As a long term subscriber, as far as I am concerned clearly you are doing the right things to inform and entertain. The recent editorial mentioning the printer manufacturers’ realisation that a new pricing policy is needed reminded me of your ink group test some time back.

I felt it was thorough but relatively superficial, possibly because you did not have access to information about the inks business, and you made no attempt to pull the inks themselves apart.

As a retired pigment and dye person, I do not now have access to the latest technical or commercial data, but it is likely to have a similar structure to that three or four years ago.

Firstly it is unlikely that any printer manufacturer actually makes the ink in their cartridges and ink tanks. Further it is certain that they do not have exclusivity on the dyes and pigments they may specify. The reasons are simple.

Pigment and dye manufacture to the consistent standard required is a skilled and specialised industry. Globally the competent suppliers are no more than a handful.

Similarly the main ink makers are also a small number of large companies who have the required expertise. In Europe the specialist firms make ink for several different branded ink jet manufacturers, if you look at the packaging you will see that most Japanese and American brands sold in the UK are of EU manufacture. The dyes used are not new and there are not likely to be any new dyes

Partly this is because dye and pigment chemistry has been highly systematically and thoroughly worked out over the past 70 years, but also because modern legislation makes the production and marketing of new chemical entities prohibitively expensive, in terms of the data and proofs required of non toxicity to user and the environment.

The dyes we have now are not new and may only be modified in simple mainly physical ways to make new colours. These dyes are commercially available to anyone who has a relevant business. The ink formulations are also legislation bound, and although tweaking is possible in terms of ingredients mix, there will most likely be nothing revolutionary.

Big improvements in print stability have been from stabilisation techniques and improved papers rather than innovation in dyes. With this background you may have realised that the differences between dye inks from individual manufacturers and from the parallel suppliers may be expected to be small, the same applies to pigment inks.

What about the pricing then?  How can the parallel suppliers be so relatively cheap? The dyes used cost between £5 and £100 per kilo in the main. That is per kilo of 100% colour taken in commercial quantities. UV absorbers are be in the same price per kilo range as dyes, but are present in minuscule amounts.

The colour is easily the most expensive ingredient, water, binding resin if any and flow control agents and simple glycols humectants are not much above £2 per kilo. The dye concentration will normally not exceed 3% by weight, this is easy to test by evaporating to dryness, and for "Photo Ink" may well be only one tenth of this. Most of the ink tanks I have seen seem to contain between 7 and 15 millilitres of ink.

For the sake of argument, if we take a worst case, the solid content will be no more than 5%, the price per kilo of that solid is no more than £100. Being very generous the cost of the remaining 95% of the ink will be costed as £2 per kilo, and we will assume that a kilo of this dye solution is one litre which is close to the truth.

If the ink volume is 15 ml then the ink cost contribution is easily calculated:

[{10000 (pence colour cost) x 0.05 } + {2000 (pence liquid part cost) x 0.950}] =  2400 pence per litre =    36 pence per 15 ml ink refill !

Of course the calculation allows nothing for the tank or cartridge, labour, packaging and marketing. However to give a us yardstick, another rule of thumb from the printing ink industry says that the basic raw material cost of the coloured ink should not exceed half the delivered selling price.

If something like that holds in the ink cartridge business then the selling price should be no more than £0.72 whereas in truth the genuine makers ink tank (no print nozzles included) cost £6 to £12 at least. Yes the balance between printer prices and ink replacement costs has been allowed to tilt to a ridiculous degree towards the ink cartridge providing the revenue.

Personally I do not want to be offered a free bottom of the market printer when I buy a new PC, I want to be free to choose a printer which meets my specific needs.

Certainly I also expect my A3+ high end photo printer to continue to work with the new hardware. And yes I do buy ink refill kits from the USA for this machine too and have never had cause to complain about colour or quality of the ink.

Anthony Darling