Original or clone?
Up to 80 percent cheaper: Warentest shows which duiker cartridges are really worthwhile
Original ink for printers is usually expensive (icon image)
© Yakobchuk Olena / Getty Images
Should you rather buy expensive original printer ink or the cheap clone? Stiftung Warentest has just examined this question in detail. The result surprises.
Everyone knows the horror message when printing: the display says the ink level is low – and you know that it will be expensive. In particular, the original ink from the printer manufacturer quickly costs money. Stiftung Warentest has now checked how it can be done more cheaply.
The testers put a lot of effort into this. They brought a total of 20 different sets of cartridges for Brother, HP, Canon and Epson printers to the laboratory, and at least six sets of cartridges of each type were printed empty. The result is surprisingly different. Because the biggest difference does not make the ink used – but the manufacturer of the printer.
Brother printers save the most
Anyone who owns a Brother printer spends the least money on the printouts – even if you use the original ink. A set of four cartridges costs by far the most at 320 euros, but because the Brother gets more than 6600 pages out of them on average, the price per page at 1.7 cents is cheaper than any other original ink in the test. Even the economy inks from other printer manufacturers are usually significantly more expensive, only one alternative for Epson printers is similarly cheap at 1.2 cents. And that, although the Brother ink clearly wins in terms of print quality. “Good” (1.7) judges Warentest.
Brother owners save even more money by choosing one of the available alternatives. The ink from the manufacturer Peach costs a lot less at 0.6 cents per page, but performs even better than the original inks in printers from HP and Epson. Only the lack of level control distinguishes it from the Brother original. “Good” (2.2), found Warentest. And thus gives the savings ink the third-best rating in the test.
The picture is slightly different for the competitors. You can save money here by using third-party ink, but the printing result is not that good. At Epson and Canon, none of the replacement inks manages to achieve the quality of the originals. Only at HP does the Digital Revolution alternative set come close to the original. However, this is due to the fact that the HP ink already only prints mediocre. The savings are enormous again: While HP’s ink rated “satisfactory” (2.8) costs a whopping 11.8 cents per black and white printout, the Digital Revolution (2.9) only costs 4.3 cents per page. Compared to Brother, of course, that’s still quite a lot.
Cheap printer ink: Don’t (only) pay attention to the price
The advice of the product testers is therefore clear: If you print a lot, you should not only pay attention to the price of the individual cartridge. The cartridges of the Brother model seem enormously expensive at first glance, but because they output up to 33 times as many prints as other models, the price for frequent printers is quickly put into perspective.
The alternatives are almost always cheaper than the originals. However, Warentest recommends buying alternative cartridges from established manufacturers such as Peach, Gigao or Energy Ink. If there is original ink on a website suddenly significantly cheaper, according to the experts, there could be a completely different explanation behind it: They are often counterfeit – and then even worse than the trustworthy alternatives.
You can find the full test for a fee at test.de.