Cost of printer ink rises to $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 or multifunction machine.  This would make the ink in your replacement cartridges just about the most expensive liquid on the planet. And you were worried about the cost of filling up your car with gas!

Why is the ink so dear? As printer manufacturers make very little, if any, money from selling printers, they rely on the profit from repeat sales of cartridges to compensate and this leads to high prices. This however does not explain the tremendous rise in price levels indicated above, it is however due to the manufacturers producing cartridges with less and less ink in them.

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 6ml of each colour of ink, 6ml cyan, 6ml magenta and 6ml of yellow.
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. The only major manufacturer not cashing in this way is Canon, the old Bci3 cartridge common in a wide range of printers in the past had a capacity of 13ml and the up to date Cli8 cartridge still has the same level of ink.

How to save 50% on the price of ink whilst still using the manufacturers brand of cartridges. Sounds too good to be true, but is remarkably easy to do. 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.