How Much Ink Is There In Compatible Printer Cartridges?

You get what you pay for!

Isn’t this what all of us have been taught from a young age?

Most of us believe that the rewards we get are almost always proportionate to the amount of money or effort we put into any task. While as a life principle this statement is beyond scrutiny, when it comes to physical products, it can be misleading. Are you asking yourself how?

If you are, then ask yourself this simple question: is everything you buy fairly priced?

Any sane person’s answer to this question will be in the negative. If you consider genuine printer cartridges, this is especially true. Nowadays, ink is more expensive than rare champagne and toner is even more expensive than ink.

However, there’s something that bucks this trend and then some. This is compatible printer cartridges. Compatible printer cartridges are, sometimes, as low as 70 percent of the price of genuine printer cartridges.

If you believe that you get what you pay for, you would naturally wonder about the catch behind the unbelievably low prices of compatible ink cartridges. What are you losing out? Is it quality? Is it quantity? Is it some metaphysical and mystical loss?

You most probably think that its quantity and quality both. However, you’re wrong. It’s none of those things. It’s the fact that the printer cartridge market is heavily imbalanced by the efforts of Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). How? Why? Inkjet Wholesale answers!

What Is The Capacity Of Genuine Printer Cartridges?

Let’s start with the capacity of genuine printer cartridges. When you go to buy a printer, you’ll find it to be extremely cheap.

What’s more, the gracious OEMs will even throw in a free cartridge for you with that printer. It’s a wonderful deal, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, it isn’t. There’s something wrong with the whole situation and you’ll realise it when you start using that printer.

First, your ‘free’ cartridge will run out in a hurry. You think, ‘fair enough, it was free anyways’.

Then, you go to buy replacement cartridges and that’s when the other shoe drops.

The cost of the replacement cartridge is huge. It’s compatible to the cost of the printer itself.

Now, you think that you can live with it because you are now ‘buying’ a cartridge and it will last longer. It lasts slightly longer than the ‘free’ cartridge but nothing compared to what you expected. The reason for this is that genuine printer cartridges are rarely ever filled to the brim.

Since they gave away their printer to you for such a low price, they need to recoup their losses. They do it by pricing genuine printer cartridges high and providing less than their full capacity. This is when you start considering compatible printer cartridges because they are significantly cheaper.

Before the final purchase, you hesitate because while their cheap prices attracted you, they also give you pause. You wonder if compatible printer cartridges are cheaper because they don’t contain as much ink or toner as genuine printer cartridges.

How Much Ink Or Toner Do Generic Printer Cartridges Really Contain?

Every generic printer cartridge sold by Inkjet Wholesale is filled to the brim. In other words, they are filled to their full capacity. There isn’t any empty space inside the cartridge housing, unlike genuine printer cartridges.

As mentioned above, genuine printer cartridges contain only about 50 to 70 percent (sometimes even less!) of their full capacity.

Because the size of compatible printer cartridges is the same as genuine ones and that they are filled to their capacity, you actually get about 30 to 50 percent more ink or toner by buying compatible printer cartridges.

If you have used compatible printer cartridges before and think that they contain less ink or toner from experience, then this is most probably a misunderstanding. Every cartridge comes with a yield value. Depending on type, brand, and size of the compatible printer cartridges, this yield could vary from 200 to 600 pages.

However, in most situations, the actual number of pages being printed are fewer than the yield numbers specified on the boxes. The reason for this is the standards that govern those yield numbers. The yield numbers are actually based on five percent page coverage.

This means that the compatible printer cartridges can print ‘x’ number of pages if only five percent of the full page is covered with ink or toner. These standards are stringent and set by global bodies. They’re followed by all manufacturers of cartridges third party and OEMs alike.

In reality, maintaining that five percent coverage for each page is impossible and most prints exceed that limit. The result is fewer pages being printed than advertised on the box.

How Can Compatible Printer Cartridges Contain More But Be Cheaper?

This question is flawed.

The question should be why genuine printer cartridges are more expensive than compatible printer cartridges because the value of compatible cartridges is the actual value of the product.

There are mainly two reasons why genuine printer cartridges are so dear.

As is obvious, the first reason is that OEMs need to recoup money on the printers they sold to you at massive losses.

Since your printer would be useless without ink or toner, they feel confident that they can not only recoup losses but make profits by selling you consumables at such high prices.

There’s another more subtle reason behind the expensive nature of genuine printer cartridges. This is the fact that OEMs spend a considerable amount of their money on marketing and advertising campaigns.

This spending actually gets added to the cost price of the product they are trying to sell and makes it more expensive. The end result is that the retail prices i.e. the price you pay needs to be hiked as well.

So, it can be said that the market for genuine printer cartridges is artificially inflated while the market for compatible printer cartridges remains natural and driven by basic dynamics between demand and supply.

Even if you consider the question from the original perspective, the low cost and higher quantity of compatible printer cartridges can be explained. The total cost of compatible printer cartridges manufacturing can be divided into the ink or toner cost and the cartridge housing cost.

Between these two primary costs, it is the cartridge housing cost that has the lion’s share of the total cost. In other words, ink and toner are extremely cheap to produce while making the body of the cartridge is more expensive.

It wouldn’t make any sense for compatible printer cartridges manufacturers to spend money on making cartridge boxes and then not filling them completely. If they don’t fill them completely, then they would not only have to reduce rates further but also make more cartridge boxes to meet their targets.

This would result in a never-ending spiral because the more cartridge boxes they have the manufacture, the harder it will be for them to make profits. Consequently, even from the angle of self-interest, compatible printer cartridges manufacturers need to fill their cartridges to their full capacities.

It is in the best interest of every third party manufacturer of compatible printer cartridges to ensure that the cartridges are filled to capacity. While the exact quantity may differ from one manufacturer of compatible printer cartridges to another, they will all be filled to capacity.