We’ve price-checked popular ink retailers and found that some charge twice as much as others for the same cartridge, but can you better our cheapest finds?
Some printers seem to drink ink, so paying as little as possible for cartridges is a must.
If you’re fixed on using printer ink of the same brand as your printer – like the 72% of people who responded to our Which? reliability survey are – shopping around for a good price on printer ink cartridges is essential.
The high price of printer ink
Kitting out a printer with a full set of cartridges isn’t cheap, as Alun mentioned in our Conversation ‘Are manufacturers cheating you out of printer ink?’:
‘Cartridges for my Canon Pixma MP800 cost from £12.99 to £17.99 each depending on colour/size and the printer requires five in total.’
We’ve been regularly price checking ten popular high street and online retailers and of those, Amazon.co.uk sold the cheapest printer branded ink. This assumes that you spend £15 to qualify for free delivery, which is fairly easy to do buying one or two cartridges.
Overall, Amazon.co.uk cartridges cost 17% less than the average price across all ten retailers, closely followed by 7dayshop.co.uk where delivery is free.
Can you better our cheapest finds?
The biggest price difference we found for an inkjet cartridge was HP’s 901 colour cartridge. It cost £12.49 from Play.com and £26.99 from PC World – a mark up of more than 100%. So you can see that where you shop will have a big impact on your printer running costs.
We want to find out just how low the price of a branded cartridge can go. Below we’ve listed the price differences of a few of the black cartridges we’ve used most frequently in our printer tests.
| Ink cartridge | Cheapest | Priciest |
| HP 364XL Black | £12.39 | £19.97 |
| Epson T1301 | £14.99 | £22.27 |
| Canon PGI-525BK | £8.73 | £13.99 |
| Lexmark 100XL black | £16.59 | £25.10 |
Can you find these cartridges for less? If so, tell us where and help us to find the cheapest places to buy ink.
Loading ...
