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Anti-Competitive Behavior in the Printer Industry?
Greyfox writes: "Here is an interesting story about the printer industry versus ink-cartridge refillers. Anyone who's bought a low-cost inkjet knows that you can spend over half the cost of the printer on ink. So it was only natural that an industry would spring up around refilling the cartridges. Well the printer industry has apparently been fighting back, trying to protect their market share. As with all good stories, legislation is being considered. Worth a read." Sort of like spyware -- it's a back-and-forth battle.
Yeah, every time you buy more ink. Over the lifetime of the printer you may well end up spending several times the original printer cost on ink cartridges.
I don't see what the big deal is. Printer makers have a tough sell trying to get people to pay more to not recycle, and rightly so. One of these companies will eventually have the balls to start making easily refillable cartridges. Their lower margins will be accounted for by their boom in sales.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
The printer business is just latching onto the "razor and blade" business model that worked so well for other industries, especially the video game business.
Sony dumps the PS2 below cost, and then I have to buy only Sony-approved games at high prices. A portion of that goes back to Sony and pays off the real cost of the box.
Is congress investigating them as well?
Gotta love HP. Their new printers use ink refills with "Smart Chips". The chips check ink levels and if they ever increase, the printer refuses to use that cartridge. No more refilling the cartridges. I don't like H-Paq very much.
Do you want to remove linux?
There's just no point in buying black and color ink carts for $60, when you can buy a new printer, albeit an "older" model, $60-80 that has the ink already. I've bought about 5 printers in the past 2 years now.
I guess I'm not doing my part to "prevent these carts from clogging up landfills" as Lexmark, et al, would like me to do.
"Ink costs half what the printer does"
Guess what folks? So do an awful lot of things you buy. I can go out and pick up a $30 discman, and the CDs are still $15+. The discman (or printer) is just a delivery mechanism, it's what you put in it that actually matters at the end.
What I found lacking in the article (and all posts so far) is a biggie for me: most printer manufacturers will void your warranty if you use recycled cartridges, and with good reason. Last time I had to maintain several laser printers, every time some dingbat (read: the boss) went and ordered a recycled toner cartridge, the printer(s) died within a few weeks of using it. Recycled toner and ink cartridges tend to be a LOT lower quality than new ones, they leak all over the place, etc. I'm not even going to start with those needle-injection packages you can buy for the home.
Although I don't think printer manufacturers should be able to PREVENT someone else selling ink, they sure as hell shouldn't have to pay (because of damage) for someone else's incompetence. Oh, and for those that bring up the old "Honda doesn't force you to buy their gasoline" argument... go pick up a new car and install a 3rd party stereo system sometime, and see just what your warranty covers now.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Look at the economics -- a printer is a one-time sale; you've collected the customer's money, and they've got their printer. Ink is a fungible; it gets used up, and you have to buy more. If a printer manufacturer can come up with a mechanism to ensure that the people who buy their printers have to buy their ink, they have a steady revenue stream.
Look at the relative costs. Printer prices have been going down almost as fast as memory prices. With some of the low-end ink-jet printers, once you buy more than one or two OEM ink cartridges, you've spent more on cartridges than you did on the printer. And over the printer's lifetime, looking at the OEM costs for some of these ink-jet cartridges, you're going to spend on ink several times what you spent on the printer. Think about what the automobile market would be like if you had to buy your oil, gasoline, tires, and every other consumable or replacement component for your car from the company that made your car. That's what the printer manufacturers want.
Several companies tried, back when the high-resolution ink-jet printers were first coming out, to achieve that kind of control over the other fungible supply for printers -- paper. They brought out special ink-jet paper 'specially designed for high-resolution printing' and ran ad campaigns suggesting that you would be producing sub-standard printouts if you used non-OEM paper. That lasted until the big paper manufacturers ramped up to produce the same products, and unlike ink cartridges, there was no way for the printer manufacturers to put in mechanisms to force consumers to use OEM paper.
Printer manufacturers have also claimed that using non-OEM inks would damage their printers, and that using non-OEM inks would void the warranty. However, the manufacturers were required to stop this tactic; under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act and general principles of the Federal Trade Commission Act, a manufacturer may not require the use of any brand of ink (or any other article) unless the manufacturer provides the item free of charge under the terms of the warranty. This hasn't prevented salesdroids and tech-support people from claiming that, but they'll fold if you press them.
It may be an ongoing back-and-forth struggle, but market forces are going to continue to pry fungible supplies sales away from printer manufacturers.
Lexmark has a license very similar to what you describe. It's called the Prebate program. Essentially, when you buy the cartridge, you agree to either send the cartridge back to Lexmark, or throw it away. There have been all kinds of angry letters from lexmark sent to people who remanufacture these cartridges.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
I own a TI Microlaser Pro and it is insane the protections they have built into the the thing. In this particular printer there is an imaging cartridge as well as toner. You are supposed to replace the imaging piece every 10,000 prints, but those things still look good at 30,000 prints and up. But they have a little fuze in them that will get tripped when the print count gets that high. Plus there is an internal counter on the toner and the imager that if not reset properly will turn off the printer. Luckily the TI division was bought out by HP and they don't make that printer anymore and so they have released the secret reset codes for the TI. But it was a pain in the ass to get the thing reset the counters and allow me to continue printing.
-Matt
2 years ago, I bought a digital camera. I won't mention the brand - it was a junky $100 job from Best Buy. It used its own proprietary batteries, which costed about $10 a piece. With the price of batteries alone, I was spending about $10/hr to use my camera.
So I dumped the camera for another one, spending $400 this time (got a much better camera), and also found one that took AA batteries. Alkaline batteries drain a little faster - but they are so much cheaper because they are massed produced - now I pay about $2/hr to use my camera - still too expensive, but better than before.
So apply this to printers - if someone developed a 'universal' print cartridge that would work in multiple printers, the cost of production would drop, and likewise the consumer's cost would also drop.
The big question is, who would be the first printer company to turn down their profits from ink-cartridge sales and develop the universal cartridge?
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -- "Step Right Up", Tom Waits
I knew I'd be telling this story sooner or later...
Last summer I was the tech guy at a small place at a time when the annual report was just going into production. The boss decided that we could make the covers in-house and printed on nice 'hardboard' paper as opposed to pay certain outrageous artwork & printing costs. The the boss herself designed some (rather nice) artwork and got it all set up in the paint program.
Next, we had to print 600 copies of it on a Canon BJC bubble jet printer.
So over the next two weeks, we printed maybe 50-60 of these per day. This cover was more heavy on blue than the other colours. Fortunately, this canon printer allowed you to change the cartridges individually, so you wouldn't be wasting the other colours. We must've gone through about 5 blues and 3 of the other cartridges in those weeks.
Hooray for Canon, allowing us to change the ink cartridges individually.
If you can do it for cheaper, THEN DO IT.
We aren't all looking to start a fucking printing company, moron. We just don't want to get ripped off by artificially inflated prices on half-empty printer carts from companies like HP who use chips that server no useful purpose other than to force us to buy more of their crap. You ever heard of fair use?
They found out that the average American barely uses their printer, but enough that spending $100-$150 a year on cartridges is not a bad deal
Bullshit. If I hardly even use my printer (say like a coupla times a month), then that most certainly IS a bad deal.
Think hard. I know you can...I hope that is your
Actually I own a victrolla that has a little paper on the back that says that I do not own the victrolla until such time as the patents run out. Until that time I am only leasing it (for a one time payment) and can not reverse engineer, modify, have repaired or play records not by the Edison Talking Voice Corporation. She is a beautiful piece with red cherry finish and a sterling silver horn but I consider that little paper to be the main prize. (the patents ran out in 1917.)
Another reason for the chip to count/disable/whatever is to thwart those companies who take empty carts, refill them them selves then sell them as "Oringinal" carts for full price. We have seen a lot of that here. People order their ink carts online, paying a slightly reduced price. Turns out, they were buying refilled carts and had no idea.
They prey on the people who don't want to refill their carts, and think they're getting a good deal.
Jason
He's totally creeping out the Great One, eh...
Subject says it.
I have a number of friends who work printer support, and those cheapass "refill" kits are mostly a scam. Number of problems: the jet heads clog if they go dry. The jet heads clog if you get case fragments into them. The refill kits don't always seal properly and leak ink.
Why does this impact the printer company? Because the same cheapskate who won't buy another cartridge then sees the shitty print quality, and calls them demanding a new cartridge... Quite often, if under warantee, they end up getting one. Good luck proving someone refilled theirs.
For me, it's a non-issue. The only printers I use take toner by the gallon. Crappy streaky inkjets are worth exactly what you pay for them. (Nothing after a rebate, usually) And it's nothing but an idiot tax. Buy a more expensive printer, pay less per page down the road. Gee, buy a better car, pay less in gas milage later too. I don't see people forcing those gas-guzzling SUVs off the road anytime soon.
BTW: The printer is nothing but a paper-dispenser and a power supply. Most of the expensive bits are in the cartridge. They're not dumping, and they're not charging you $50 for 2 oz of ink.
--Dan
It's been more than 5 years now, but I used to work repairing printers, and the refills (for both inkjet and laser printers) were bad news. Part of this can be chalked up to poor printer design. Most printers on the market today have the "print head" and the ink tank bundeled into one package, or in the case of laser printers, the imaging drum and the toner bundled into one package. Refills work on the principle that the print head/imaging drum is more durable than the resevoir, so in theory you should be able to replace one without the other.
This is true, on a well-designed printer where the two parts are separate assemblies. (Some canon printers operate this way; a replacement ink tank is only a few dollars while a whole cartridge is ~$30 - 50 US.) The problem is that refills, at least in those days, were difficult to perform correctly. I believe that it is even harder today, as cartridges are more complex while the refill technology doesn't appear to have improved. We used to see a large number of printers come into our shop damaged by improperly performed refills. Of course, in those days this was worse news, as a new inkjet was typically around $300 US and a new cartridge was around $30 US. This is true of a good printer today as well.
In short, if you have a good printer, the refills are not worth it. You most likely will wind up damaging the printer, and of course the warranty does not cover damage from non-approved cartridges/refills. If it's a really cheap printer, the risk/reward scenario is quite different. The cartridges do not last as long on the cheapies, and represent a higher proportion of the cost of the printer. I prefer a nice printer and a lower cost per page, though. If this is your situation, the refills are almost certainly a false economy.
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I have an Epson SP 750. I had suspected that the printer was prematurely deeming the cartridges empty, so I tried a little experiment. I simply popped-out and popped-in the same "empty" cartridges. The color cart lasted another few printouts, but the black cart has been going strong for at least 100 pages.
The only problem is that on the 750 I can't exchange the ink carts unless the printer thinks they're empty. It's weird, after reinserting the carts the printer thought they were full. It seems to be using some algorithm or usage rate to infer the ink levels based on number of pages printed since last replacement. This is kinda cool for some reasons, but I'd really like to replace the color cart independantly from the black cart.
Fast, low operating costs, free black ink, fantastic color. If only there were consumer models...
(However, I would never, ever, under any circumstances, use an inkjet as a primary printer. Try to find a cheap used laser printer. I've been using an Epson ActionLaser 1500 for pretty much all my life, it's served me extremely well. The printer claims it's printed 9600 pages, and I'm not sure it hasn't reset. I would never, ever deal with the noise, lack of speed, and cost of printing homework and so forth on an inkjet, and nobody else should either. Inkjet text looks nasty awful, anyway. Laser prints look muuuch nicer.)
I believe the printer companies sell their printers at close-to-the-bone or loss prices, and I don't like their attitude to me putting whatever refill I like in the printer I've bought. How can I make my displeasure known? Hmmm...
If I just throw out the whole printer once the cartridges are empty, that only costs me $40 more than buying new cartridges. Because the printer manufacturer is using the printer almost as a loss leader, if I buy a printer with cartridges, I have now got A) a spare printer (or a printer I can just throw away) and B) if everyone does it, maybe manufacturers of those cheap printers will hurt, and realise that people don't WANT to be screwed for printer supplies.
I realise there's a bit of an ecological burden involved in throwing away a printer every three months, but there's the beauty of the thing, I can actually sell the printer to Cash Converters or a salvage firm and recoup that $40 gap as well...
Bewdiful!
-- ted russ http://www.arach.net.au/~ted/mydynes/ http://www.arach.net.au/~ted/myblogs/
I work retail, so I hear people complaining all the damned time about the cost of ink refills. Here's an easy way to figure it out: The cheaper the printer, the more expensive the cartridge. Simple as that.
Go buy a cheapie Lexmark z23 and marvel at the ~$33 cost for the black ink. Now buy an HP 900-series, and notice how the price drops to ~$30. Now buy their D135 all-in-one unit and (HOLY SHIT!) the price for the black is $22. Is anyone else surprised, because I'm not.
Is it an honest way to do business? That depends on your perspective. I always try to show a customer the fact that the $20 they're saving here is going right out the window when they replace the ink for the first time.
I have a laser that I use for 95% of my printing. You can snag a good quality home-oriented laser in the $250 range if you shop it. I have a couple of old color units that I use if I NEED color. I might pick up one of the photo-type units if for some reason the SO decided she wanted more of the digital pics printed out. Under no circumstances would I ever try to print the volume of papers that I routinely print (I'm an english major... typical Sunday evening has about 50 pages worth of printing in its future) on an inket. You wouldn't try to run a DNS on a Win95 box, and you wouldn't try to go off-road in your Cavalier, so why do so many people insist on using an el-cheapo inkjet for a job that a laser is so much better suited (and cheaper) for.
So are we complaining when the free cell phone requires a two-year contract? Two cliches come to mind: "Pay me now or pay me later", and "you get what you pay for".