Buying Ink Cartridges

Nowadays, most people are aware that when it comes to buying a printer for your home or office you need to consider not just the cost of the printer itself, but the ongoing cost of ink cartridges. Before calculating anything, remember ink cartridges contain a sponge and will dry out in our weather conditions. If you can remove the cartridges from the printer if not using regularly and place into airtight containers using the plasic boxes supplied with your cartridges before placing into airtight bags or containers. (the colours will mix if you let the outlet rub against any surface, which is why to use the little plastic holders they come with. They don’t allow the cartridge to sit on the surface) They will then last a lot longer with a little effort…

Even if you’re not on a budget and are willing to spend more money for more quality prints, it’s important to know how much ink you’re likely to use in your printing jobs. Whether you want to simply ensure you’ll never run out of ink or you’re just economical in your overall approach to printing, trying to determine how many prints you’ll get from an ink cartridge is actually not as complicated as you might think.

The range of ink cartridge print numbers

It should come as no surprise to you that different ink cartridges provide different numbers of prints. There’s no set standard and every cartridge will likely be different in the amount of printing they provide before running dry.

Of course, your printing habits will also be a considerable factor. If you print a lot, frequently, you’re going to need to factor that into your calculations.

So, where do we start? To break it down for you, we have two general ways of trying to calculate the number of prints you can expect from an ink cartridge and how to estimate the number of cartridges you’ll need over a given time.

The rule of thumb

This handy estimation is just that, an estimation. Nonetheless it can be rather helpful. The average yardstick for ink cartridges is that 1 millilitre of ink allows for 1 square foot (0.093 square metres) of printing.

Some things to remember with this rule of thumb:

• Multi-colour ink cartridges which contain 10ml of ink for example will translate to 10ml of ink per colour, i.e. 40 square feet of printing.
• This generalisation does not factor in other variables such as cleanings, printer cleaning cycles, saturation etc.
• Remember that your first ink set will likely print less pages as it needs to prime the printer machine as well.

The golden formula

If you’re ready and willing to do a little bit of maths, we’ve laid out a simple formula that you can use to work out the print-life of your ink cartridge.

The golden formula is:

52 x Pages (per week) ÷ Pages (per cartridge) = cartridges needed per year

This nifty formula tells you how many cartridges you’ll go through over the period of a year. (If you want to change it to 6 months, change the 52 to 26. Or change it to 1 to work out cartridge use over one week).

Pages (per week)

Don’t stress too much about getting this figure right. Just take an average week and look at your average amount of printing for that week.

Pages (per cartridge)

You can often find this number on the packaging and/or in the manual of your printer. Remember that this is for your standard page of printing, not very full page photographic or other ink-intensive prints.

Cost of ink

Once you have successfully worked out how many ink cartridges you will likely go through over the period of a year, you can then work out how much to budget for ink. Simply take the number of cartridges and multiple the cost of each cartridge. Voila! It’s that easy.

Inkpal – we’re here to help

Got any other questions or concerns with your printing, printers and ink cartridges? Feel free to get in touch with the helpful team here at Inkpal!