Printing at reasonable cost

It’s a bit like hybrid cars, a good compromise between the too expensive fuel consumption and the not-yet-perfected fully electric car. New inkjet printers with refillable ink bottles come as a solution that makes sense, somewhere between the inadmissibly expensive traditional ink cartridges and the ideal world where we would not be printing at all.

For many years we have been listening to advice and recommendation not to print on paper unless really necessary. Up to a certain extent it is working rather well. There is no doubt that most of us have learnt how to avoid printing e-mails, photos and virtually any digital contents that we use and share electronically. Online banking alone is saving the world tremendous amounts of paper and ink. Especially since electronic messages and online banking statements and digital transactions receipts have become legal documents, perfectly accepted in a court of law.

Still, we have not yet made it to the point where we do not need to print anything at all.

Printers manufacturers have acknowledged the situation and the trend, and are responding with solutions that make sense and that significantly reduce the running cost of the equipment. It is saving users money and at the same time protecting the environment a little more. It may be only a drop in the ocean of the COP21 Paris Conference on climate change that has just received a new boost this week with the European Parliament signing the global treaty, but like with any big endeavour, every bit counts.

Epson, the current leader in the inkjet market, is making printers that use fixed inks of bottles that can be easily refilled by the user. Compared with the previous ink cartridge system, this solution presents a double advantage. The first is that refilling bottles that remain installed in the printer saves the user the cost of the expensive cartridges that are complex and are costly to manufacture. Moreover, the empty cartridges must be discarded and replaced with new ones; hence the negative impact on the environment.

The second advantage is that the new inks chemical formulation is simpler and allows for many more pages printed per volume of ink. The two innovations combined result in actual savings of about 60 per cent compared to the older cartridge system. This is a significant contribution to the consumers’ pocket and to the protection of the environment. Besides, the company’s refillable ink bottle system is aptly called EcoTank.

Epson’s tour de force is to have managed, despite the change, to maintain printing quality that is equal or superior to that of the cartridge printing system.

Whereas laser printers are still very popular in the business environment, more particularly when it comes to black-only printouts or very large volumes of printing, if only because they are fast, inkjet printers on the other hand — though slower than lasers — remain the first choice at home, in small offices and whenever high quality colour photographs must be printed. Because they use toner and not ink, laser printers cannot print on special, top quality stationery like glossy photo paper that inkjet printers can easily handle. Hence the efforts of companies like Epson to design more cost-efficient and environment-friendly models.