I have a love-hate relationship with printers and it’s fair to say that I lean towards hate, most of the time.
I find them temperamental, high maintenance, and expensive, prone to jamming or running out of ink on a Sunday night just as I’m about to print out documents I need for a workshop starting at 8.30am on Monday.
I’ve spent too many weekend afternoons racing around Wellington’s stationery outlets trying to find ink cartridges, then leaving a store wincing at the eye-watering cost of buying a vanishingly small amount of coloured and black ink.
I’d like to banish my printer from my home office once and for all. But, alas that’s still about as realistic a prospect as the paperless office.
A few years ago, I signed up for HP’s subscription ink service, Instant Ink, which sends you ink cartridges regularly when the printer alerts HP that your cartridge is running low. Subscriptions start at $3 a month for a plan allowing up to 10 pages of printing a month, topping out at $56 for up to 700 pages.
I chose the $9 monthly plan, allowing up to 50 pages of printing. If I went over that amount, I was charged $2 for every 10 pages. That worked fine for a while, as I comfortably kept within that limit.
But after a series of projects, my printing needs spiked semi-regularly. Other people at home randomly printed documents over the wireless network from their phones and laptops, adding to the paper pile. I ended up paying fees for overrunning my monthly allowance, and running out of ink before HP could courier me a replacement cartridge.
With Instant Ink you aren’t buying cartridges, but essentially the right to print a certain number of pages each month for a set fee. If you don’t print your page allocation, you can roll it over to a maximum of three times your monthly service plan. But if you cancel a subscription, the print cartridge they sent you no longer operates.
My irregular printing habits weren’t suitable for Instant Ink. The final straw came when the new cartridges, which are shipped directly from Singapore, were held up by New Zealand Customs, forcing me once again to head to Warehouse Stationery’s copy centre in a panic.
I cancelled my subscription soon after, but not before I’d been billed for replacement cartridges to be sent to me yet again.
An ink subscription may be viable if you do a predictable level of printing each month. They also benefit people who print a wide variety of document types, from photos to full-colour pages, to dense text documents. That’s because a page is counted as a page towards your monthly allowance, whether it’s an A4 full-colour photo or a single word of text on a page.
A better way?
Unwilling to move back to buying tiny cartridges at exorbitant prices, I jumped at the chance to test drive HP’s Smart Tank 7305 printer.
My in-laws had been using a Brother ink tank printer for several years and getting six months of printing between tank refills, with reasonably priced replacement ink packs.
The HP Smart Tank 7305 inkjet printer and scanner is a mid-range Wi-Fi model, big enough to handle low-volume printing for home or small-business use. It delivers decent-quality, black and white and colour printing and can be controlled via the HP Smart app on your computer.
But its real claim to fame is the four big ink tanks which you squeeze black, cyan, pink, and yellow ink into for multi-colour printing capability. According to HP, the Smart Tank can print up to 6000 black pages and 8000 colour pages. Around four months into using it, I’m coming up on around 1500 pages printed and the HP app indicates my tanks are pretty much full. My ink anxiety is vastly reduced.
I’ve bought a set of replacement ink packs ($81 for the full set), so I know I’m pretty much sorted for the year for what will probably amount to about $100 spent on ink supplies over 12 months. That’s similar to what I was paying for Instant Ink, but only getting a total allowance of 600 pages a year, and regularly running out of ink during printing splurges. With my old HP Envy 6400 Pro printer, a full new set of cartridges cost around $116 and allowed only 200 pages of black and 165 pages of colour printing.
So, a tank-based inkjet printer has turned out to be the printing solution for me. Their refillable ink tanks eliminate the need for frequent cartridge replacements. I’m getting a lower cost per page, more security that I won’t run out of ink during high-volume printing jobs, and I don’t have to mess around with recycling printer cartridges.
Filling the ink tanks is easy - you just squeeze the bottles into the tanks - and the print quality is no different from using a printer equipped with ink cartridges. There’s only one drawback with buying a printer with an ink tank - the upfront cost of them is much higher than buying a cartridge-based printer.
While, technically, the printers are very similar, the printer companies heavily subsidise the cost of cartridge printers because they make their money from selling you ink after you’ve bought the printer. That’s why buying a full set of replacement ink cartridges is likely to cost more than the printer itself.
And as the Washington Post explained last year: “Once you’ve brought home their printer, it’s not in the companies’ interest to help you economise on ink. When they flash a ‘low ink’ warning, it doesn’t mean the cartridge is actually out of ink — there could be a few pages left, or a few hundred. And as much as half of the ink in a cartridge can get wasted just by your printer running maintenance cycles, according to a Consumer Reports investigation.”
It’s a rather predatory and not very sustainable business model that has upset a lot of customers. Plus, the mountain of plastic and packaging created in making ink cartridges have helped push printer makers to embrace the ink tank - and attempt to recoup more money upfront.
Ink tank printer - a ‘no-brainer’ decision
Can you squeeze out even better value by using generic ink bought for a fraction of the cost of the branded ink from the big printer makers? Yes, says the Washington Post, but the printing quality may not be as good, and you run the risk of clogging up your printer heads.
A printer should last you up to 10 years, so the higher outlay for an ink tank printer (you’ll likely pay three to five times as much as for a cartridge model) should prove cost-effective over time.
The big four printer makers - HP, Brother, Canon, and Epson - all now offer ink tank printers suitable for small office and home use. This is the biggest trend in home printing solutions in recent years. If you pick up an ink tank printer in a sale, you’ll set yourself up for cost-effective printing for years to come, even if you shell out for official branded ink.
My cartridge and print subscription days are behind me. Until I can finally ditch paper, I’ll make sure I’ve enough ink left in the tank.
