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Ink More Expensive Than Champagne
laing writes "According to this story, ink for home printers is now seven times more expensive than vintage champagne.Ink in a typical replacement cartridge costs about £1.70 per millilitre, compared with 1985 Dom Perignon at 23p per millilitre." Explains why I get daily spam about toner, but none at all for booze!
I've long held the belief that ink for inkjet printers is way to expensive. I bought a cheap laser printer 4 years ago, for about twice that of a nice inkjet printer. However, I am still using the same toner cartiridge that came with it. I've probably saved myself 10 times the money by going with a laser printer. Yeah, I can't print in color but that does not bother me. I'm not sure how the price of toner compares to ink cartridges, but laser is the way to go.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
This has been going on for a while, it shouldn't surprise anyone. Manufacturers are getting cheaper (not all their own faults, but it's a fact of life for most consumer grade items). The make crap and hope to keep selling it, because other manufacturers are finding cheaper ways to produce the same goods (usuallt with offshore labor, but not always).
So...in the end, they produce crap and try to make up profits elsewhere. In the printer business, that's either paper or ink. And not a lot of printer manufacturers are selling much expensive paper. And, they're not liekly to beat the paper industry at inexpensive paper either.
Me, I cut printer costs by saving everything on $0.50/GB hard drives instead of printing, always cheaper in the end.
Chaos, panic, disorder...my work here is done.
I mean, you drink some champaigne, take a piss an hour later, and it's gone.
You print out your term paper...and behold! It's still there! Way to go ink manufacturers!
Of course, you could always try your luck with pissing on a piece of paper...but I don't think your instructor would like to read your essay that you printed that way....
Consider this:
1. Buy mint condition Epson Stylus Photo EX @ Goodwill for $8.
2. Buy (6) color and (6) black ink tanks from 'inkinablink' on eBay for ~ $45 delivered
3. Connect to Linux box and configure CUPS
4. Print. A lot. $53 per year, plus paper.
5. Printer breaks? Printhead clogs? Repeat step #1 as necessary. I 'upgraded' from a $20 Stylus Color 800 to the $8 Photo EX.
Come on people, use tha brain a bit, you don't have to go to CrapUSA to buy this stuff...............
He said "Bottled Water", not water from refilling stations where you can get a gallon for 25c.
To explain the water>gas phenomenon, you just have to look closely in urban areas. In California, bottled water such as evian, dasani, arrowhead in tiny or medium tall bottles are more of an accessory than something which serves a specific purpose - thirst quenching; rehydration.
It is psychological behaviour and water-distributing mafia knows this. Historically homo-sapiens always had the need to carry around something. Whether it was a rock, a spear, sword, etc; later became smoking and morphed into the idiotic bottled water trend. It is the ideal successor to smoking, because it repeats the 2 basic patterns cigarettes serve - hold it in hand, intake into the body through the mouth. And thus we have companies exploiting it with inflated prices and we get bombarded with constant advertisements on TV, billboards, etc.
I'm no psychologist, but I think I've narrowed it down to why the bottled water costs more than gas.
Of course it shouldn't be illegal. It should just be unprofitable, since the customers would all Just Say No. The real point of the story is to inform people that they are idiots for paying that much.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Whats even more interesting is that, for example, Coke is cheaper than bottled water. :)
(Compare Coke and Dasani -- both produced by the same company, but the "flavored" water is more expensive than plain!)
In fact, bottled water seems to be the most expensive soft drink
I wirked for California Coolers for a while (anyone remember them?) and let me tell you, bottliing is cheap. After the initial capital investment is earned back, it's pretty much a minimum cost operation.
What this fact tells us is that people will buy just about anything. We've gotten so condition to the $1.00-$1.25 bottle of soda (talk about a pure profit market!) that we willingly accept a $1.00 bottle of water. Add in the snob appeal of certain brands of bottled water and you've got yourself a massive money-maker.
One thing you have to remember is that price is NOT a function of cost. Price is a function of market forces. It is whatever people are willing to pay.
Consider: I used to wirk for a computer store eight years ago. A regular six-connector 50-pin SCSI1 internal ribbon cable was priced at $60.00. You know how much it cost the store to buy it? $5.00. Yep. $55.00 markup. Why? People beleived that SCSI was more expensive.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
It's only a ripoff if you don't consider the whole picture. Consider that soft drink for $1 a bottle is easily 10x the cost of the materials (mostly sugar and water). But what you're paying for is the FRIDGE at the store that keep it cold and the CONVENIENCE from not lugging around a bottle of water until you needed it. Convenience has a price. You can't simply look at the raw materials to determine value.
:-)
Look at it this way, there is 2c worth of wheat and yeast and water in a loaf of bread. They charge $2 for it. Where did the other $1.98 go? Into the cost of preparing and cooking and packaging and marketting and transporting and storage and the sales clerks salary. So what if there is 0.01c worth of water in a $1 bottle? You've still gotta pay for all the other costs including a much more expensive storage cost (refrigerated).
PS: I don't buy bottled water, I prefer juice
(About low printer prices)
However the only reason they go so low in pricing is because they have managed to trick the public into almost exclusively buying HP-ink. Ink is a substance that's *pretty* generic. And still people still buy HP cartridges even if they could get ink elsewhere at 1/3 of the HP price-tag. That's beyond me.
They tell people, "buy original or your printer'll blow or something".
It's the same BS they tell about pirated CDs, at least here in Brazil.
Cesar Cardoso can be found at cesar at zyakannazio dot eti dot br (or at least I believe so)
...that, for instance, HP only produces a few different actual types of printers. i.e. the printers' guts are all the same, just the software is different to allow better printing quality. So it's very likely your $50 printer is the same one as the $350 printer. Just different software and different plastic exterior.