Is A Homemade DIY Ink System Worth Your Time And Money?

If you have a printer, you may wonder whether or not installing a DIY ink system is a good idea. We recently tried this with a Canon model, and it worked well for a while, but we soon began experiencing trouble. All we had to do was add ink to it—we didn’t have to buy new cartridges or modify the printer in any significant way. But can we save any money by doing this?

We decided to test this out by seeing how many pages each system can print.

Canon sells basic black ink cartridges for $17.99, and they contain 11.2 milliliters of ink each. The real question is, how many pages can we get out of 11.2 mils of ink?

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How do you calculate ink coverage?

Let’s establish a few formulas to help you calculate this. Each milliliter of ink can produce roughly one full-color page. If you print a page covered entirely in black, it will take about one milliliter of ink so that 11.2ml can print 11.2 whole-black pages.

Printer manufacturers assume 5% ink coverage on the average printed document. That means that about 5% of each page you print should be covered in ink, on average. The estimated number of printed pages equals the whole page divided by your coverage (11.2/.05), which totals 224 pages for this form of black ink. Canon 280 cartridges can print 250 pages, so we came pretty close with this formula.

We can do the same thing with the color cartridges, except with these, you get four cartridges in one set. Each has 5.6 ml of ink, and the price is $47 for all four. Assuming they can print 5.6 whole-printed pages, then with 2% coverage, we should get 280 pages. Now we can divide the number of pages printed by how many pages a black cartridge can print, which requires about 44 cartridges, costing you roughly $792.

Applying these same numbers to the color cartridges, you’ll need about 35 sets, so you’ll spend around $2,448 in total without a CIS. With the DIY system, you will spend about one hour modifying the printer and assuming 5% coverage of black ink, you should get about 500 ml of black ink and 200 ml of color ink. BCH Technologies sells a standard dye ink kit for Canon for $15. It contains three black bottles and one of each colored ink.

The verdict? Using this modified ink system can save you big time money, especially when it comes to color ink.