As IT executives look for ways to tighten their belts, one item they may be overlooking is the cost of regularly replacing their printing cartridges. PCWorld decided to test cartridges and found what you have already been suspecting: Many manufacturer-branded and third-party vendor cartridges leave a vast amount of ink unused when they read empty. In some cases, the test found that some models reported ink cartridges as being empty when they had as much as 40 percent of the ink left in them.

There are plenty of reasons not to drain ink completely out of the cartridge, some experts say.

"Many inks, if they run dry, can cause significant damage to the printer," says Brian Hilton, a senior staff engineer at the Rochester Institute of Technology who holds 29 inkjet patents. "You always want to leave a buffer in the tank so that the printer never runs dry. There should always be a factor of safety included."

Other experts say that the quantity of leftover ink is often very small. "Printers have generally become more efficient over the years," says Andy Lippman, a printing analyst with Lyra Research. "In the past, you might have seen 40 milliliters of ink in the black cartridge. Today you're going to get the same amount of pages out of 7 or 8 milliliters."

There are plenty of opinions on this essential item to run any kind of office.

"I personally think that consumers are getting ripped off," says Steve Pociask, president of the American Consumer Institute, a nonprofit educational and research institute in Washington, D.C. Pociask recently coauthored a study on the cartridge market. "In some cases, we found that [the price of] the printer could be 1/8 of the total cost of printing," says Pociask. "Over the life of the printer--and by that I mean three years--you can easily spend $800 for the printer and ink."

For more on these test results:
- check out this PCWorld.com article

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