Why you should NEVER buy a “cheap” printer!

This photo is the reason why you should NEVER buy a cheap inkjet printer….

But unfortunately we get people in our shops every day telling us that they bought a “cheap” printer but that the cartridges run out very quickly, printing only a few pages and costing almost as much as the printer to replace!

To prove the false economy that is a “cheap” printer, we bought one from a well know electrical retailer. The printer brand was very well known and it only cost €89. It was wireless and it scanned and copied – on the face of it an affordable printer price with decent functionality. So we opened the cartridges and extracted all the ink into syringes.

Here is what we found:

• The colour cartridge had 3 chambers (one for each colour) – the problem with this is that if one of the colours runs out, the cartridge needs to be replaced, even if there is ink in the other chambers
• The sponges in each chamber are only half the size of each colour chamber – another sneaky ploy the manufacturers adopt to reduce the amount of ink further and get you buying cartridges sooner
• There was just under 2ml of ink in each colour chamber – pour 2ml of water into an egg cup to see how little that is!
• The colour cartridge printed just 77 pages
• The best independent price we got to replace the colour cartridge was €38 for a branded version and €29 for a reasonable quality non branded version. Now compare the replacement price with the number of pages the cartridges prints to see how “cheap” the printer is now!

So if you need a new printer, avoid the “cheap” option that will cost you small fortune in the short, medium and long term. If you’ve fallen into the trap already and have a “cheap” printer recycle it or give it to someone you don’t like AND then switch to a printer from Cartridge Green that’s comes with FREE UNLIMITED INK!