08.05
I’ve just finished a small experiment involving ink. About two months back I bought two brand-new ink cartridges for my HP DeskJet 5940:
- HP Vivera 344 (Tricolor) at 30EUR
- HP Vivera 348 (Photo) at 25EUR
Since, I’ve only printed A4 sized photo’s, with very varying subjects: nature, portraits, urban, etc. Although this wasn’t a very scientific experiment, I tried to keep things as varied as possible, to create a generically representative workload, cough… well sortof…
Now HP rated these cartridges at 130 borderless prints on 15×10 paper. Which comes down to about (130x150x100/297/210) 31 borderless A4 prints. In the past months I’ve counted the actual number of prints I could do, which boiled down to 27 perfect prints with no color abberations. The 28th print displayed a clear lack of red.
Now down to business, a single borderless A4 print would boil down to (55/27) ~2EUR a pop. Rather lucrative I’d say (at least for HP).
This rather emphasizes the fact that you’d almost have to be stark raving mad to use cheap photo paper. It would be a total waste of perfectly good ink. And at 2EUR of ink per A4, adding another 0,50EUR or so for good paper shouldn’t hurt a bit.
Though these costs might scare off some folks, I’d like to emphasize that I was totally amazed by the quality of the prints, first to last, they couldn’t have been any more consistent. And that I printed directly from F-Spot on Ubuntu. HP is the only manufacturer which makes excellent true open source printer drivers, and it shows. My printing experience on Ubuntu couldn’t have been anymore troublefree.
