Inkjet Printer: End of the Year Roundup

Canon S330

A full cartridge set costs US$19 or 20 euros. At first sight they seem cheap, but in fact they hold very little ink. The black one will only run to about 130 pages, and color to 160.

Its pages work out at exactly twice the price of the S520, which costs more to buy (US$149/ 179 euros) but a lot less to run. You can see this in the chart below, based on the overall printer cost price after 3000 pages.

Despite this, it is still 14% less expensive than the average for inkjet printers of all categories.

Epson Stylus Photo 830

A full set of cartridges (black + color) costs US$48 or 62 euros. There is not a huge difference here, but their lifetimes are not at all the same. In text mode, the black lasts nearly three times longer than the color one, which only prints 151 sheets covered at 5% per color, against up to 500 for the longest lasting middle-range inkjet printers.

We were not able to estimate the lifetime in photo mode because we were not sent enough ink. Sorry about that.

Nothing new, the cost per page is similar to the earlier Stylus Photo 810, meaning average and comparable to that of HP printers. But it does not compare to a Canon separate-cartridge printer, which uses half the amount of ink.

The long-term cost worked out by adding the purchase price to the cost of printing 1500 monochrome and 1500 color sheets (at 5%) is quite modest, when you consider the low cost of the printer itself.

Reminder: costs per page in black and white or color are calculated for a cover rate of 10% black in monochrome and 5% per color (5% black, 5% cyan, 5% magenta, 5% yellow) for color prints. Photo costs are based on the number of 10x15 cm prints and include ink and the price of the photo paper recommended by all the manufacturers (A4 sheet cut into 4, i.e., 10.5x14.8 cm).