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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?
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.