cartridge is exactly the same size, only the amount of ink it contains varies. So by searching for the largest capacity cartridge your printer will accept can save you big bucks. Until recently this was not always easy to do as the manufacturers very often allocated different number codes to the cartridges without any way of referencing how the related. This is now changing and both HP and Lexmark have stated to label high yield cartridges with the suffix XL, these cartridges offer the best value in today’s market.

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