The Impact of Third-Party Inks on Image Quality

While costs of inkjet printers have plummeted over the past few years, brand name consumable prices remain high. As a result, consumers have been drawn to thirdparty inks that offer the promise of comparable quality at a much lower price point. In order to investigate the impact of third party inks on image quality, a combination of subjective and objective image quality measurements were applied to a set of samples printed under nearly identical circumstances on the same printer but by using different vendors' inks. In this paper we will be presenting our assessment methods and the results of our study.