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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!
You don't get any for booze because the ATF would go postal on spammers. They take their job very seriously.
This happens with ink. How fortunate we are that other stuff for computers cant be sold the same way ink is.
Its a good strategy selling cheap hardware, and than charging huge amounts in the stuff needed to make the hardware function. Should this be illegal?
Call on God, but row away from the rocks.
I usually get the generic cartridges for my pre-chip Epson. When they ran out of those, I had to buy the "economical" two-pack of genuine Epson.
Aside from the $40 cost (deep-discount, as I understand), just getting the cartridges out from all the packaging was a chore. It was like peeling an onion. It was time- consuming. I needed a knife to get past the hard shell. There were slick-coated 4-color ads in and on the packaging.
The resulting stack of garbage took up half the wastebasket -- not including the spent cartridges, which I am starting to save for refilling.
Knowing I paid for all that glossy, 4-color trash makes me highly reluctant to buy those genuine cartridges again.
one pretty nagling problem with companys using color printers is that when the black cart goes the color suffers and instantly the user thinks its the color cart thats gone.. so wanders to tech to get another.. end of the day Im sure you can see whats happened.. and how much money is wasted/lost.
moo
I found the repost useful. Reading the Headline and summary on the HP - DMCA article, I had no interest in reading the full article. Hence, I never read anything about the cost of Ink.
Reposting the story with a different theme may get the attention of people who may not have been interested in the original story... people like myself. The link may be a Dupe, but the idea behind the posts were not.
Thanks
Snazzed
...when you buy Champagne, the bottle is actually full. Plus there is no crime against refilling the bottle and using it for your own stuff.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
The other day HP introduced their new DeskJet printers. Their prices start on something that would have been almost unbelievable a few years ago; *$39*. Isolated that's just freaking cheap for a printer capable of printing medium quality photos.
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.
AFAIK these printers don't contain chips that makes it impossible to use generic ink or third party cartridges.
I guess that the price on HP-ink feels right to many consumers as long as they are still willing to pay the price.
And BTW about the Champagne; the price on this former exclusive goods has been falling steadily after the Y2K buzz about the world running out of it. Basically the price curve on some brands like Dom Perignon looks like a stock chart for a dot-com.
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
I was once told by the design dept. where I work that they would never let me take the printers they were using.
Then I gave them one of these.
They couldn't get rid of the other printers fast enough. 20 PPM full photographic color, single-pass laser printing. The damn thing basically has a first generation Power Macintosh G4 under the hood for the RIP processor (PowerPC 7400 / 500Mhz, 20GB hard disk, 512 MB RAM).
It is the most impressive printer I have seen in a long time. Be warned: it's damn expensive, but it has already paid for itself many times in the last six months.
Oh, and it has your built-in Ethernet, and responds to AppleTalk, LPR, and Windows printing.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Personally I see no need to print in color. Most documents that I would actually print (word, visio etc) look fine in greyscale. And I've had the same experiences with toner, the cartridges are expensive, but they last forever.
I just dumped a 10 year old Epson laser last year. Only because I needed more memory(the 1 meg printer was choking on large documents and flowcharts). Epson memory for my model was like $50 a meg And the printer had a 4 meg max. (Would have been $150 for 3 megs of memory) So instead I got a new HP for $450.(16 megs, 1200 dpi).
Interestingly, the toner cartridge for the old Epson was 25% full. If I didn't have the memory requirement, i probably could have gotten another 2 years out of the toner.
The only thing I can think of reasonably needing a color printer for is photographs. And I figure: why bother? If I need a print of digital photos, I just send them off the service. They come back on photographic paper, looking almost as good as prints from my SLR.
Huh?
Funny thing is that this is a somewhat recent change. My old hp c400 inkjet (really slow and ugly) had print cartridges with refill holes built into them.
Bottled water is almost pure profit, but guess what? The bottle of Coke right next to it on the refrigerated shelf, which is the same size and same price, has almost exactly the same cost behind it, and is also almost pure profit. Cola costs pennies per gallon to make, which is almost as cheap as the distillation and/or filtering process of most bottled waters.
I used to feel dumb for paying $1 for a bottle of water, until I realized that most of the people next to me are paying $1 for something that is not as good for them.
Instead, drink beer -- it's been helping ugly people get laid for over 200 years!
Beer was invented by the babylonians or Sumarians at least 6,000 years ago (it is mentioned in the epic of gilgamesh, approx 3,000 years ago).
It was also an important part of the diet of the european middle-ages peasant. Peasants would stockpile barley and wheat for the winter, but towards the end of the winter, the grains would start to go bad. The solution to this is beer, which could be made from slightly bad grains and still convey the nutritional value of the food. Beer is nothing if not a good energy source, rich in sugars and other more complex carbohydrates.
So, you could say that beer may have saved Europe in the Middle Ages.
Or, you could just say that it's been getting people laid for quite a lot longer than 200 years.
(damn history degree)
~Will
sig?
Yup. Cause if you do, your replacement ain't gonna be a 6 gig drive. They'll replace it with whatever they have handy, because giving all their RMA replacements a 40 gig drive is cheaper than continuing to make 6 gig drives.
It's not like this in all of the US.
The tap water in the area where I live is horrible.
I can't stand to drink it, it just doesn't taste like what water should taste like, and it's probably not the most healthy thing to drink.
Mostly everyone I know does not drink from the tap, unless it's being filtered.
But, I still don't pay more for water than gas. I usually buy bottled water at $0.50 to $1 a gallon.
In almost every city in America, clean drinking water is available from your city water tank almost for free. ... Drinking bottled water is looked upon by many Americans with a certain amount of scorn for lack of thrift
I guess it's drinkable here, but it won't pass as "clean" for me until it loses that mysterious nasty taste (filters help, but not enough).
That said, the best thing about travelling is everywhere else I go the tap water tastes as good as bottled Arrowhead (which I get at Costco for $4.50 for 6 gallons; better than $1.80/gal for gas)...
Here's the latest crusty screed from Michael Shermer making fun of dumb people who pay for bottled water.
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.
Yup.. Sams Club... (a walmart for the rich and snooty.. you have to pay to shop there...) a CASE of 36 bottles of water.... $3.95
bottling costs are NOTHING.. as well as distribution, marketing,everything....
Hell I asked and I can get a pallet of 144 cases of 36 bottles for only $150.00.. nothing special for a business to buy a pallet of product.
2 cents per BOTTLE of water my Cost.
and I am nobody special.
Let's add that product to my store... If I sell it for 25 cents a bottle I get over 1000% profit. if I chill it, I'm only getting 300% profit..
If I put it in a vending machine at a local spot.. I get 500% profit! and that includes the payback on the vending machine!
Anyone here trying to justify the $1.00 a bottle for water is a complete and utter moron.... or just a scumbag at heart.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.