Quality

Firstly, the biggest difference is the compatible inks are made by a third-party company, rather than the original printer manufacturer. Third-party inks can be as reliable as genuine inks if you are using a good quality third-party company cartridge – not a really cheap, low quality one from the likes of Ebay or Amazon – and if the printer is used on a regular basis, shouldn’t cause you any issues with print head clogging or damage your printer; quite the opposite to the common misconception that compatible inks break your printer.
It is good to do your research when it comes to finding a good compatible ink company, like we have with the ones we stock; they’re the best we’ve tested for reliability, compatibility and value.

PRICE

Printer ink is one of the most expensive liquids you’ll probably ever buy; especially when purchasing genuine manufacturer inks. This is one of the key factors that makes compatible inks so appealing; their lower price, sometimes being as little as half of the price of its genuine counterpart.
This is partly due to a higher mark-up from the manufacturers, because genuine inks are how the manufactures make the bulk of their profits as in some cases they can sell the printers at a loss to reel you in – and they also contain the highest percentage of head cleaning fluid in them (mixed in with the ink), which is why you rarely find compatible cartridges block the print heads with dried up ink inside. The inks can also be higher quality and use special technologies to ensure optimum colours and lifespan, but we’ll come to that next…
So all in all, price is a major consideration for using compatible cartridges, making them a great choice for anyone looking to print out the kids homework, print office work, or print the odd photos or full colour document in the home, or small office.

LIFESPAN

The last point to mention is how well printed documents last when printed using genuine and compatible inks. Genuine inks generally tend to use specially developed ink mixes which helps the ink stop fading over time. Manufacturers call this technologies such Epsons DuraBrite , and can come with guarantees against ink fading over time, it smudging, or how realistic the colouring is when a photo is printed.
The compatible inks don’t always tend to use that same ink, which means you may notice when trying to use a highlighter on a printed document, the original text might smudge a bit, or if you’re storing photos for a number of years, the colour may well start to fade.
With that in mind, for any high performance printed requirements, or for a longer-lasting photo prints, it’s probably worth considering paying the extra and using the original manufacturer cartridges, but for printing out the kids homework or other day-to-day use, compatibles are a sure winner for value.

BRAND

The compatible inks we have chosen to sell for Epson printers are from a company called InkLab.
We have found these to be the most reliable inks, with an incredibly low failure rate, and we also find the prints from them to be as we would expect. They also contain a small amount of cleaning fluid – unlike a lot of other third party cartridges – so the chances of them clogging up your printer are minimised.
Most of our customers tend to purchase the compatible inks and they are more than happy with them!

NEED INK NOW?

Whatever your chosen ink – original manufacturer or third party – we stock a range for most common printers and brands.

If you’re in need of ink, why not pop in or give us a call to check if we’ve got ink for your specific printer and we’ll give you the options. If we don’t have that ink in stock, we can typically have it ordered in next-day for you.