If you have an inkjet printer, you might be confused by the amount of different ink cartridges out there. Why are there so many, and which ones are suitable for your printer?

The short answer is… visit the page for your printer manufacturer, use our special ink selector (available for the most popular brands) and Bob’s your uncle!

Still reading? Great! Actually, it’s fairly simple. Most inkjet printers accept a set range of ink carts- for example, a Canon i450 will only accept the BCI-24BK (black) and BCI-24C (three-colour) ink carts. You can’t use a Light-Magenta Epson ink cartridge in your i450- it simply won’t fit! In fact, you can’t even use Canon’s own BCI-21BK; despite its similar appearance, that tank is designed to work with older printers like the BJC-4300.

It’s sometimes annoying that there are so many similar-but-incompatible cartridges out there. Often there are good technical reasons behind this, but other times this is done for purely commercial reasons.

However, the moral is simple- find out which ink cartridges are supposed to work with your printer and stick to them! (Sometimes a cartridge may have more than one code or name, but we’ll make clear which printers it works with).

The big-money saver for you is “compatible” cartridges. These aren’t made by the original printer manufacturer, but they are designed to be 100% compatible with the original cartridges. So (for example) if you have an i455, you can save money by buying cartridges that are marked as being compatible with the BCI-24BK and BCI-24C. Or simply check the list of printers on the packaging!

Printer configurations

Generally speaking, inkjet printers use one of the following configurations of cartridges, depending on what they are meant to do and how much they cost.

Simple inkjets - Single Black, Single Tri-Colour

The simplest inkjets are often designed to use

• A black ink cartridge
• A single colour ink cartridge, which contains the three colour tanks (cyan, magenta and yellow)

With these, you can replace the black and the colour cartridges separately. However, because the three colours come in a single cartridge, if one colour runs out before the others, you have to replace the whole lot.

Mid-range inkjets - 1 Black, 3 Separate Colours

Other printers use the same types of ink but let you replace the three colours separately:-

• Black ink cartridge
• Cyan ink cartridge
• Magenta ink cartridge
• Yellow ink cartridge

This doesn’t give you more colours, but it avoids the waste described above.

Mid-range inkjets - 1 or 2 Black, 3 or 5 Separate Colours

To improve print quality, some printers may have six separately-replaceable colour tanks. As well as the four described above, you also get

• Light Magenta, and
• Light Cyan, which allows for better print quality, particularly in areas of skin and sky.

Other printers have two black ink tanks, each with a different formulation. One is intended primarily for text, and the other is better optimised for photo use.

High-range inkjets

As well as the six or seven separate black and colour tanks described above, some more high-end models also accept (e.g.) red, dark blue or green cartridges and even things like gloss optimiser.

Other combinations

Some printers use all-in-one cartridges that combine all the black and the colour inks.

Others give you a small amount of choice- for example, letting you temporarily install a photo-colour cartridge in place of the black.

Some cheap inkjets used to be sold that took only a three-colour cartridge. The “black” was generated by mixing the three colours. This gave horrible results as it soaked the paper with ink, gave poorly-defined text, and the black turned out to be a darkish brown. Fortunately, such printers are no longer common.