Inkonomics

Printer ink is expensive stuff. In fact, over the lifetime of any photo printer, you will probably spend more—a lot more—on ink than you did on the printer in the first place. The problem is that the printer makers don’t make it easy to sort out how much money you’re in for when you buy a particular printer. Some would say that there is profiteering in the market and the obscurity by the printer makers is on purpose. Others, well, they just want to make good looking prints and not be taken to the cleaners.

One thing for sure is that the larger cartridges found bigger printers are more economical than the smaller cartridges in smaller printers. That’s no surprise. Buying in volume is almost always a win. The surprise, however, is how fast this rule applies if you are going to do any serious amount of printing.

Many of the experts out there have commented that you’re better off buying an Epson 3800 with its 80mL tanks than the R2400 or R2880 printers with their puny itty-bitty tanks. A bit of math on the back of an envelope can prove this out, but just for kicks, I plugged the numbers for the 3800 and 2880 into a spreadsheet and made a graph to illustrate the point.

The first dot on each line is a plot of the cost of the printer and the quantity of ink it comes with. Each subsequent dot represents the amount of ink in a full replacement set of cartridges. The costs for the printers and ink are using MSRP. You can usually find ink cheaper, but I wanted to keep things somewhat simple.

There are a few problems with this simplistic analysis. The first is that it assumes that the ink cartridges are fully utilized. You know that’s not the case. Printers always leave a bit of ink the cartridges. If anything, this should result in an understatement of the cost of running with smaller cartridges. The second problem is that there’s an implicit assumption that the utility of a given quantity of ink is the same in each printer. Sure, there’s a lot of shared technology in there between the printers, but without real testing, its a bit of a stretch. The third problem is the comparison ignores losses due to cleaning and the like. Without the kind of testing that Printerville and Red River are doing, however, this is about as good as can be done with the available data.

Even with the issues, however, the graph does strongly show how much of a win the 3800 is over the 2880 if you’re going to do any amount of printing at all with the printer. There are, of course, other factors. The 2880 has the newest K3 inkset with vivid magenta ink and the 3800 was introduced back in 2006 and lacks vivid magenta. On the other hand, the 3800 has the ability to print up to 17" wide and produces simply outstanding output. Bottom line: If you want a 17" printer, there’s no probably reason to let the initial cost difference stop you.

The impetus for this comparison, of course, is that I’m starting to look at options for replacing my broken workhorse HP B9180 printer. It would, of course, be nice to be able to make a direct comparison between the HP B9180 and the printers on the graph above. To do so would smack of government level junk science in assuming that you can compare the utility of ink between brands of printers. All the figuring I’ve done so far, however, leads me to believe that the HP B9180 has a cost structure of a similar nature to the Epson 2880.

It’s really too bad that HP doesn’t have a 17" printer with big tanks on the market. It would be neat to see how it would stack up against their 13" offerings.