Printer ink for some inkjet printers really does cost the equivalent of £14,000 per gallon. It is unlikely that you have purchased any other liquid that cost nearly as much and, worse still, chances are it will not last very long.

It is true that the price of ink cartridges has always been high but this is being made even worse now because manufacturers include smaller quantities of ink in new models.

One instance of this is the HP inkjet cartridges. Some of the older colour ones used to have at least 18ml of ink split equally between the three colours whereas now they have as little as 5ml in total.

I’m sure it will come as no surprise that HP are not the only culprits as Epson, Lexmark and others are all doing the same thing. A good example of this is the old BCI3 Canon ink cartridges which had 13ml of ink while the newer CLI521s only contain 9ml.

The reason for this is easy to explain as manufacturers profits are far greater from ink cartridges than from printers. Fortunately it is possible to dramatically reduce your running costs. When you buy a new printer it comes with low capacity cartridges supplied which will not last very long. Do not replace them with the same cartridges, instead look for higher yield alternatives which almost all manufactures supply. This could reduce your expenditure by as much as a half.

Obviously you need to be able to tell the low yield and high yield ink cartridges from each other and, generally speaking, this is not difficult to do. Many cartridges in the HP and Lexmark have the suffix XL to identify the higher yield models. You can find out how much ink is in HP and Canon cartridges by looking at the packaging. This used to be possible with Epson as well but they have now stopped including this information. Unfortunately Lexmark have never said how much ink is in their cartridges, not even on their website, and one can only surmise why.

Running costs can be further reduced. In many instances it is possible to buy compatible ink cartridges which are much cheaper, in other words ones not made by the printer manufacturer. Printer manufacturers will try to scare you off from using them by saying they are inferior and will damage your printer but if you are careful about which compatibles you use you will have no problems.

If you are in the market for a new printer it is very difficult to compare running costs between brands but it is safe to say that if you are not careful you could end up spending a lot of money. Fortunately there are ways of reducing this.

Printer cartridge specialist Theodore Beach is a long time member of the Cartridge Concept team specialising in printer cartridges.