I've just watched a case study on the BBC TV consumer advice programme, Rip-Off Britain. To say that this case irritated and frustrated me might not surprise you as most of the cases broadcast by this programme document the unfair treatment by uncaring organisations on hapless members of the public. But this time I am irritated and frustrated by the programme itself because I feel they have badly misrepresented the complaint over allegedly high costs of printer inks - a topic that concerns many DPNow readers when printing photos.

The case study in question documents the experience and opinion of an office administrator at a bowls club. The club purchased a high-end Epson all-in-one ink-jet printer/scanner/copier, although crucially the model they chose was not intended for office use. The administrator appears to like the printer but hates the cost of genuine Epson ink-jet cartridges. He goes on to say that he is not interested in colour and would even like to replace all the colour cartridges in the printer with black ones. He compares his printer with a car and asks why he has to use expensive Epson ink in his Epson printer when he can use any brand of petrol regardless of the brand of his car.

The programme also used the tired old analogy between the cost of vintage champagne and ink by volume (yes, ink is more expensive). They also did a test that they admitted was unscientific and compared the cost and yield of third party inks with manufacturer inks. Based solely on costs, third party inks, in the opinion of the programme, won every time. The only sense shown in the programme in my opinion was a very brief interview with a journalist from Computer Active magazine who pointed out that many ink-jet printers are initially sold at a loss and for the manufacturer to make a profit it has to sell its ink for use over the lifetime of that printer.

So let's deal with a number of key points, firstly, the bowls club and its choice of printer. By buying the wrong printer for their needs they put themselves into the situation they subsequently found themselves in. If they didn't want colour printing why did they buy a colour printer? They should have researched their needs better and chosen a printer that offers reduced cost black ink document printing over the life of the printer. In the case of Epson, their WorkForce Pro range of office ink-jet printers would have been a much better choice over the lifetime of the printer even though the initial purchase price may have been higher. Alternatively, they could have opted for a mono laser all-in-one which would have been economical to buy in the first place and delivered much lower per page printing costs.

Secondly, why do manufacturer printer inks cost more than third-party inks? Especially for domestic ink-jet printers (and the bowls club's Epson is really a model aimed at home use rather than in the office), rightly or wrongly, the market has developed so that the hardware is often sold at cost or below cost and a profit is only made during the life of the printer if the owner buys manufacturer inks. Printers for professional use cost more to start with and this allows the manufacturer to charge a lot less for its inks per page than for its consumer printers. You must also remember that costs are not simply about the ink contained in the cartridge. You're buying packaged technology, from the cartridge design, which may incorporate a precision print head, that works to provide reliable printing and uniform colour reproduction. Some third party ink suppliers refill original manufacturer cartridges. There is no guarantee that the ink that these refilled cartridges contain will match the colours of genuine inks, nor the longevity and with some types of printer there is a genuine danger that you could prematurely end the life of your printer. The potential pitfalls of cheaper third party inks is even greater people who use their printers for photo printing. And the irony is that some companies re-manufacturing cartridges with cheap ink will enjoy much higher profit margins than the printer manufacturers.

I was left with the distinct impression that Rip-Off Britain portrayed the bowls club office administrator as another bona-fide example of someone being ripped-off and that the culprits were the printer manufacturers. But this, in my view, is simply not the case and the programme failed in its duty to study and understand the salient facts.

Ink-jet printer manufacturers don't gorge themselves in profits at the expense of their customers' expenditure on ink. Lexmark has recently decided to close its ink-jet printer manufacturing business because it has found it to hard to maintain profitability and HP is currently losing billions of dollars.

Printer manufacturers do a lot of hard and expensive work in designing and manufacturing what are complex and highly sophisticated, precision, devices. The analogy with fuel for your car completely misses the point. If you buy a pen, do you worry about the cost of the ink inside the pen? A printer is a very sophisticated pen designed to do a very specific job.

I'm not saying that the printer market is entirely undeserving of criticism. It's true that you can buy ink-jet printers that are so cheap it's hardly worth buying replacement inks instead of throwing the printer away once the bundled inks give out. I also think that the printer manufacturers have not done enough to educate the public about how to choose the best printer for their needs and argue the justification for the cost of their inks.

And, you may think oddly, I'm not saying that there are no third party inks worth buying. At the same time I can't recommend any because I have no idea which third party inks are any good. Independent testing over many years has revealed horror stories about some third party inks; where inks have faded in a matter of months, or where colours were very poor, and in the worst cases where cartridges simply wouldn't work or the printer was damaged beyond repair. Knowing this, I personally won't buy third-party inks. I might be tempted if there was a bullet-proof quality standard by which third party inks could be reliably rated. But there isn't one.

In my experience you can purchase genuine inks at very reasonable prices by shopping around. Indeed the variation in price of genuine inks can be shockingly wide. Sometimes you can opt for larger capacity cartridges that contain more ink and so deliver a lower cost per page than standard cartridges.

In conclusion, my message to the BBC's Rip-Off Britain programme is this - in the case of the bowls club and their expenditure on ink - that was pretty shoddy journalism and I can't see how they deserved the attention of your programme. They bought the wrong printer for their needs and the reasoning behind their complaint was misconceived. On top of that the programmed failed to educate the viewer about the real issues regarding ink-jet printing costs and potential pitfalls. A programme of the genre of Rip-Off Britain simply mustn't fail in the way it did in this case.