Subscription Ink

Canon ‘Pixma Print’ and HP ‘ Instant Ink’ subscription inks

Over recent years it has become far less common to need to print at home, we store our photos on our mobile devices, and we are all aware of how much ink can cost us. Sometimes however we need to print documents and tickets at home as well as photos, and this is where the home/multifunction printer can be of great use.

The mistake many of us have made, is to buy an inexpensive printer only to find out too late that the replacement ink rapidly costs more than the printer itself. The printers are often sold below cost as the manufacturers know they will make the money back over time from the ink costs. There are however solutions to this problem

One such solution would be to purchase one of the as the newer ‘ink tank’ models that allow you to buy bottles of ink instead of cartridges. These printers keep printing costs down, and will be the subject of a later article, but have a much higher initial cost for the printer itself.

Another popular approach utilizes allows you to buy a printer at a very low cost, but subscribe to ink instead of purchasing cartridges. It is this approach that is the subject of today’s blog.

Canon’s ‘Pixma Print’, ‘Instant Ink’ from HP, and ‘Ready Print’ from Epson, are all examples of an ink subscription plan. They all essentially work in the same way, where you are allowed to print out a certain number of pages per month, and they make sure you always have enough ink available. The printers keep a track of how much ink you have left, and they order more in time to make sure you never run out. There are different price plans available, with the cost per page decreasing as you go up the price plans. If you have pages left at the end of each month, you can roll these over within certain limits. If you use more that the plan allows, you pay an extra premium cost per page over your plan, or you could just move up to a larger price plan and get the extra pages you need. There is flexibility to move easily between plans according to your needs.

Unlike other approaches where you use up ink every time you decide to run, or the printer forces a cleaning cycle to run, a subscription plan has you only pay for pages printed, and never the amount of ink used. Ink used in a cleaning cycle is not paid for by you.

If you have a plan the lets you print up to 100 pages per month, the pages could be plain text or full colour glossy A4 photos. You pay for pages and not the ink. The down side of this of course, is that if you printed a page with just one word of text on it, it still counts off your monthly allowance. The plus side follows that you could just print full colour images instead and only have each one count as one page off your plan, even though you have a full page of ink.

At the time of writing, there is a slight variation between plan prices, but similarity as well. All three mentioned have a plan that gives 1oo pages per month for £4.49. I do understand though that HP is putting this price up soon.

In terms of printing ink price per print, it can be difficult to calculate costs, but for a subscription plan, the price per page is independent of ink costs. 100 pages per month at £4.49, means 4.49 pence per page. If you are using the printer to generate photos, then this low cost will make printing at home competitive with print shop prices when you factor in the paper costs.

Not all printers are available for a subscription ink plan, but many of the low cost printers are now part of these plans and definitely worth a look at. My Canon ‘Pixma Print’ plan machine was purchased for just £59, with £4.49 per month allowing me to print up to 100 photos per month from it.

I will include a more in depth guide for getting the most out of your home printer in my printing guides section soon, as well as looking into the pros and cons of the ink tank system instead. Overall however, I would suggest that a very capable low cost printer, on a subscription model, would suit many people. The higher cost ‘ink tank’ models will cost you more should they break down or get clogged nozzles, so the low cost subscription plan machines are a lot less risk, especially for the more occasional users.