Work top printers are not as high-priced as they used to be. But looking after a printer is still fairly costly due to the fact that ink and toner cartridges are fairly expensive.

At the moment there are alternatives to reducing the printing bottom line of your home or business. Obtaining a more effective printer, using compatible inkjet cartridges or simply refilling original cartridges.

In this editorial I'll be taking a closer look at original and compatible inkjet cartridges and aspire to choose which is the most cost effective.

Everyman knows that compatible inks are less expensive than original inks. But to choose which is more price effective we need to acquire the ink dispersion of both types of cartridges.

A method to do that is by weighing them. Lets pretend we have two fresh ink cartridges, an original and a compatible cartridge. At the outset we need to weigh them before installing them on a given machine and then weigh them at the end of testing.

Getting scales acceptable (and cheaply enough) to do the task shouldn't be a difficulty: one litre of water weighs one kilogram, so scales that measure down to 0.1 gram would quantify to a conclusion of 0.1 ml - and scales that measure to a tenth of this are readily accessible too.

The obstacle of course, is that you need to know the specific gravity of the ink. Assuming the manufacturer have this information ready for use, all you need to do is reduce the final weight from the initial weight in order to find the ink consumption.

With so many printers and cartridges available these days it is difficult to write about a particular one. So for a better accepting lets work on a fabricated model.

Let’s claim the initial weight of a "tank" was 235.8 g and after the assessment it weighted 227.4 g, which provides us an usage of 8.4 g of ink. Applying a specific gravity of 1.2 as a conventional value then the amount of ink used would be 8.4/1.2 = 7 ml or 7/32 = 0.21875 ml per 'standard' A4 print.

Now that we have found how much ink is used per A4 print we can decide the cost of each print. Again using a fabricated example, if a cartridge nominally contained 17 ml of ink and price £10.99, then the price per 'standard' A4 print would be 10.99*0.21875/17 = £0.14 (rounded to the nearest pence).

The inkjet cartridge with the lowest price per print will be the most cost effective. I know it might sound too arduous for you to do this at home, but for those of you running a business that relies on printing on day-to-day basis this test might be worth the bother.

I would love to hear your accounts, please share your test results or any other action to determine the ink consumption of original and compatible inkjet cartridges.