Printer Cartridges – Do Your Homework

Another quick tip for this evening.

When we buy a new printer there is a sort of honeymoon period after it comes out of the box and you’ve gone through the process of assembly, connection, installation and the final test print. What we may not realise is the ongoing cost of consumables such ink or toner may be higher than we had anticipated.

When buying a new printer, I could recommend also jotting down the cost of the ink and toner cartridges and also try and found out if there are “value packs” or higher capacity cartridges that might help cut costs further. I know with our HP Officejet 7410 there are two different capacity ink cartridges for both black and combined colour (with the higher capacity cartridges being better value) and the black cartridges also come in bundles of two for less than double the cost (better value still).

Another piece of advice I would have would be to try and get a printer that will have separate cartridges for each colour. Throwing out a combined colour ink cartridge when one of the colours is nearly gone is annoying when the other inks are perfectly usable but useless without the exhausted colour in most circumstances. You may need to pay a little more for a printer that has this feature but it could save you money depending on how much you print.

My final tip would be to shop around for your cartridges. Places like Officeworks, Dick Smith and other big retailers will absolutely gouge you for replacement cartridges. Consider buying online and in bulk (to offset the cost of postage) and using a site such as staticICE to find the best price using the part number to narrow down the search.

These are all fairly simple things that we can all do to make our hard earned cash go a bit further.

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  1. […] while back, I did recommend using staticeICE when looking for a bargain on printer cartridges but this site will do the trick for most […]

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