"The big printer manufacturers have reduced the amount of ink in a cartridge, encrypted the chip technology, and used aggressive marketing tactics to discourage refills."Ĭhris Brooks, technical director of industry group the UK Cartridge Remanufacturers Association, is more forthright: "The big printer companies do all they can to squeeze ever-increasing amounts of cash out of the poor consumer in exchange for less ink." "The strategy has been to nudge the consumer towards a high frequency of purchases," says David Connett, editor of The Recycler, a trade magazine covering the remanufacturing industry. In Epson cartridges, meanwhile, the ink tank has been systematically reduced in size.
The rest of the cartridge is now simply empty space. The size of the sponges inside, which hold the ink, have progressively reduced over the years. Today, the standard printer cartridges made by HP may contain as little as 5ml of ink but sell for about £13.Ĭut open a HP inkjet cartridge and you'll find what is going on. A decade ago, the best-selling HP cartridge had 42ml of ink and sold for about £20. It's a similar story with Hewlett Packard (HP) cartridges. But the T032 contains 16ml of ink and the T089 contains just 3.5ml of ink. "The amount can be minuscule."įor example, the Epson T032 colour cartridge (released in 2002) is the same size as the Epson colour T089 (released in 2008). "Newer cartridges contain a fraction of the ink a similar product contained a decade ago," Dyckhoff says. Less well-known is the fact that the amount of ink in the average cartridge has shrunk dramatically. The sky-high price of printer ink – measure for measure more expensive than vintage champagne – has been well documented.
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