Slashdot Mirror
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 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.
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
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.
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?