Irate Over Ink
Some buyers seethe about wasted ink. But while specs can be hard to find, tests show that most printer vendors deliver on expected yields.Tom Spring
Photograph by Garry Geer
"When the ink costs more than the printer, you notice these things," Frandsen says. Over the past two years he has chucked dozens of cartridges containing leftover ink that he believes was wasted.
The ink may have gone unused, but tests done for PC World show that most ink jet vendors--at least those who told us what numbers their customers should expect--did deliver on promised quantities of printed pages (page yields).
Nevertheless, the sense that they may not be getting all they paid for is very real for some ink jet owners.
With the price of replacement ink cartridges running as high as $50 an ounce--on a par with fine imported Russian caviar--Frandsen and other unhappy ink jet customers are crying foul. And in some instances, consumers are going to court in the belief that printer companies are pressuring them into buying more ink than they really need.
This perception is aggravated if a printer stops functioning when a cartridge's ink level dips to a certain level (as is the case with some Epson and Hewlett-Packard printers), denying users the option of continuing to print after the driver software warns that it's time to replace the cartridge.
Printer companies say that they do this to benefit the customer, because trying to print with cartridges containing too little ink would risk damaging the printer and would produce unacceptably ugly prints.
"If people try to bleed their cartridge dry, then there is a high risk of customer dissatisfaction with printouts and a good chance of causing irreversible damage to the printer," says Pam Barnett, Epson's public relations manager.
Complaints that cartridge buyers are not getting their money's worth are less easily answered, however. Most ink jet printer companies simply won't say how much usable ink is in their cartridges.
Epson says that it prices cartridges based not on the volume of ink they hold but on how many printed pages they produce. Epson publishes this page yield information online, but some other companies don't tell how many pages their cartridges will produce, or make this information difficult to find.
To investigate customers' complaints that printers prematurely force ink cartridge replacement, we enlisted the assistance of the Imaging Products Laboratory at the Rochester Institute of Technology, which performs independent testing for aftermarket and name-brand ink cartridge manufacturers.
IPL tested five ink jets--one model from each of five major vendors--to determine the page yields of each printer and to see how much ink remained in the cartridge at the moment the printer stopped printing. For each printer, IPL used up five cartridges per color.
Testing Yield
IPL's tests of a Canon i850 Color Bubble Jet Printer, a Dell A940 Printer, an Epson Stylus C84, a Hewlett-Packard Deskjet 6122, and a Lexmark Z65 Color Jetprinter bore out the perception that the Epson and Canon printers in particular stop printing while a fair amount of ink remains in the cartridge: The Stylus C84 on average stopped printing with 20 percent of the ink left in the cartridge, while the Canon i850 stopped printing with 10 percent of the ink left. Canon says that it generally strives to leave 6 percent of a cartridge's ink as a safety margin. Epson doesn't disclose its target residual ink levels, nor will the company comment on why so high a proportion of the total ink is unused when printing stops. The other printers we tested gave low-ink messages but never stopped functioning (see the test report for details).
IPL's tests showed that of the printers that provide yield figures, each produced slightly less black than the vendor had estimated--except the Canon, which overdelivered. On the other hand, the Canon, Epson, and HP printers' color yields exceeded vendor promises; Lexmark, meanwhile, did not meet its color yield estimates.
The Epson cartridges we tested have a chip that records the amount of ink used from the cartridge and then alerts the driver software when the ink level reaches a certain point. The software, in turn, prevents you from printing further until you replace the cartridge. Canon printers use an optical sensor to check on ink levels; Canon's ink tanks don't have smart chips that can prevent printing, so you can continue using the printer even after you receive an out-of-ink warning.
The printheads of the Dell, HP, and Lexmark printers we tested were located on the cartridge, so running their cartridges dry can't harm an integral printer part.
The Epson's printheads are located on the printer, and the Canon's printheads sit on an assembly inside the printer; vendors say continuing to print with either printer after a cartridge ran dry might introduce air bubbles into the printheads and cause costly damage. A limited number of HP ink jet printers (not tested here) use a smart chip technology similar to Epson's and force you to replace the cartridge when the printer decides it's out of usable ink.
In the Dark
In some respects, vendors may have themselves to blame for consumer anger over ink costs. Expenditures on ink jet printer consumables--that is, ink and paper--can easily exceed the printer's price within the first year of ownership. But in reviewing how manufacturers present data like page yields per cartridge, we found that important data on consumables is sometimes inconsistent, hard to find, or missing completely.
Epson provides yield information on its Web site and in its product documentation, but we also found incomplete data on Epson printers at PCConnection.com, as well as contradictory information at OfficeDepot.com. Epson's Barnett explains that this is because in many cases an Epson cartridge can be used in more than one printer, and print yields vary depending on the printer; but Office Depot's Web site permits listing only one yield per cartridge. An Office Depot spokesperson says that the company's Web site lists the mean of the various yields for each cartridge.
HP printers do not include ink yield data in their product documentation, but the information is available at HP's Web site. Canon USA did not supply page yield data in the past, but in response to PC World's questions for this article, the company says that it is making the information available to customers on request through its presales or postsales support lines. Lexmark's policy is not to provide yield data to customers, but to share it with reviewers such as PC World. Dell does not provide any yield information.
Dell and Lexmark say that they have chosen not to provide their customers with page yield information because, in the absence of industry-wide standards for testing page yields, such figures would be meaningless. But this means that prospective buyers have no way of trying to calculate their per-page printing costs.
Ink Lawsuits
The relationship between printer makers and some of their customers may be less than picture-perfect across the board, but it seems particularly acrimonious in the case of Epson, which is the target of four lawsuits--three (in California, Texas, and New York) filed by a single New York law firm, and the other (also in California) filed by a different firm. All seek class-action status, and all accuse Epson of manipulating its printer hardware to notify customers that their ink jet cartridges need to be replaced while a substantial amount of ink remains.
The lawsuits reason that--just as a low-oil light on your car's dashboard doesn't shut down the vehicle's engine--Epson's out-of-ink message shouldn't prevent users from printing when the cartridge evidently still holds a considerable amount of ink.
In a written statement, Epson has asserted that the lawsuits it currently faces are "frivolous" and "without merit," and some industry observers evidently share that view.
"If Epson says that consumers will get 100 printed pages based on its specs, then a consumer will likely get that," says imaging expert Jim Forrest, with Lyra Research. "Yes, there may be some ink left over, but that is by design."
Canon, Hewlett-Packard, and Lexmark have also been targets of consumer grousing over ink, both in the United States and abroad. Indignation overseas in recent years has prompted U.K. and European Union regulators to urge Canon, Epson, HP, and Lexmark to tell consumers more clearly what their long-term printing costs are likely to be.
"Yes, as an industry, we could do a much better job of making page yield and printing costs more transparent," says Boris Elisman, vice president of marketing and sales for Hewlett-Packard. Elisman says efforts are underway to create standards for yield and total cost of ownership.
"Don't hold your breath for standards," says Tricia Judge, executive director of the International Imaging Technology Council, which represents third-party ink manufacturers and vendors. Judge says leading printer makers have been promising standards for the past five years.
Nabil Nasr, director of IPL's test center, believes page yield data for printers should be as readily available as gas mileage information is for new cars. "Consumers are entitled to know," he says, adding that without this information buyers can't compare the costs of operating competing printers.
Standards Needed
Until printer firms make apples-to-apples comparisons of ink yields possible, don't count on getting a lot of help in figuring out what you'll be paying for ink jet ink.
Next month, we'll examine ways to keep these and other printing costs down. Meanwhile, if getting a handle on costs is important to you, consider buying from companies that offer the most complete page yield specs, and calculate the per-page costs yourself.
Page Yields: What You Get, What It Costs (chart)
Printers generally deliver the page yields vendors promise, but per-page costs differ widely.
n/a = Not applicable.
FOOTNOTES: 1 Actual. 2 Dell does not provide yield data.
HOW WE TEST:Page yield data supplied by the Rochester Institute of Technology's Imaging Products Laboratory. IPL follows the American Society for Testing and Materials' F-1942 Standard Practice for Creating Test Targets for Determining the Ink Yield of Imaging Supplies Used in Ink Jet Printers. Average yields are based on results from five cartridges per color, printing until print quality visibly deteriorates or until the printer software stops printing until the cartridge is replaced. Pages assume 5% area coverage of a document based on an 80-square-inch printed area. Color page yield is based on 5% area coverage per color. These parameters are assumed to be comparable to (but not a facsimile of) the 5% graphics page yields given by Canon, Epson, Hewlett-Packard and Lexmark.