Look online at any large printer and ink manufacturer, say Brother, and you will find the same concept continually reiterated. For brother you will find a line stating that if you don’t get your Brother toner direct from them “it’s not guaranteed Brother quality. Non-Brother supplies may affect hardware performance, copy quality and machine reliability. Safeguard your investment by using only Brother printer supplies for your Brother machine.” There is truth to these claims, but perhaps not all as much truth as they would like you to believe. The fact is that few printers make much profit for their makers. In fact, quite a few models actually lose money for the company selling them—but ink sales are pure profit, as these little devices are relatively simple to spit out and fill with ink or toner. And once a consumer buys a printer, they’re basically locked in to that type of cartridge for the length of their device’s lifespan. So, when you buy ink from the manufacturer (and you’ll need to buy it quick with the size of the introduction packs that come with most printers) expect to spend premium prices. It’s going to hurt in the wallet.
Faced with this challenge, along with an economy that isn’t doing anyone any favors, it can be tempting to visit eBay or Amazon as you search for elusive cheap ink and toner. I confess, I’ve done it too. And so have a lot of people, in fact there are thousands of ink packs that bought and sold online every day and many many of them are good quality. Because of the ridiculous prices charged by the original makers, third parties ranging from Chinese entrepreneurs to Staples are remanufacturing and refilling ink cartridges which will work in your, say, Dell printer just the same as genuine Dell toner. At least that’s the story. In fact you can find a lot of information that gives reason for caution, my own personal experiences included.
It’s not all as bad as the writers at Brother have stated, necessarily. In many tests these third party packs are actually be found be overfilled, resulting in more pages available to be printed in the cheap generic stuff. And most of the time these packs will work when you plug them in. But they also do have a point. I some tests third party ink packs have demonstrated a failure rate four times greater than the failure rate of genuine ink packs. Also, even in tests using reputable third party ink, the quality of text and images tends to be lower (resulting in lighter print, striping, on and off fading, etc…) than when using genuine ink and toner (you can look up the PC World Ink and Toner trials for more information). HP, who has done aggressive work pitting their product against imitators, claims that in tests their genuine HP toner never failed whereas a significant amount of third party packs (from online marketplaces, like those I’ve shopped from) were dead at the start twenty five percent of the time.
I don’t have my own company with banks of high quality laser printers, but if I did I suspect that this figure would give me pause before I went out and bought third party inks. I’m a home printer user (or a college user printer, until recently), and I didn’t want to spend forty bucks on an HP ink pack I could get for eight on eBay. During my years with that printer I probably ended up buying five or six replacement ink packs, all from eBay. Here is what I found—ready for this?
You do get what you pay for. The two times I bought the penny ink it took them a month to make the trip over the big water to my college, bearing custom marks in Chinese from the trip. These packs were spotty at best and didn’t last very long (although whenever I moved my ink basically dried out anyway, thanks to the month without use each time). Those that I bought more in the middle range of prices (from the USA) worked very well and very consistently (at least until the end of my printer’s lifespan—when it was basically broken and on the way out).
So I can believe the one forth stat, provided you’re buying from the bottom barrel and neglecting to check user reviews, which I didn’t know to do back when I was getting started. Actually, if you find a good, highly reviewed, US seller with an old established eBay or Amazon storefront you’re probably just as well off as you would be visiting any large online seller—although I would recommend any high quality jobs take you to the maker, and any large orders to someone with a sale or a customer appreciation system.