We’ve found 52 printers currently on the market where you’d spend more than £100 a year on ink alone, based on our expert tests, with some costing a whopping £500 or more per year.
Our testing reveals the most expensive cartridge printer to run costs £152 to buy plus a ridiculous £756.48 for one year’s replacement ink. However, if you’d bought a tank printer instead, it would be peanuts.
For one fully-featured model we recommend (£350), one year ink costs are just £1.92 – clearly the best way to avoid the great printer ink rip-off, and you’d save a fortune in the long run. You can get cheaper tank printers too – they start from around £150.
But even if you don’t want to switch out your printer, there are ways for everyone to save hundreds of pounds on printer ink. Below, we reveal the three key ways you can save. Plus which tank printers are the most popular on Which.co.uk.
3 ways you can save on printer ink
Our expert lab tests not only find printers that print brilliantly, but – crucially – how much they cost to run. Three-quarters of Which? members (73%) still own a cartridge inkjet printer, according to our latest survey.
Our running cost calculations are for a typical user printing 20 black text pages and 10 office graphics pages a month – hardly heavy usage.
Here’s three ways to avoid the trap of original ink cartridges:
Third-party ink is available for most printers. However, some printers, particularly from HP, block the use of third-party ink.
Will third-party ink work in your printer?
What’s cheapest: switching to third-party ink or buying a tank printer?
Tank printers are inkjets, just like traditional cartridge models. The only difference is the ink is stored in large tanks in the printer, rather than in cartridges.
You can easily spot a tank printer. Look for the ink ‘windows’ on the front of the printer where you can easily see how much ink is left.
But if you have a cartridge printer you don’t want to replace yet, you can still save hundreds of pounds by switching to third-party ink. These are sold online by long-established providers such as Refresh and Inkredible.
How you can save with third-party ink
According to our annual survey of owners, a typical printer lasts for 13 years and a typical user buys two sets of replacement cartridges a year.
£1,631.24£613.34£320Third party ink vs your printer manufacturer’s ink
Here are some typical comparisons on what you could save, depending on your type of inkjet printer, by switching to third-party ink:
Traditional cartridge inkjet printer
Prices for example printer Canon Pixma TS6350 (£102):
£86.49£20.75Ink tank printer
Prices for example printer: Canon Pixma G1530 (£140):
£41.26£19.90As you can see, the owner of the Canon cartridge printer would save more than three-quarters of the cost of ink by switching to third-party ink. The tank printer buyer would save just over half by switching to third-party ink.
That said, tank printer ink is vastly cheaper per ml compared to even third-party cartridge ink, so the saving for tank printer owners in switching to third-party ink is much lower, as a single replacement set of ink bottles for a tank printer holds so much ink it’ll probably last you years.
News, deals and stuff the manuals don't tell you. .Ink subscription services: are they worth it?
All the major inkjet printer manufacturers offer ink subscription services, which allow you to get ink (or toner for laser printers) regularly delivered to your door on demand.
These services are not cheap:
You pay per page rather than the ink you use, so this service is cheaper for those who print lots of photos – printing a single line of black text costs just the same.
To save versus buying original ink cartridges yourself, you need to maximise the use of your allowance each month. And not go over it, as else you incur high additional charges.
While some pages roll over to the next month, there is quite a low cap to how much you can do this before you start wasting your allowance. This means you need to manage your subscription carefully, and it will only work well for those you print a fairly consistent amount each month – or simply are willing to pay for the convenience of having ink delivered direct to your door automatically whenever you’re running low.
Find out more from the manufacturer websites:
Tank printers: how much can you save?
Tank printers hold so much ink that 53% of owners in our survey have never needed to replace the ink after buying their tank printer, and 23% have only replaced the ink once (and another 11% twice) over the lifetime of their printer so far.
We’ve calculated the costs for the average ink tank model and cartridge inkjet model over the printer’s 13-year lifetime, both for the upfront cost for the printer and the ink running costs. We’ve done this for a regular user (RU) printing 20 black text pages and 10 pages including graphics a month, and for a very infrequent user (VIU) printing the same amount of pages but over a 6-month period, using original ink.
Even if you don’t use your cartridge inkjet that often, it’s still more than £100 more expensive over the lifetime of the printer (13 years on average) than a typical ink tank model.
Cartridge inkjet users can save a huge amount by switching to third-party ink, so this could be the cheaper route for some infrequent printer users.
Tank printer owners won’t save that much more by switching to third-party ink most of the time. A typical user will only spend £32.11 on ink over the 13-year lifetime of your printer anyway, using original ink – that’s probably only one replacement set of bottles of ink needed over your tank printer’s entire lifetime.
3 most popular tank printers on Which.co.uk
These are the three most popular tank printer reviews read on Which.co.uk over the past year. Which? members can find out if they are good models to choose and what you should watch out for by using the links to our reviews.
Canon Pixma G3570
Canon has been one of the pioneers of tank printers. This is one of its cheaper models. Ink cartridge models can be super-cheap upfront but not necessarily the better investment in the long run.
This is quite a basic model, but it does offer wireless printing - so you can print directly from your computer, smartphone or tablet. It also supports AirPrint for the easiest printing from Apple devices.
Epson Ecotank ET-8500
This is a high-end tank printer from Epson aimed at those looking for professional-quality results for desktop publishing – for example, printing leaflets or photos on glossy photo paper.
Instead of the usual four ink reservoirs in a typical tank printer (black and three colours), this model has six reservoirs. This includes grey and photo black, for the most accurate colour reproduction for professional users.
Canon Maxify GX6050
This is a higher-end all-in-one printer, which means it has a scanner and even offers an auto document feeder – a lifesaver if you want to scan a long, multipage document.
It has the usual four ink tanks, and a large paper capacity – 100 sheets, plus 250 sheets in the secondary tray. It has the usual wireless printing options, including Apple AirPrint from Apple devices, an ethernet socket for a wired internet connect, and you can print from a USB stick too.
There’s even a small colour screen so you can preview your content prior to printing, saving you money on printing mistakes.
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