Writers: Use Cheap Ink!

As writers, we tend to use a lot of ink. My business expense for ink and paper alone is probably about 70 - 80 percent of my budget. Well, there's good news. PCWorld did an extensive study, and they say that it's safe to go "cheap" on your ink expense.

In their article, "Cheap Ink: Will It Cost You?", PCWorld found that inexpensive third-party or remanufactured printer ink cartridges may be worth the savings. An added bonus? They sometimes yield more prints than their new, branded counterparts too! From the article:

PC World teamed up with the Rochester Institute of Technology, a respected research university known for its top-notch laboratory for testing imaging products. Using popular ink jet printers from Canon, Epson, Hewlett-Packard, Kodak, and Lexmark, we ran side-by-side tests of brand-name and third-party inks to compare image quality and fade resistance. We also tracked how many pages each cartridge churned out before running dry.

Our tests show that all of the third-party inks in our test group yielded more prints per cartridge--on top of costing less--but that, with some notable exceptions, the printer manufacturers' ink we evaluated usually produced better-quality prints and proved more resistant to fading. Of course, our conclusions apply only to the printers we tested. We couldn't test all of the printers that are available (partly because you can't get third-party ink for all of them), so we picked a set of mainstream inkjet printers from recognized brands as a way of taking a snapshot view of the ink market.

If you print photos, the cheap ink may not work for you because it is less resistant to fading, but if you're primarily print text, PCWorld says there's every reason to choose the cheap stuff. Your estimated savings? $30 on a black-ink replacement cartridge compatible with an HP 45 inkjet printer according to PCWorld.

What other ways have you saved on business expenses?