Windows 7: ink cartridges are sending me to poor house !!!

Pardon someone just coming out from under a rock...
I don't know of " compatible cartridges "....... ha ha ha.
How do I find them ?
Who sell them ?

t-4-2

A laser toner cartridge normally sells for about £80 or more, and I would expect to get about 3000 or more printed sheets out of it. If you get about 1000 (like some cheap modern laser printers) and a similar cost cartridge, then inkjets can work out to be much better value for money even with official cartridges.

Someone suggested once that inkjet printers and cartridge prices work like this - the more you pay for the printer, the less you pay for cartridges. I did a bit of research for a customer recently who was interested in a higher end printer than the average £50 jobbie they had been going for, and a £200 business inkjet gave better value than all the other laser printers put together, based on cartridge yields (I used Epson as I trust them to build printers that last).

The calculation I used was the cost of their printer and cartridges, factored in the official yield figures and figured out how much that printer would cost to print 10000 pages. One inkjet was £150 cheaper to get to that figure than all the others (several lasers, one other inkjet). Of course, the printer might not last that long, and laser printers tend to be designed for business use / higher volumes.

I wouldn't take the manufacturer's page yield figures as gospel, but I use them for comparing printers from the same manufacturer.

I plan to get myself an Epson SX535WD when my ageing CX6600 needs new cartridges - apparently the new high capacity cartridges for the SX535WD put the ones for my printer to shame in terms of value for money.

Personally I stick with official cartridges. In my line of work I tend to see problems rather than working kit, and it isn't often that customers have problems with official cartridges (unless they've let the printer sit unused for months on end). If compatible cartridges work for you, great. Some customers say that they've never had any problems with them. Other customers say that the colour quality isn't that great. Others say they went through a printer a year until they stopped using compatibles. IMO that means that some cartridge makers are just in it for a quick buck and don't care about their products, and others do apparently.

Places like this,

HP Inkjet

Thank you. Quite informative.

t-4-2

Be very careful with this suggestion. Maybe other brands can get away with it, but HP's don't usually do too well with cheaper cartridges. The yield is often lower, with much lesser quality. I used to work for HP, and while I wasn't in the printer division, I had some insider knowledge on how and why those inks wouldn't work. I've also had printers destroyed by using remanufactured ones.

As a solution, when I left HP and couldn't get cheap ink, I switched to a Kodan all-in-one. Quality is just as good, but a full replacement ink set is $29 USD.