Want to know the dirty, hidden secret behind INKJET printers? Read this & you might never buy one again...

I recently purchased a color laser printer for my personal & home office use. I cannot remember why I did it. Maybe it was the recent Consumer Reports article I read. Maybe it was my growing frustration with all of the ink cartridges I have been purchasing recently for my kids. But regardless of what led me to it, I bought a color laser printer. And do you know what? I love it. I haven't been more excited about a purchase since... Well... Probably my Wrangler.

Ever since I bought this printer, I've been printing everything I can think of... For example, I printed cut-out place settings for each member of my family at our annual Easter dinner. I printed a corny card that I gave to my wife, where I re-professed my love for her (because, why not?) I even printed my Last Will & Testament. Yes, it's true. (Although I still have yet to get it notarized.) I also printed out a checklist of all of the things my heirs need to consider & do once I pass on to the great beyond. (Wow, this just got morbid in a hurry! But seriously... That was on my bucket list for a long time. Ever since my neighbor friend passed away unexpectedly, actually. I saw first-hand what his wife had to struggle through, as she was left immediately and unsuspectingly left helpless, not knowing the critical details about his insurance, household finances, laptop and banking passwords, etc... But I digress. That is a story for another time.)

So there I was, printing any and everything I could think of. I was literally searching each Microsoft Office application for "New" templates to give me ideas of what I could print. What was behind this obvious and evident re-kindling of my passion for technology? It occurred to me that it had to have been because I have a certain nostalgia when it comes to color printers.

My very first one arrived at my doorstep when I was just a 'tween, back in the Golden Age of the modern computer era: The 1980's. After months of begging, groveling and mowing more lawns that was probably legal, my parents brought home the now infamous Apple //e, replete with duo disk drive & a color monitor. My parents, being the most amazing parents that a nerdy geek could ever desire, had the foresight to pair this amazing machine with the highly-coveted ImageWriter II, a 9-pin serial dot matrix printer, with an optional color ribbon cartridge and the ability to print 250 characters of text a second (!) in Draft mode. Man, it was a Thing of BEAUTY!!! And I contest it still is... (By the way, I still own it.)

So all of these articles, cards, notary public documents and placeholders are a result of my inner geek, nerding out and remembering a simpler time, when printing "H A P P Y - B I R T H D A Y" on green & white z-fold dot matrix paper - in banner format - was the coolest thing since lady finger fireworks, the Beastie Boys & safety-pinning your jeans. (And as I write this, my 13 year-old son sits behind me, singing over my shoulder, "Nerd-nerd-nerd-nerd-nerd-nerd." Oh yes, I'm really flashing back to the '80's now...)

Okay, enough about my passion for this new printer. This article actually has a point: I learned a lesson about the printer industry & I just have to share it. It's yet another one of those #lifehacks that will Change Your Life.

Ink Jet Printers' COST PER PAGE is significantly MORE EXPENSIVE in real life than advertised, thanks to rampant and deliberate obfuscation

Using something psychologists call planned obsolescence, along with a heaping dose of what I call information obfuscation, the ink jet printer industry has hidden this dirty little secret about ink jet printers: It is practically impossible to achieve advertised cost-per-page metrics in the real-world environment.

The factors behind this are many. The one that blew my mind the most recently was reported by none other than the country's leading consumer research publication, Consumer Reports (CR). In one of their recent printed issues, they reported that ink jet printers have a power-on cleaning cycle that drops more ink into an internal diaper (aka spittoon) than it drops onto your print jobs in the form of ink on paper. Argh!

This would explain why I've had to replace the black and color ink cartridges in my ink jet printer every three months, despite printing only about 30 lightly-covered pages in that span of time. And man, that type of thing gets my blood boiling...

Watch: Wasted Printer Ink, by Consumer Reports

In the CR video linked above, they explain how they recently adjusted their methods of testing to determine (something closer to an) actual cost-per-page of print. And before I explain my issue with it, I feel compelled to offer CR the just and due praise they deserve for exposing these issues in the first place. They have earned my money as a returning subscriber, and I love their work. Thank you, Consumer Reports!

But there's a little hole in even their latest approach: CR has been measuring the weight of the ink cartridges as a mechanism to determine which printers transfer the most ink to paper. Then they assign each printer a Cost Per Page score and then share these results with readers (subscribers), in the form of their rankings.

But do you see the problem with their approach? While they do a great job putting each printer through the power-off-power-on cycle that runs the (evil) cleaning cycle, they weigh the ink cartridges to determine how much ink they dropped onto the paper.

That is an inherently flawed way to measure these print jobs. Especially when it is now known (after only decades on the market, mind you) that ink jet printers deposit up to 75% of the ink in each cartridge back into the diaper/spittoon repository of the cartridge after the cleaning cycle. The ink released into the repository is NOT re-used for print jobs. It is wasted.

And therein lies the flaw in CR's measurements. For those printers that house the wasted ink "in cartridge," the weight of the cartridge is artificially inflated after the cleaning cycle. The resulting Cost Per Page of these printers will appear low. But don't be fooled. You know it won't be low... (Sigh.)

So the moral of this story? Be a smart consumer! Trust your gut. I've sensed there was an issue with the duty cycle of the cartridges in my ink jet printer for a long time now. I even (mistakenly) thought my kids were printing pages upon pages of full-color graphics when I wasn't looking (despite finding no evidence in the form of printed pages to confirm this truth.) I finally gave in and purchased a color laser printer - since the prices have dropped so dramatically in recent years - and I truly can't believe the difference already.

First of all, let it be known that the Total Cost of Acquisition for Color Laser Printers is finally competitively LOW

I purchased my new color laser printer for $119 shipped. Wow! And I was amazed to learn each cartridge in this thing prints up to 2,000 pages. In fact, the whole set of 3 color + 1 black replacement cartridges cost me $50 total to replace. What a deal! And there is no "power on" cleaning cycle involved with laser (or LED) printers, so I trust I'm not wasting these consumables needlessly.

And about my real-world experience with the color laser? So far, so good. I've printed about 50 pages, and the toner cartridges report they are still close to max capacity. That's a big difference already from the old ink jet. But... There couldn't be any smoke and mirrors trickery going on with these laser printers, too, could there? Maybe I just haven't discovered it yet. It only took a couple decades to figure out what was going on with the ink jets, after all...

Check back with me in a couple decades and I'll let you know what I find out.