If the car manufacturers announced that as of January 2022, you’d be forced to use their own brand of fuel…
Or your toaster gives you a warning, if you didn’t put in the manufactures own type of bread… you’d quite rightly think that the world’s gone mad.
But this has been going on for years with printer manufacturers, and the majority of consumers are quite happy to along with it.
In a recent survey by Which? more than 77% of people surveyed, said that they’ve stuck with the manufacturers own brand of ink when replacing the cartridges.
The big four companies (Brother, HP, Epson & Canon) will try and scare you into believing that you’ll experience compatibility and quality issues if you use third party cartridges, but this is a complete lie.
From my experience, the quality’s the same – if not better; but the best bit is the savings on offer. Let me give you an example…
My HP Laser printer takes four ink cartridges, and if I bought a HP set, it would set me back around £70 per cartridge totalling £280. I recently bought a set of four cartridges from Colour Direct totalling £46.58; that’s a saving of £233.42!
With these kind of profit margins, you can understand why the manufacturers aren’t too keen in consumers buying compatible ink cartridges. Some new printers are now being specifically designed to prevent a printer from functioning when it detects a compatible ink cartridge is inserted as opposed to a genuine manufacturer one, but this only happens on a very small number of printers.
There’s quite a list of companies to choose from, but to help you, here’s the top 10 published by Which? in their latest edition of the magazine. The score’s made up of the print quality, ease of use and value for money.
Internet Ink – 86%
First Call Inks – 84%
Stinkyinks – 83%
Inkredible – 82%
Cartridge Save – 80%
Colour Direct – 80%
Think – 80%
Refresh – 80%
Ink Factory – 80%
Cartridge People – 78%
