Nevertheless, printer owners are probably throwing away a lot of usable ink, and that is a problem when you consider how expensive ink is. An average black-ink cartridge contains between 5 milliliters of ink and costs about which is equivalent to a cost of per milliliter. If you bought a liter of the stuff over the life of your printeT, you'd have paid for a liquid that one aftermarket vendor told us was "cheap" to make.

Steve Pociask, president of the American Consumer Institute, a nonprofit educational and research institute based in Washington, D.C., recently coauthored a 50-page study covering the inkjet printer and cartridge market. "In some cases, we found that [the price of] the printer could be one-eighth 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 for the printer and ink."