GI-20BK black · standard

The GI-20BK is an ink bottle rather than a cartridge, and the difference shows up in the arithmetic. It holds enough for 6000 pages and lists at $13.00, which is 0.22 cents a page. A thousand pages of black text costs about $2.17 in ink. For comparison, a page from an HP 65XL black cartridge costs 12.33 cents, so it is roughly 56.9 times what this bottle charges for the same page.

It goes into the Canon PIXMA G7020, the only machine in our catalogue that takes it, alongside GI-20C cyan, GI-20M magenta and GI-20Y yellow. Those three are rated at 7700 pages each at $12.00, which is even cheaper per page than the black. All four bottles together come to $49.00 and will outlast most people's year.

Nothing about this system is locked. Our record shows no firmware DRM on the G7020, and a refill tank has no chip in the ink path to argue with in the first place.

What you trade for the running cost is a print head you cannot replace with the ink. It stays in the printer, so it is the part worth looking after. Fill the tanks before they run dry rather than after, since running a tank empty pulls air into the line and turns a simple refill into a cleaning job. Print something in colour every week or two instead of leaving the machine idle for months. And when colour does go missing, run a nozzle check and a cleaning cycle rather than buying more ink, because on a tank printer a blocked nozzle and an empty tank look identical from the outside.