PrinterHelp

How can I save money on bubble-jet printing?

Unfortunately, the first answer that comes to most user’s minds is “buy some cheap third-party inks”.

I’d like to explain why this is not such a good idea.

While bubble-jets are 1) remarkably cheap, and 2) as good at printing photos as any other kind of printer at any price, they are really best suited for low volume home/home office/ small office printing.

All too often, the cheap third-party (i.e. not the manufacturer’s own ink) cartridges cause head blockage and other problems. If you are running a small business, this is the last thing you want. Time is money, and if you or your staff are struggling with a blocked print head it’s costing your business money. £25 for a dinky cartridge for a mobile printer may seem a rip-off - until a printer in one of your vans fails and is out of action for the day, and then the printer head can’t be cleared and the printer has to be sent out for service.

If you balk at the cost of bubble-jet printing with genuine inks (and let’s not fool ourselves, it IS expensive) there are alternatives:

Some manufacturers offer “value packs” of ink tanks and photo paper which offer significant savings.

If monochrome print will do, a dedicated monochrome printer will be far cheaper to run.

If you can wait, a photo printing centre will be far cheaper, and quite good enough for holiday snaps.

If you are printing colour leaflets and the like, there are a whole range of colour lasers that become cheaper to own and use than a bubblejet at quite low volumes.

If you want to print lots of glossy photo posters in A3, check out digital colour copiers - they cost a lot, but for speed and finish kick bubblejets out of the office window. These also illustrate the difference between a so/ho printer and a professional colour laser printer, the latter sometimes having four toner vats each the size of a 400g loaf or larger.

Don’t be like the guy who used a bubblejet printer till the mechanics wore out at over 50,000 copies. The ink tanks he got through must have cost more than a car.

Don’t be like the poor old guy who was given a bottom-of-the-range bubble jet, and used it for his hobby, which was to print A3 photos of aeroplanes in flight. He kept complaining that the tri-colour ink tank only lasted for about 25 prints before the cyan ran out. Lots of blue sky, tiny ink volume. Right!