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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)
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?
"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.
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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