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."

Comments

Re:Expensive!

[PhysicsPhil]

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.

Going to buy 2 right away

[Jason Straight]

Just my way of telling the other printer makers that ink isn't worth $30,000/gal

Funny - Canon already does this.

[Plekto]

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.

Ink prices

[purduephotog]

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.

Re:Ink prices

[sacrilicious]

Xerox full color lasers are almost $200.00 with a full set of toner carts.

Cheapest Xerox color printer I saw on their site costs $350 (I don't regard "rebate" prices as real; and if I did, I'd compare their "$250" price to something below the expected street value of the kodaks). Doesn't look like free toner cartridges are mentioned either....

Re:Expensive!

[CastrTroy]

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.

Re:Will People Still Seek Cheaper Alternatives?

[simm1701]

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

Re:Special Interests

[Tim Browse]

Answer:

• Colour inkjet printers are cheap.
• Until pretty recently, colour laser printers were not.
• Many people want to print in colour (note I said want, not need).

HTH

Another alternative

[gerardrj]

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.