The digital colour laboratory has released a report following its competitive ink comparsion study, between OEM and remanufactured and refilled cartridges.
According to the laboratory’s original report, comparing HP inkjet cartridges with four brands of non-OEM remanufactured cartridges and four non-HP brands of refill kit-refilled cartridges, all sourced in North America.
For each brand, nine cartridges were tested against the HP original, on 46 different printers during over 2,000 hours of testing – over the course of which, nearly two million pages were printed.
The study set out to compare page yield, reliability, wasted pages, and printer damage throughout the lifespan of the cartridges.
Overall, the results of the study were positive for the OEM, with the HP cartridges boasting an average of 111 percent more page yield than the non-OEM equivalents, more than double.
The original HP cartridges also included no ‘problem cartridges’, such as ‘dead on arrival’ (when the cartridge either failed to operate from the beginning, showed substantial leakage before installation, or printer less than 10 pages) or ‘premature failure’ (when it had a page yield of less than 75 percent of its HP counterpart). This is in contrast to 58 percent of the non-HP cartridges showing these results.
According to the study, the non-HP cartridges also produced 29 times more wasted pages than the OEM product, and caused considerably more printer damage; whereas the original HP cartridges did not damage any of the printers used in the testing, the non-HP models “destroyed several printheads” of the HP Officejet Pro and Photosmart Plus printer models, causing “irreparable printer damage” and costing several thousand dollars. The total percentage of printers damaged by the non-OEM products was 31 percent.
You can read the study for yourself, by clicking here.
