Archive for the ‘iso’ tag
Compatible Ink Cartridges: Save Up To 300% Compared To Brand-Name Inks
Compatible ink cartridges provide significant cost savings.
A great way to save on your printing costs is to utilize compatible ink cartridges rather than full-price brand name ink. Original Equipment Manufacturer, or OEM, ink is found in office supply stores and sold by the original printer manufacturer in glossy boxes at a high price. Usually, you will hear claims about how OEM cartridges are of the highest quality and will produce better results than any competitive products. In truth, however, compatible cartridges can produce a high quality of output at a much lower cost basis than brand-name manufacturer ink, if you purchase them from reputable online suppliers.
OEM cartridges do often come with warranties and guarantees, but it's much more likely that any defects will occur due to the printer hardware than with any ink refill. The relatively high frequency of cartridge replacement will mean that you'll likely use up your ink before you have any mechanical problems with the cartridge itself; in the rare cases that there is a defect, you will be able to tell upon your first print from the cartridge, and, in those cases, you can usually just exchange the product.
Buying Compatible Ink Makes Sense
Even when OEM ink supplies have a longer life, when adjusted for per unit cost, compatible cartridges are still much less expensive. For example, a black ink OEM cartridge for the HP Officejet 7210 printer currently retails for $22.99 in office supply stores. Online, at retailers like 4Inkjets or 123Refills, a compatible black cartridge can be had for almost three times less, at only $9.95, a savings over close to $13 per cartridge. The savings only multiply when one considers the need to replace separate color cartridges.
ISO Manufacturing Standards Ensure High Inkjet Cartridge Quality
The International Organization for Standardization, or ISO, sets quality standards for various manufacturing processes. The ISO standard is comprehensive and touches on each aspect of the supply chain from raw source materials all the way to end-user delivery. While product defects are inevitable, the goal of ISO is continued improvement to limit any problems and constant work to improve the quality of outputs.
Buying an ISO-certified ink cartridge helps ensure that, while you are saving on your ink refills, you are not sacrificing quality standards.
Look For Ink Suppliers That Comply With ISO 9000 Certifications
The most common set of standards is the ISO 9001 standard which certifies a level of quality in manufacturer business operations, output improvement and product compliance. Ink manufacturers that are ISO 9000 certified have met a level of inspection quality that ensures quality control procedures; make sure to look for the ISO seal, especially when purchasing remanufactured ink cartridges as a safeguard for quality.
My Inkjet Cartridge Page Yield Is Listed As 890 Pages – What Does That Mean Exactly?
Today I'm going to go a bit into the more numerical side of determining what kind of performance you can get out of a given inkjet cartridge. I'll cover some of the basic terms that you'll encounter when purchasing and comparing inkjet cartridges, and hopefully give you a better idea of what exactly they mean so you can make more educated buying decisions.
Defining Page Yield
The straightforward and short definition of page yield is that it is the number of pages that can be printed out of a given cartridge. However, you may ask - wouldn't this number differ based on the type of printing that was done? For example, if "Draft" printer settings were used throughout the life of a printer cartridge, that cartridge would certainly produce more pages than a ink cartridge used on the "High Quality" setting.
The answer is that page yield is measured using a standard called 5% page coverage. The definition of 5% page coverage is approximately the amount of ink used to print a 8.5 inch x 11 inch page with a light heading and title, and three paragraphs of double spaced text.
Therefore, the amount of printed pages you'll be able to get out of your printer varies on how the average amount you print compares to this 5% page coverage. If you regularly print photos from your printer, your page yield will be significantly lower than the manufacturer's quoted page yield, and vice versa if you usually print on "Draft" settings with only a few lines of text on average.
How Is Page Yield Officially Determined?
If you're really interested in how exactly this figure is obtained, then check out the official International Organization for Standardization writeups for page yield, titled "Method for the determination of ink cartridge yield for colour inkjet printers".
Or you could just take our word for it... 