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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!
This was all covered earlier. The story posted by Michael earlier today about Lexmark's DMCA suit contained a link to a BBC article showing the price of ink to be higher then that of vintage champagne. The 1.70 per millitre thing was even covered.
You guys are editorial juggernaughts.
Ink costs more than champagne? What?! That's not the natural order of things. To correct this problem, the French must immediately start drinking printer ink and printing with champagne. That should kill a few problems with one stone (sorry for the mixed metaphor). To clear up the resulting confusion we will call printer ink "Freedom Champagne" and champagne, "printer ink 2: full-speed".
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
IAALS.
People are taking this so negatively; just revel in the fact that champaign is so cheap!
But seriously -- anyone mind providing conversions to USD?
Alcohol and Calculus don't mix. Don't drink and derive.
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.
My annual operating cost for an $800 HP LaserJet 2200 is about a $100 for toner.
Sure, I paid a lot more up front, but having to spend $100 every two months to maintain an Epson Inkjet added up quickly.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
Does this mean people are going to start bootlegging ink? Will the great crime families ditch the drug trade for the undergound ink market? I fear the day our great cities are brought under the heel of the ink barons.
I tend to find the 86' Lexmark ink has a fruity taste which can be complimeted only by a good mature cheese and a decent toner cartrige.
Even though ink is more expensive than fine champagne, and therefore is better than fine champagne (proof by induction), you shouldn't drink it.
It would stain your teeth some ugly color like #006666, and you would never get a date and you would die cold and alone, a pitiful 30 year old virgin.
Instead, drink beer -- it's been helping ugly people get laid for over 200 years!
I don't want to be here.
Explains why I get daily spam about toner, but none at all for booze!.
Sending booze by mail across state lines is not legal in many places.Pound for pound...
Poodles cost more than horses!
Crack whores cost more than fatties!
Eardrums cost more than eyeballs!
Best Windows Freeware
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.
Max: But chief, that's incredible. Do you realize what this could mean to our energy supply?
Chief: Unfortunately its an extremely rare type of ink that can only be found in the Middle East.
Yes I'm paraphrasing, but that's the first thing that came to mind;-)
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
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.
Champagne is to printer ink as:
a) Automobiles are to shoes.
b) Doorknobs are to bedpans.
c) Beach sand is to integrated circuits.
The answer is c because integrated circuits are computer related and this is slashdot...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
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....
That's nothing. You should see the cost of worms. This week, 250 grams of mail-order worms cost me 4UKP (say $6). So much for the urban legends about worms going into McBurgers. I bet they just use cheap filler ingredients instead, like ground up cow.
Refill your Canon i320 printer that you bought for $40 (U.S. price) with this refill system: http://www.ims-ink.com/. It costs $17 at Costco and refills the black cartridge an estimated 24 times. The system also comes with bottles of colored ink; haven't calculated the color refills yet.
Which is why we need a bureau of Printer Ink, Natural Viagra Supplements, Genital Enlargement, Nigerian Banks and Obscure Domain Name Registrars.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I buy a drink mix that, added to water, yields a liquid that's more expensive than gasoline. Does that say anything about the high cost of the mix, or the low cost of gasoline? NO! They're two different things and thus have two different prices. Telling me that a little tub of ink costs more than champagne on a per-unit basis is similarly useless information, unless I can substitute champagne for the ink.
no, it tells you that people are idiots to be paying $1 for a pint of water.
its all profit. water is dirt cheap. plastic bottles are dirt cheap. distribution method is already in place for the big guys.
Bottled water is almost pure profit.
... hi bingo
Mmmmm. Nothing like a good bottle of gasoline. ;)
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suwain_2
I need to stop printing and start drinking. Its "cheaper". Yeah honney. I was thinking about printing out the manual for your new stairmaster, but I wanted to save money so I drank a case of cris and then put it together.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
In Canada, a $100 toner cartridge gets you around 5000 sheets on a low-end laser printer. The same price cartridge for a more expensive printer (same toner, but different cartridge shape for obvious reasons) gets you well over 10000 sheets.
Most inkjet cartridges here are in the $40-$50 range (assuming all black printing). You get anywhere between 200 to 500 pages per cartridge.
So basically:
Note that I'm ignoring any ink/toner that comes with the printer; usually these are extremely low-yield 'samples', and in any case the initial toner cartridge almost always outperforms what you get for free with an inkjet.
So basically, unless you're planning on only printing a few hundred pages EVER, it makes no sense to buy an inkjet for B&W printing. Never mind the fact that if you rarely use an inkjet, the ink nozzles eventually stop working even if there's plenty of ink inside. At least, no amount of cleaning can fix the ones I use in my Epson Stylus 700, if I don't print for more than 3 months.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
One interesting fact about ink cartridges:
As you all probably know: ink prices average around $30 US per cartridge.
Did you know that most of the $50 printers use 10mL ink cartridges, while the more expensive ones use 40+ mL cartridges?
The strange thing is that when it's time to refill the ink, the 10mL cartridges cost almost the same price as the 30 mL that are used in more expensive models. So while you saved a little money by getting the dirt-cheap printer, you're now paying 3 times as much for the ink!
This is (in my opinion) a very unethical way to trick consumers into thinking that they are saving money by buying a cheaper printer. I've heard many people say that "it's cheaper to buy a new printer than to buy the refill cartridges". But it turns out that this is not true.
Don't believe me? Check out the HP deskjet 3300 series ($40 printer). It uses 10mL cartridges that cost $17.00, which is $1.70 per milliliter.
Now check the Deskjet 6127, a $299 printer. It uses 42mL cartridges @ $29.00, which is only $0.69/mL! The ink for the $40 printer is 2.4 times as expensive.
By the way, this does not apply to Canon printers, but does apply to most others.
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.
I was looking at the HP 3420 - it was on sale recently for something like $40 or so.
I had always used second-hand DeskJet 500's, 560's etc... with the "26" cartridge - that cartridge holds 40 ml and prints out about 800+ or so pages. These "51626" cartridges are right around slightly less than $30 US. I have printed thousands of pages of material using these old HP DeskJets and have had no problems. I like those printers. They are kind of slow, but very reliable.
The black cartridge for the HP 3420 holds 10ml and is expected to print about 200+ pages. It costs slightly less than $20 US. The color cartridge for this printer holds 8ml and produces slightly less than 200 pages.
The higher quality (and more expensive) printers have larger page number counts for their refills, but many of the less expensive brands and printers had page counts of less than 500 pages per cartridge, and even though the cartridges have dropped in price, they hold a lot less ink and you can hardly get anything printed with one cartridge. These bargain printers are probably an excellent solution for those who just need to print out an occasional web page or order confirmation here or there. They probably are not designed for people who print a lot. And, paying 18 dollars for a cartridge just kind of feels better than paying 28 dollars for a cartridge, despite the fact that there is only 1/4 as much ink in there!!! The boxes are all the same size on the shelf, who would guess that one cartridge has 10ml and the other has 40ml?
I have come to expect over 500 pages from one deskjet cartridge. Closer to 1000 would be better - some printer can do this. The HP DeskJet 1200 (which is an older model) - this black print cartridge was rated at 1100+ pages before it ran out (42ml). Same price as the others - about $30 US.
I don't doubt that the quality of the printed pages is good - I love Hewlett Packard printers, it's just that if you print a lot of stuff, you really need to get a printer (even second-hand, if you can find one) that was originally designed to do some serious printing. I found a second-hand HP printer (I love HP printers) that is rated for 12,000 pages per month; not like I would ever print that many pages per month, but it is kind of cool to know that you could if you wanted to.
Office Depot's site has page counts on all the refills - I found it helpful when shopping around for a printer. To some people, page counts per cartridge don't matter - they don't print enough stuff to have that matter. But to many of us, it does make a big difference, and it is surprising how expensive the ink is for the really inexpensive printers.
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
These high prices are just a result of rampant piracy in the ink industry. College students are especially guilty of downloading ink from Kazaa and sharing it with their friends.
"Leave the strategizing to those of us with planet-sized brains." -Tycho
that your printer doesn't require a magnum of ink!
They did an episode on bottled water. It turns out that bottled water is NOT tested or regulated by any government agency unless it crosses state lines, but tap water is constantly tested. The federal government has over 100 people that test tap water, but less than one person to test bottled water.
In an independent study that they quoted, more than half the brands of bottled water would not have passed tap water quality specs.
The funny part of the ep was when they went to a NYC restaurant and had a "water steward" BS'ing people into paying $8 for a bottle of water from the hose in the alley with a phony label on it; people were making up all kinds of BS about how "sparkling" and "crisp" it was, and how they each had a different character even though we knew they all came from the same hose.
Around here (Ann Arbor, MI), the tap water is VERY good tasting; I bought some bottled water in Chicago a couple of weekends ago and it tasted FAR worse than what comes out of the tap here. I actually think the tap water tastes better than the bottled stuff, but people still buy the bottles.
Also, Aquafina/etc is NOT distilled, it's merely filtered. Taste distilled water sometime; it's nasty. Aquafina is just Pepsi with no carbonation or flavoring; really, it comes from the same lines, it's the water that they normally use to mix soda. So you can pay $1 for a bottle of Pepsi, or $1 for a bottle of Pepsi without the additives.