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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.
HP seems to be the most expensive, with Epson a close second. Canon however has some decent prices on the dual cartridge packs.
I have tried the refill cartridges (a LONG time ago) and found out it was not even worth the effort the first time, much less the third attempt to refill the same cartridge.
You keep going until you die..."Me".
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?
I know someone who doesn't bother buying new cartridges. He just picks up a new printer each time and sells the old one off second hand. He saves about GBP5 a shot doing it that way.
Epson are the worst for this. They have some device on the cartridges which stops you from refilling them (to 'improve quality' apparently). The catch? Take a cartridge out before moving a printer, put it back in again, the printer refuses it.
This reminds me of a certain piece of software which won't work if you change your computer... Except you can't ring up Epson and get them to re-'certify' the ink...
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.
This is the same as: Sell the Razor at a loss, make the profit on the blades.
I don't understand why something that's okay at the $3.00 range (blades) isn't okay at the $50 range. I mean really, do you think these guys are making a profit on a $50 printer when the _packaging_ for that printer's gotta cost $12?
Buy a laser printer. The toner doesn't dry out or age. Print 99% of your slashdot articles on it. Buy a cheapie inkjet for the occasional color print you need. Not only is the laser printer faster and easier to read, You'll go 2 or 3 years before needing a new toner cart. (I've got an NEC superscript 870. Bought it in 1997. The first toner cartridge lasted four years and printed 2200 pages with one misfeed. It's on it's second toner cartridge)
Besides, by the time you need ink on your color printer, the NEW color printer will be higher quality. (or USB, or whatever)
I'm actually considering buying a dedicated photo printer as that's all I really use color for now anyway!
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
At work we have a Tektronix 860 that uses Wax Sticks Compared to Ink Cartreges or Toner Although the printer is expensive (For the avereage user competitive for buisness use) it comes with free black ink for the life of the printer. (The Color Wax sticks are more expensive) But what you do is just print in black and white and you can save a bundle on expenses. Of course Xerox wants you to print in color more often (and wont tell you that you can setup your print server to print in B and W). But at least the Printer is worth more then the ink.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The printing industry doesn't even compare to Sony's PS2 market. Had they sold their PS2 for $80 and charged you $150 per game, and made you renew your license on the game every month or so, then it would be similar.
I've put up with my lexmark and its $40-$50 cartridges simply because it's no better for any other company. You would think a company would come along and sell their printer for a higher price, and drop the ink price... that would drive everyone out of business no? I know I sure as hell would buy it, along with pretty much everyone I know...
"This printer is licensed to you, not sold. By printing anything with this printer, you indicate your agreement to use only genuine HI-PRIKED replacement ink cartridges. Any other use invalidates your license. You may terminate this agreement by destroying the printer."
This will be called a breakthrough in ineffectual property.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
The solution is all you people who want laws, throw your money into a corporation, and COMPETE.
If you can do it for cheaper, THEN DO IT.
I, myself, can not. I looked at the cost of getting it all to work. There is no way to do it. Since they know you won't pay $600 for a printer, and $5 for cartridges, they do it the way they have to do it to make a profit, albeit a small one.
Epson, HP, Canon, they're not in bed together. This is no boat race. 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, rather than paying $500 for a new printer and $25 a year on cartridges.
There are numerous other ways to print in color. I bought an HP Color LaserJet 4500. I print everything. The damn thing is a personal printer for me, and it runs ALL the time. The cost over the past year? Maybe $200, including tons of toner (thousands of pages printed). I love it. I will NEVER go back to Ink Jet.
Go, compete. The market is open. Once the government regulates, you think it'll help us, or help HP and Epson?
Think hard. I know you can...
That explains why so many helpful merchants are able to help me "SAVE UP TO 80% ON INKJET REFILLS! ALL MAKES AND MODELS!"
"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.
I remember reading someone who went over HP's books, and concluded the printer consumables business was basically propping up the rest of the company.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
You can do refills pretty easily with some printers.
I've been refilling my Canon BJC-4000 for over 3 years now. It's not a process for the faint of heart (or those that hate to get dirty!), but it can be done.
I use the big BC-21 black ink tanks which have a plug in the top that you can get out fairly easily. Then I just inject the ink into the sponge inside with a syringe. A bit of cleanup, put the plug back in, and it's done. It takes less than 10 minutes.
Not only that, the ink from the supplier I found is, IMO, much better than Canon's. It's darker and seems to print a bit clearer.
I bought a big (500mL) bottle of ink for $99CDN and by the time I'm done with it I'll have got close to 50 refills out of it. A cartridge costs $40CDN. Do the math!
Well, actually I can only get about 3-5 refills out of a cartridge before the print head gets too clogged, at which point I still have to buy a new cartridge. But that's a lot better than buying a new one every single time!
I simply couldn't afford to own a printer without refills. It's something I intend to look into carefully when I buy my next printer. If a manufacturer goes out of the way to make refilling difficult, then I'll go out of my way to avoid buying their product.
I tried the drill into the top and refill it yourself once. The image quality dropped to that of an Imagewriter. What's worse is even after buying a new cartridge the printer was never quite the same. I ended up buying another printer. I'll never buy refills or recycled again.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
So I got an "Epson chip resetting kit" and generic ink cartridges. It's pretty easy to use - you take out the old ink cartridge, pop out the chip with a little plastic tool that comes with the resetter, insert the chip in the resetter. Wait a couple of seconds for an LED to change color, then insert the chip in the new cartridge. Then install the new cartridge as Epson's instructions direct.
The chip resetter wasn't cheap - $36, but the ink was - $7 and $9 for B/W and color, respectively. I figure the total fixed cost of $116 for printer and resetter is still reasonable, and $16 for a pair of cartridges is much more reasonable. Also, I got my mother an identical printer, so I can just reuse the resetter since I am her official administrator.
Then again, if I were printing a lot, I'd get a refurbed laser printer. Their per-page cost is way lower than inkjet.
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...
I'm surprised that I can't find any posts explaining why printer manufacturers are against refills (other than the knee jerk "they want all my money" response).
I had the chance to meet one of the inventors of ink jet printing awhile back, and he explained why the HP "smart chip" would be (it wasn't rolled out yet then), a Good Thing(tm).
Most ink cartridges today have print heads on them already, which is a big part of their cost. Now obviously, the print head on an inkjet cartridge doesn't last forever. With today's really high printing resolutions, this head is a device which has to spit out pico-liters of ink with very precise timing. The ink must be at the correct temperature so as not to evaporate before hitting the paper or to stay wet on the paper for too long. All this requires a pretty sophistocated print head which wears down with use. After enough use, printing performance actually suffers.
The only way to guarantee printing quality under these conditions is to make sure the printing head is replaced periodically (i.e. with a new cartridge). By allowing cartridge refilling, there's no way to guarantee the print head gets replaced when it needs to be, and thus they wouldn't be able to guarantee that "an HP printer will always print quality." So there's actually a QA issue.
HP has developed a separate print head / ink assembly, but generally only very high volume printers use this type of solution (because it's not cost effective for Joe Q. Consumer to buy a gallon container of red ink), and even then they have to separately replace the print head occasionally.
And, as you point out, unless the ink is the exact same consistency, the print head will get clogged or else simply not deliver good print performance.
Additionally, the reason they make the print heads part of the ink cartridge is (at least in part) so that users will change the heads regularly. For good print quality, you need new heads every few hundred pages anyway, so tying the head to the ink forces Joe Blow not to forget to change the heads.
Now, don't get me wrong: I believe that this is also a case of the manufacturers taking a legitimate claim and using it as leverage to force the users to pay more. I'm not naive. But that doesn't mean that the manufacturer's claims are entirely without merit, either.
I think that ideally, the heads and ink should be separate, standardized modules. Each one would have to be labeled with precise information about (in the case of the head) number of jets, jet spacing, voltages, etc. and (in the case of the ink) the types of heads it will work with, the quantity of ink per container, etc. That way, you could (theoretically) upgrade your printer by swapping in a higher-quality print head. If they could legislate that kind of solution, it might work.
But DIY ink refills are at best a hit-and-miss proposition -- if the government were to legitimatize ink refills, they would have to also regulate the quality of these offerings... something like requiring a warranty, in case the refilled cartridge somehow ruins the printer.
Oh, and BTW: None of this applies to laser refills, which I have very little experience with. My understanding is that some are very good, and others are very bad. And, having had to clean toner spills out of laser printers, I can tell you that it's not a fun job. But laser is by far the better technology: my printer here is a LaserJet that produces nice, sharp (albeit B&W) pages and that has jammed maybe once and otherwise never given me a problem. Of course, I don't use it as much anymore... I really have no need for hard copies of anything 99% of the time...
"Anything is better than IE, and you can quote me on that." -- Wil Wheaton.
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.
.sig: file not found
Yeah, he's testy, but he's right. I, too, am sick of the Libertarian bullshit of telling me to start a company every time that I voice a complaint about a product or service.
I'm sick of hearing about how the "free market" will fix everything. The only thing that the free market will guarantee is a lot of companies that are very efficient at generating profits. If the free market is so f****** wonderful, explain Microsoft!
I'd rather have consumer protection laws passed and enforced by a government with no stake in the transactions than have a bunch of big companies collude to cheat consumers.
Don't you worry about that evil old government. Enron is working for your best interests.
I recently bought an Epson Stylus Photo 820 printer, because it was top-rated for the price at printing photos - mainly due to the fact that it uses a 6 color ink system.
I hoped that this time around, I'd at least be able to buy 3rd. party ink cartridges and get decent performance. (My last inkjet was a Stylus Photo 700, and every time I used anything other than real Epson ink, it would clog up after 2 or 3 pages were printed - and nothing would unclog it again, short of putting new Epson cartridges in and running it through 14 or 15 cleaning cycles.)
My first experience with ink carts. off eBay was dismal though. The colors just wouldn't print uniformily. Every time I printed a test pattern, one color would be missing completely or streaked up. Sure enough, putting in a real Epson cartridge made it start working again.
I think with these high DPI Epson printers, Epson must be putting some type of thinner or solvent in their ink that nobody else is using. Everything else seems to clog up their nozzles real fast. Quite frustrating.....
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".
Canon has spouted that same line about print quality since their first inkjets came out, long before there was any such thing as a high-resolution inkjet printer.
I had a BJ200, which I used enough that the moving parts finally wore out. I found that contrary to Canon's claims, the better cartridges could be refilled indefinitely (not all carts were exactly alike in quality; there were four carts that fit this printer, and the one labeled for their fax unit was best). I've refilled some as many as *8* times, and only lost carts at that point because I accidentally bumped the printhead and damaged it.
The trick is to keep the printhead clean -- swish it thru denatured alcohol every time you refill it, and make sure you keep the track area clean and free of dust. Use a high quality refill ink, like Fillmore brand (which is considerably better ink than Canon's original ink, at about 5% the cost). Don't overfill the cart -- half-full works better in many cases. If it gets cranky, next time it's empty run a little alcohol thru the cart itself, and print a few demo pages to let it clean out the printhead from the inside, then do the regular refill. (I've even resurrected "dead" dried-out carts that way -- turned out good as new.)
With proper care, inkjet printheads provide the same print quality throughout their lifetime, which is a helluva lot longer than the time it takes to use up that first ink resevoir.
Note: I've seem similar results with high-resolution HP and Epson inkjet refills, but my hands-on experience was with Canon.
And thanks for the heads-up on the newer HP units -- personally, I wouldn't buy an inkjet that rejects being refilled. At some 25 cents per page to print with "original" ink, inkjets cost too damn much to run. (Compare to about 5 cents/page for laser printers, and barely above cost of paper for pin impact.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?