Here’s a little something to make us even more conscious about the cost of printer ink.

A recent study has shown that as much as 60% of the ink in a cartridge is thrown away when printers ask users to throw away half full cartridges.

This information comes from a study commissioned by Epson and conducted by TUV Rheinland. Their goal was to measure how much ink is used up and how much ink remains in the cartridge when the printer prompts the user to replace the cartridge. What they found was a lot of ink being wasted.

Amazingly enough, it did not matter how makes your printer half of the ink in the cartridge goes to waste. They also reported that, on average, inkjet printers have an ink usage efficiency of just 58% when used for photo printing and 47% when used for business type printing. Comparative tests were done on 8 different printers from the major manufacturers (HP, Canon, Brother, Lexmark, Epson and Kodak).

Printers made by HP and Epson were found to have an efficiency level of 80%, while the new Kodak EasyShare model was found to have an efficiency level of just 40%. Kodak has made quite a stir with their new, less expensive, ink cartridges. I guess you can afford to pay half price for a cartridge that you are only half of the ink in.

The research also showed that the printers with the worst efficiency were the ones that use the individual ink tanks, as done by Epson, Brother, and Canon. The report says that pages were printed until one of the colors ran out. At that time the “residual amount of ink that was unused was then recorded”. We are not sure if this means that the ink in all of the tanks was recorded, or just the ink in the cartridge that ran out.

Epson commissioned this study because they wanted to find out the impact of wasted printer ink on the environment. They believe that is is more environmentally friendly and less expensive to utilize the individual ink tank model than it is to use a single color cartridge. All Epson printers utilize the individual ink tank model.

As presented, it would seem that the Epson model may not be the correct one, at least in terms of waste.

There is one factor that this study is missing, and we at Pacific Ink have heard this quite often; the majority of printer users don’t replace their printer cartridge as soon as they are prompted to. Consumers, or at least those we talk to, are aware that there is still quite a bit of ink inside their cartridge when they are warned they are out of ink. They keep on printing until the actual print out comes out looking poor.

You can read a full article at PC World.