Printer inks: more choice & value.(ANNUAL PHOTO GUIDE)(Buyers guide)

If you print a lot of photos, you might be as fed up with ink costs as you are with gasoline prices. Alternative brands that sell for as little as half the price of brand-name ink seem like a good way to save money. They are--sometimes.

Lower-priced options include store brands, third-party products, and generic inks. You can also have empty cartridges refilled. Inks are sold at office-supply chains, mass-market retailers, franchise stores specializing in printer supplies, and online. Most also sell brand-name inks.

But our tests of hundreds of cartridges from many of these sources showed that off-brands often didn't cut photo costs much because they printed fewer photos than brand-name cartridges. Also, they generally didn't match the manufacturers' inks for print quality and fade resistance.

We did find some exceptions. Office Depot cartridges for Hewlett-Packard printers, the top-selling brand, matched HP ink for photo quality and trimmed 20 cents off the cost of an 8x10-inch photo. Staples cartridges for Canon printers and Epson-compatible inks from online suppliers Carrot Ink and PrintPal matched the photo quality of the printer makers' cartridges at slightly lower cost.

There are trade-offs. Few of the off-brand inks we tested offered manufacturer-level quality for text and graphics as well as photos, and it was almost always a challenge to get them working properly. We often had to run the cleaning utility, which wastes ink, and some samples simply didn't work. In our experience, brand-name cartridges rarely have such issues.

HOW TO CHOOSE

Use brand-name ink for the least risk and hassle. As a rule, brand-name ink had the best-quality photos, graphics, and text. For top results with all output and for keepsake photos, buy brand-name ink. That might be your only choice for new printers with redesigned cartridges. It often takes three to six months before alternative cartridges for new models arrive.