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Kodak Challenges HP's Printer Sales Model
Radon360 writes "Kodak has decided to attempt to buck the trend set by HP by offering low cost printers and reasonably priced ink cartridges. Three of their new printers start at $149, with ink cartridges costing $9.99 for a black cartridge and $14.99 for a five color cartridge. To counter, HP has announced a release of lower-priced cartridges, though with less ink and they are still more expensive than Kodak's. It will be a matter of time to see whether Kodak can upset the practice of ink cartridge extortion."
Is it me or does a $15 cartridge sounds expensive. I mean, like you go to a copying a store, and copies are like .03 each. $15 = like 450 pages. One of their ink cartridges can't even print that.
The $15 cartridge is for colour. It's $10 for b/w, but it's still more than you'll pay at a copy shop. The copy shop will be using toner-based laser printers, which have a cheaper per-page cost to run. If you're planning to print a lot, get a home laser rather than an inkjet.
Just my way of telling the other printer makers that ink isn't worth $30,000/gal
I can get ink for a typical Canon printer for a couple of dollars because the head and tank are separate.
The price for ink bought online via InkDaddy or other sites for the Canon printers runs about 1-1.5 cents a page, or almost exactly what the cheapest laser printers cost(black), and under 3-5 cents a page for color.
My Epson C86 is a wonderful desktop inkjet. Discount ink is $10 for extra capacity black and $8 for each of the other 3 colors. A new C88 is about $80 retail at Staples.
Does it scan? No
Does it scan pictures? No
Does it print w/o a computer? No
And when it breaks I toss it out and get another one.
Dye Ink costs about 1 to 15$ per gallon to manufacture. Milled ink (methanol milled nano-particulate pigment ink) is about 3x the cost.
I used to work for Kodak.
They can dump better ink at lower prices all over the market. HP does NOT want to get into an ink pricing war- everyone would lose.
People must not look beyond HP printers much, if they think this sort of thing is new. Canon has been selling dirt-cheap ink refills for years.
Case in point: I bought a Canon i475D for about $40 in 2004. The ink cartridges are easy to find, and cost $5.99 for black and $13.99 for color (at Newegg, about $1 more at B&M). It is far from the first Canon printer to feature a system like this.
If anything, Kodak is late to the game, and HP just continues to suck.
Epson has also been selling relatively cheap ink cartridges for a while now.
The early ink-jet printer patents should be expiring soon. The first inkjet printers were developed in 1976, and HP's original DeskJet shipped in 1998. We'll probably see a flood of no-brand-name printers using generic ink over the next few years. That's what happened to laser printers when those patents expired years ago.
In my experience, Inkjets are terrible for casual users. I need to use my printer about once every 3 to 4 weeks. Because it's inkjet, and I use it so infrequently, the cartridge is dried out every time I need to use it. So I've given up on the thing and it sits in a corner. When I need to print something, i'll use the printer at work, or go to the UPS store. For Photos I have Walmart. The next printer I'm going to buy will be a laser, because I don't want to have to worry about the ink drying out. On another note, what happened to dot matrix printers. I remember we had a dot matrix printer and the cartdges (ribbons?) were $5 each and laster for well over 1000 pages.
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It's only a risk if your printer is an Epson generally with non-replaceable ink heads. Something like HPs you can buy the shittiest refills you can, and it doesn't matter. Ink head clogged? Oh well, hit it with a little alcohol, nope, new cart. Too bad I only got to refill that black cartrige three times for printing text.
Something else of note though. I find it highly suspicious these sites that have been doing photo ink print comparisons all of a sudden. In the control case they use OEM fresh carts, and OEM paper. Then they turn around, get the cheapest ink refill they can, and use garbage Office Depot paper, or paper that was made for a different printer entirely (the paper is the main factor in these instances). Just my 2 cents on the matter though.
Well that may be and I've seen the printout for a color laser. Although cheap is relative. $300 for the low-end and it takes four toner tubs at inkjet cartridge prices apiece. Now if you want copier capability and a fax machine it's double that price (comparable to a multifunction inkjet). There's also the size overall compared to the inkjets. And last inkjet is still going to do photo-quality better than a laser. It's the nature of the process. Only a dye-sublimation or solid-ink would do better and they're expensive or impractical. Also last I checked they're are no large-format color laser printers (greater than 11" x 17", sometimes even in a roll)
Dot-matrix went out because they're seen as "old", they're NOISY, and the print quality pretty much sucks compared to anything out now.
That said, I still have an ancient Epson (it was purchased with an old 8088 machine) that still works, and I've got a pile of ribbons for it. It'll print fine from some old dos programs, but I'm too lazy to put together a windows print driver. It is tempting though. Just for the novelty, not for any practical purpose.
Caught this article just a few weeks back, it goes into some detail on Kodak's inkjet technology.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
I have seen the quality of these bargain printers first-hand at a recent (HP) seminar, where they "tested" (in a very armchair fashion) the $199 model Kodak vs. the $199 HP. The Kodaks are a bargain for a reason: they suck ass very hard. The color was washed, almost 5 shades lighter than their HP counterparts. The ink has a waxy residue when it dries that is incredibly easy to scratch with your fingernail. Both Kodak and HP use image-enhancement algorithms before outputting, but in the Kodak it is impossible to switch-off, which destroys most mid- to high-res images. The contrast is horrendous and in some test shots it looked like pictures of two different locations. Oh, and the printer? The on-screen controls are wonky and limited. The ink-system uses print heads, which were difficult to install. The Kodak was nearly 1 1/2 times the size of the HP. And did I mention the image enhancement can't be turned off?
Do lots of people leave their inkjets in front of a south facing window or something? I print only a few photos a month, if that, and I've never had this problem in the 3 years I've owned it. Not once. Canon i960 with the 6 separate inks, if that matters. My Mom's old i860 was the same (until the electrical part of the head went, but that's another matter). Maybe integrated-printhead cartridges are worse for this? I dunno, but my printer is in a cool, dark cabinet. I have a Laserjet 4000 with a duplexer for text work.
Problems arise when you use some ink cartridges over and over again, I had to superglue the circuit board on my brother ink cart after about 5 refills. It just fell off during printing one day.
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Epson cartriges are not worth refilling. Unlike many other printers the printing head is not on the cartridge, its in the printer (atleast on all the epsons I've ever had). This means the cartridges are a lot cheaper to make, true epson still charge an arm and a leg, but the clones are very easy to find cheaply and I've never had a problem with them.
I think I pay about 3GBP for black and 5GBP for 3 color for my 740 - the printer is also 7 years old now and still works fine.
I think I'll stick with epson in future - mainly for the sheer ease of buying good quality cheap clone cartridges.
Having the printing head on the printer has a down side - if it breaks its time to bin the printer - too expensive to replace/repair - the up side it they can use a better quality one than the disposable ones on the majority of cartridges
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Answer:
HTH
As opposed to HP where, at least for a couple of models, it's cheaper to buy a new printer than change the cartridge? Even though nothing is broken?
Not disaggreeing with you, just saying that if that's the only downside, I can live with that. Happily.
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People... stop using ink jet printers. I'm not going to talk about brands since I don't want to skew this argument, but for about $500 you can get a really decent color laser printer that will to 20 pages/minute in black and 5/minute in color. Yes, that's five pages per minute not five minutes per page.
Yes, you pay a lot more for the printer, $500 vs about $100 for a decent inkjet, but you don't need to EVER clean print heads and you don't need to purchase special photo or "hi-res" paper. As a bonus, a page printed from a laser printer will last as long as the paper does; toner doesn't fade or decay at any descernable rate unlike ink which will start fading in a few months unless well protected.
So lets look at those costs:
Inkjet: $149 to purchase the printer; $25 to refill the ink. I my experience I get maybe 100 pages from an ink cartridge. For 4000 pages I pay $975 for ink tanks. This number assumes that the tanks in the printer box are full and that I never have to clean the print heads and that all the ink is always used on printed pages. I've now spent $1,125 to print 2000 pages.
Lets take my laser printer: $500 to buy the printer with cartridges that last ~4500 pages.
So even for printing 4000 pages the laser printer is $625 cheaper than the ink jet. And yes, I'm ignoring the electricity costs since most lasers today have "instant on" fusers and have quite good power management. The annual electric cost may difference may be $20, but even if the electricity operating cost is $500 more for the laser I still save $120 over the cost of the inkjet.
The break-even point for the laser is about 1500 pages. And again... all these numbers assume you are using standard paper in the inkjet. hi-res or photo paper can increase printing costs on the inkjet by a factor of two, easily.
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