Spending a Lot on Toner – Berto sees red

One reason for the complaints could be that people underestimate the engineering that goes into printer ink, says Rich Sulin, who leads Consumer Report’s printer-testing program.

“People don’t see the science and engineering behind printing,” he says. “So, it’s easy to understand why shoppers have such a strong reaction to plunking down $50 to $100 for little black chunks of plastic.”

Here are a few reasons that printer ink is so expensive:

1. the engineering is complicated: the oldest ink drawing in the world was created 73,000 years ago, according to archaeologists. “Companies like Epson, HP and Canon had to do research in translating a dye to a pigment composition to be able to get the photographic quality everybody wanted,” he says, while also producing prints that would last. All of that research and development, of course, costs a lot of money—and that’s where the price comes in;
2. you’re paying off your printer: according to IHS Markit, a global information provider, the cost to build a printer is higher than the retail price of most—if not all—consumer printers. “This is a classic “razor-and-blades” business model where the manufacturer sells the goods at a low price to help increase the sales of accessories, where the money is made,” says Wing Lam, associate director of cost benchmarking at IHS Markit;
3. lots of ink and toner gets wasted: according to our labs, with many printers, more than half of the ink you buy will never wind up on a page. “It’s typical for an inkjet to waste as much ink on maintenance cycles as it uses to print documents,” he says.