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HP Explains Why Printer Ink Is So Expensive
CWmike writes "'There's a perception that [printer] ink is one of the most expensive substances in the world,' says Thom Brown, marketing manager at HP. Well, yeah. One might get that feeling walking out of a store having spent $35 for a single ink cartridge that appears to contain fewer fluid ounces of product than a Heinz ketchup packet. Brown was ready to explain. He presented a series of PowerPoint slides aptly titled 'Why is printer ink so expensive?' I was ready for answers. The key point in a nutshell: Ink technology is expensive, and you pay for reliability and image quality. 'These liquids are completely different from a technology standpoint,' Brown says, adding that users concerned about cost per page can buy 'XL' ink cartridges from HP that last two to three times longer. (Competitors do the same.) The message: You get value for the money. No getting around it though — ink is still expensive, particularly if you have to use that inkjet printer for black-and-white text pages."
If people are paying for the precision and technology behind the ink printing itself, that still doesn't explain why it's so expensive. How can they afford to print the label on that ketchup packet for so cheaply? Printing and ink technology isn't exactly brand new, I guess I'm a little confused. If I pay $35 for an ink cartridge that is the size of a ketchup packet, it better be super concentrated precision ink that can stick to tin foil and will last for a gazillion print jobs. HP seems better at selling snake oil then they do printer ink.
and even Color Laser Toner, twice on Sunday. This fad with inkjet is amazingly short-sided by people who would buy this junk and just print off their digital photos, instead of buying digital picture frames to load up their images to have around the house. Keep buying it as my Laser montone and color printers are dirt cheap today.
They want you to think ink costs a lot to produce, but it's actually that they are selling the printer as a loss-leader with the idea that the cost will be made up for in ink sales.
You can charge anything you want. This might as well have been titled "DeBeers explains why diamonds are so expensive," or "Saudi Aramco explains why oil is so expensive."
The elves are expensive to train.
It's simple. They sell printers at a loss and ink at over 500 to 5000% it's value. That's why you see all those kiosks that will refill your ink. The problem is some of them don't use "quality" ink. You know a company is full of shit when they start to use microchips to prevent 3rd party ink cartridges. Be smart!! Buy a laser printer. Most of those are VASTLY more efficient. I've printed almost 2,000 pages off of my Samsung ML 2581ND laser printer and it's still going strong.
Color prints work the same. If you invest in a good printer, the ink doesn't cost much. If you get a $20 printer expect to pay that $50-$70 difference in ink.
...There is tender love and care in every drop!
"HP exec tries weaky to justify more-expensive-than-gold printer ink" -- fucking non-story.
Seems to me that cellphones - which sell at a loss while you pay for the service - are similar to ink printers.
Makes business sense to me!
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
that's why we refill them with reasonably priced ink here in mexico... yeah, the warranty gets void but who cares?
"It's expensive because people pay it."
Until people go to cheaper per-page laser printers (with bad photo quality) and move away from inkjets, they'll get the most they can squeeze out of people. People pay for the ink, so they sell the ink for those profitable prices.
Learn to love Alaska
I hardly print anything anymore. Photos I have printed at Costco as they are dirt cheap and better quality than what you can do at home. They also sell enlargements up 30"x20" for $8.99. That is amazing as it would probably take an entire $35 cartridge to print not counting paper costs. Convenience of printing a photo right this second does not out way the insane costs of printing photos for me.
I think the inkjet business is going to shrink and better technology will replace it. Not soon, but eventually. If companies need to print they use laser so inkjet has become a niche in my personal opinion.
I call bullshit. It is the reason HP makes money. I used to sell ink by the gallon for 'classic' plotters. It was not $8000 per gallon. That's what modern ink costs. Ridiculous.
They are thieves. We are too stupid to demand change.
No victims if we continue in our own ignorance.
Nick van Rijn explained it this way in one of Poul Anderson's stories: "It's a seller's market, and all we can do is hope they don't use too big a reamer on us."
Good, inexpensive web hosting
I bought a $300 printer. The ink is still $40 a set (HP 02)
It's just like Razors and Razor Blades. That's how Gillette and Schick make their money.
first post?
Walgreens Drug stores are doing refills for $9.95. I suspect that usually that works pretty well.
I hardly ever print - to me it makes much more sense to buy a subsidized printer for next to nothing and $30 of cartridges a year than it does to buy a laser printer and $150 toner cartridge that will outlast the printer.
You know a company is full of shit when they start to use microchips to prevent 3rd party ink cartridges.
I wonder if somebody out there is making a living selling little DIY electronic doodads that bypass that "feature."
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
Is it because yachts are expensive?
What would Brian Boitano do?
Ink for my Canon Pixma is only $15 for the official ink. There are 6 different inks, but each lasts longer than my mother's HP cartridges and I print more than she does.
On the other hand, HP's model is like the razor model: give away the printers cheap and charge an arm and a leg for the ink. Mind you, the printers are cheap pieces of excrement.
My mind works like lightning. One brilliant flash and it is gone.
"You guys gotta try the pasta... it has a real nice Profit margin! BAM!" Elzar from Futurama.
Now substitute "printer ink" for pasta, and Carly Fiorina for Elzar.
Get the picture?
No real substance, much like HP's cartridges.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Seconded. I bought an el-cheapo color laser printer on clearance a few years back for $200. The print quality is way better than any inkjet ever will be and I'm still on the original toner cartridges that came with it. The biggest downside is that it takes up a bit of space, has a rather long warmup cycle, and probably consumes a lot more electricity than an inkjet. But I'm sure that cost is more than offset by not having to buy $30-$50 in liquid gold every few months.
I sense a disturbing lack of acceptance of Mr. Brown's statements.
Are you all so cynical?
And the worms ate into his brain.
Brown says, adding that users concerned about cost per page can buy 'XL' ink cartridges from HP that last two to three times longer. (Competitors do the same).
Collusion?
The message: You get value for the money. No getting around it though: Ink is still expensive, particularly if you have to use that inkjet printer for black-and-white text pages."
...and no bullshit can explain it, even if your competitors do it.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Market competition is ideally supposed to lead to innovation, resulting in customers getting radically more for less over time. Despite the number of players in the printer market, both current and previous, this does not hold true for inkjet printing. You could literally have self-cleaning devices that take gallon jugs of ink at dirt cheap prices if that were a priority, but making an objectively better product is not the goal.
The goal is making a product that will get the easiest money available on the market. This is always the game - and virtually all efforts are driven toward this end. The greater 'market' takes this further, and makes acting in a manner that does not 'return shareholder value' a very serious offense against the market.
In the end, this is not actually the market serving itself, growing to produce more, or expand more markets - it is simply the market spinning its wheels as hard as it can to extract as much easy money as it can, eventually shaping law to extract what marketing cannot. Much like an inkjet printer, this cycle quickly gunks itself up, and falls into an inert heap - and the answer tends to be to just replace it with the same model of printer again, since it seems cheaper than spending the resources on something more reliable or cost effective.
I recommend a nice reliable laser printer (so it will at least work for those few times I want to print), and a functioning regulatory system to break up corrupt, stagnant market players - or at least allow universities to be exempt from most legal limitations ('IP', noncompete, etc.), and allow them to compete when market players will not. Universities are already the only ones doing a lot of the research that happens in the 'market' these days anyway - should demand that private companies keep up, or get left behind when they're benefiting from public research while demanding exclusive rights.
Ryan Fenton
So what could be done. Refills, color laser printer for those that did the volume to justify the costs. Now that they are losing the market battle they drop the price and say ink was never that expensive. When I had an inkject I never paid less than $25 for black ink, and now HP is selling for under 20? Give me a break. All they are doing is lowering prices and pretending they never overcharged.
I notice HP is doing this with toner. When I bought my Phaser printer I figured an comparable HP would cost about 50% as more per page in toner. About a year after the price dropped on toner and it was about the same. Kudos to HP for changing their tendency for usury, but clearly there was a period when they were overcharging simply because they could, as well as everyone else.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I hate to admit it, but I love my original Kodak 5100 mfp. The ink is cheap and lasts a long time, the actual cost per page is one of the lowest of all inkjets, and it has lasted longer and worked better than any other inkjet I have owned or used.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
How much of that 1 billion dollars a year in R&D costs goes towards finding new and creative ways to stifle third-party ink vendors?
The worse thing is that Fiorina wants to be a part of government, and multiply her failure (as well as make use of her H1-b special interests).
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
There's several companies out there that make a pile of money by manufacturing (or remanufacturing, which is another way of saying "used") cartridges and selling them for a lower profit margin. They don't have to advertise; they just need to make it relatively cheaply.
All those kiosks you may have seen for recycling used cartridges, or the nice forms Dell and HP will send you to ship back used material at their cost? They aren't necessarily being kind to the earth - just their wallet.
They make a toner cartridge for $30,
sell it to you at $99,
get you to mail it back for $8,
refill it for $15,
and sell it again for $99.
The remanufacturing companies just do the same thing, but don't have the initial build cost. Most of the remanufactured market comes from Clover or Nukote or another one that I forget. (My former employer is among those, which is where I found how rich those margins are.)
The government forces all laser printing companies to put a secret ID code into each printout, they are then allowed to charge as much as they want for ink. Gov't wins, companies win, you lose.
My non-canonical refills come with a small plastic chip-holder doodad and instructions on how to remove the chip from the Canon originals.
Except that I get the feeling that the damn ink evaporates before I get a chance to use it. I am not printing very much and I am always having to replace cartridges. At the moment I am doing high speed, grey scale draft printing on most things because one or of the colour inks have gone - although that is probably how I should be printing in general.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Disclaimer: I'm in the remanufacturing industry
HP doesn't have an excuse. They have sold efficient printers in the past. Lets look at a few comparison inkjets currently sold by HP:
HP #21
Retail Price: ~ 20.00
Pages: 190 pages at 5% page coverage
HP #88XL Black
Retail Price: ~46.50
Pages: 2450 pages at 5% page coverage
You do the math. $40.00 buys you either 400 pages or 2450*. (*side note, the print head is separate from the 88 style cartridge. It is rated at about 40k pages for around $70.)
Furthermore, the 88 is more efficient price per page than some of HP's laser cartridges. Case in point:
HP CB435A
Retail Price: ~74.99
Pages: 1500 pages at 5% page coverage
You do the math. And the fun part? They don't sell 88 printers any more. As soon as people in my industry reverse engineer the carts, they release a new series of printers.
Guess what kind of inkjet printer I use?
Screw those guys. Inkjets are a ripoff. It's not just the cost per ounce of the ink, it's how the cartridges dry up with disuse, and how the printer uses up half a cartridge during a print head clean cycle, how the printer can't get through an 8x10 without at least one row error. The cost per page is prodigious with these printers, due to supply cost and designed-in high amounts of waste.
If you must use inkjets, it's worth looking at the economics of just throwing the printer away when the demo cartridges are empty. The cost of these printers is heavily subsidized (because they make their money on the ink), and by buying a new one each time you're also getting the benefit of new technology.
Consider a color laser printer. I have been using a color laser printer for three years and my cartridges are still at 80%. The important part of that statement is that my cartridges have been in the printer for three years and have not dried out. Because powder toner doesn't dry out.
But if you must have a photo-capable printer in the house, go with pigment based inks (Kodak, Epson) instead of dye-based inks (what the article is talking about). Pigment based inks do a better job printing photographs and don't dry up as fast. You'll get better results and you'll save a fortune in ink.
Really, there is no reason to ever buy another Inkjet, ever. Never ever. Tell all your friends. It's the biggest sucker game in the computer industry today. Buy a memory stick instead, and do your printing at the nearest Fed-Ex/Kinkos. Anything. Just don't buy another inkjet.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Buy a printer that has a fixed head, not one with the head built into the cart. Buy bulk ink. Refill the cartridges yourself. If your printer cartridges are chipped then buy a reset tool, build one, or, if they're available, buy "auto-reset" chips.
Title says it all. At least have the decency to shut the fuck up while you're raping your customers.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
The success of the razor-and-blades-type model isn't based on "lock-in" as such; they're changing up the printer product lines more often than you change your shorts, and they're still practically paying you to take one. If you don't want to waste money, estimate what you're going to use in the future, weigh all the options, and do the math.
I used their HP ink. It's terrible. One color cartridge did not work. Got another one and it's working so far.
The printer didn't like the black cartridge after a month. I forgot the error message. The replacement started to spit out gray text after 3 months, like it was running out of ink. I cleaned it and it's working for now.
I'll try walgreens next, but I think the cartridges themselves are bad so I'll have to refill with HP cartridges.
Maybe if you guys buy enough ink, I can get a raise. I would really appreciate it since HP has turned another quarterly profit and there are no raises in sight.
www.inkrepublic.com
I bought one from them about 6 months ago for the price of two sets of cartridges for my epson.
if I want archival pigment based inks, I buy 100ml bottles for about ten bucks each.
the dye ink that I got with the kit does the job and comparing prints from epson carts using the same paper and image, there is no difference that I could see.
The real reason is that they subsidize the cost of the printers through small, quickly used, expensive carts that have a finite lifespan that is not related to the number of pages printed or the amount of ink left in them.
Personally I would rather pay an appropriate price for the hardware, and a reasonable price for the consumables.
As consumers we need to stop supporting planned obsolescence and overpriced proprietary consumables.
I am the happy owner of a Brother 1440 laser printer with 6000 page toner and an HP 9800 business inkjet which uses the same cartridges as the designjet 500 plotter (that is, huge cartridges). Small cheap printers are for cheap, silly ignorants.
Or cheat using an auto-refill kit and *gallons* of ink from a supplier for a cheaper cost than toner.
Market competition is ideally supposed to lead to innovation, resulting in customers getting radically more for less over time.
I agree with most of what of you said. But I'd like to point out that while the use of consumables may improve with innovation, innovation does little to reduce the cost of getting the raw materials. You can't expect to double the amount of black stuff you can mine every 18 months with constant costs.
Funnyhacks - Wierd, unusual, and fun hacks
I had way more respect and trust to the "HP" brand until I and several others got ripped off by their inks. My respect to the build quality went away when I saw inside of an HP 690C , a printer which the service center joked that I should have bought another printer for a lower price instead of living hassle to get it there. Guess what? Even my 690C looks way more reliable than the current plastic money traps.
On one hand, HP is a very large computer vendor with excellent support regarding drivers, service and huge Unix servers. On the other hand, same brand tries to rip 13 year olds with $50 printer, $70 for ink childish schemes.
I recently found an old HP Scanner, from the days of old HP. It has a perfectly standard 12V input, standard parallel port and scsi connectors. Next to it, 2 HP inkjet printers both having different adapters (so they can sell replacement?) with really amazingly disturbing "drivers" which does nothing but advertise HP inks.Thank God, driver coming with Windows 7 does what it is supposed to do (print!) without any bugging.
I have also used the legendary HP 5L Laser printer under amazingly high load for months, it was connected to a Novell server and did what it is supposed to do without any tricks. I remember toner price was all fine too.
I wonder if HP would spare time to find out if this "ink jet" business hurts their company image. I'd say yes. The brand image of HP in 1990s has nothing to do with the one today...
I bought a Xerox Phaser a few years ago when I got fed up with ink cartridges (and my old 4p crapped out) but just a couple of weeks ago I bought a couple of photosmart printers. Why? Laser printers can't print on CDs and DVDs. If I do a lot of printing on the inkjet, I'll install a continuous ink system.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I own two brother laser printers (one at school one at home) and would recommend them to anyone looking for a cheap laser printer. The older, an HL 2070N has done a little over 10,000 pages in the 5 or so years since I got it. The newer one, an HL 2170W I've had for about a year and printed around 1600 pages on. They come with a toner cartridge good for around a thousand pages, after which I recommend buying the "high yield" ones which are around $40 and good for around 2600 pages. You'll also need a new drum unit ever 13,000 pages or so, but that hasn't happened yet.
One thing to look out for though, neither of these models seems to have postscript support that I can tell. Brother does have Linux drivers, but I've had occasional issues with them (actually nothing in the last 6 months or so). The few times that I've tried them, the Windows and OSX drivers seemed ok.
2K pages is nothing really. We have a HP 4200 that has several hundred thousand pages printed and it's only needed the scheduled maintenance to replace the fuser and other stuff once. It still prints the same as it did the day we got it. We get about 15-20K pages before the toner needs to be replaced.
2K pages on the other hand might be something for a inkjet printer. That printer you have is rated to handle 12K pages a month. Coincidentally, it does have a microchip. I don't know if it's to prevent third party units or just to track page usage.
For an article that's supposed to "explain" why ink is so expensive, it's rather short on details, leaving the reader with the impression of reading a whole bunch of numbers - which were all meant to impress you with drops per second, nozzle sizes, pixel sizes, etc...
I can accept that they must turn a profit, and that their prices must reflect that. What I don't see is any kind of ROI analysis. Tell me what it costs to produce and market your ink and break it down per cartridge or by mL. Then, and only then, will I believe you. Until then, this is just another excuse - entirely subjective and lacking any real objective analysis.
"Government is like fire; a handy servant, but a dangerous master." -- George Washington
For $15 for 400 milliliters and a one-time cost of $30 for the refill cartridges, eBay supplies me with all the ink I'll ever need.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
Long time ago I've read about ink-jet inks whose primary requisite was to guarantee a perfectly constant fluidity, or else they'd close the printing head holes, forcing to replace it.
I don't know if it's for real, neither if that highly reflect on manufacturing costs, but seems reasonable to me.
Besides, I'd take a laser printer any day if I'd have to choose.
Mastering the English language is fucking easy: all you have to do is to put an f* word in every fucking sentence.
If you ever go to an electronics market in China (and probably in a lot of other places), you buy a printer that's been hacked with a large inkwell practically taped to the side. The ink's cheap as anything, can't comment on the quality, though the prints I saw were fine. There's also the ease of use factor. You can see right there how much of each color you have left, since the container is clear and it's on the outside, and you don't have to open the printer up or even stop printing to change the ink. Someone needs to start selling these things in the West.
Ink is expensive because they literally give away ink-jet printers for free whenever you buy a new PC. They have to off-set it somehow.
Page for page, laser-printing is cheaper. But the initial costs are higher. You pay now or later.
"Here you go kid, the first one's always free..."
Inkjets are a complete waste of money. Get yourself a b&w laser printer for document printing and go get any photos you want printed over to your local grocery store (via SD card or whatever) where you can get them printed for cheap. I try explaining this to some people but they don't seem to get it and would still rather waste money on ink and glossy paper.
Meh.
Yep, sure are check this out.
And that's the retail price.
I resisted buying an inkjet for years, preferring instead to use an HP business laser printer. After looking at horrible Costco soft proofs for some photos I was going to print, I decided that instead of buying a $50 costco printer I'd buy a $50 inkjet printer and use after market inks.
Only suckers by genuine OEM ink. Get yourself a Continuous Ink Supply System (CISS). They're basically a bunch of dummy cartridges that connect to bulk ink tanks that sit outside the printer. A good CISS vendor such as Inkjetfly or inkrepublic will sell you inks that closely match your OEM ink for 1/10th the price. Reputable vendors even provide ICC profiles for their ink and common papers, although if you're serious you'll want to pick up something like a spyder 3 print sr that will generate your own profiles. That will effectively lower your printer costs to the price of the paper. The output on an inkjet is actually much better than someplace like Costco, and you have much more control over how your prints will come out. The downside is a CISS requires more maintenance than cartridges and can be difficult to set up.
Of course now I regret printing anything because trying to frame anything larger than 4x6 is practically impossible. Frames, mats, photo paper and your camera's frame all use incompatible aspect ratios. If you think printer ink is expensive, wait until you try to buy non-standard framing supplies!
It seems to me that more than half of the people I meed have made a choice at some point in their lives.
When faced with a difficult bit of knowledge such as, "I work for a company which rips people off," it feels bad. A certain type of person when so faced with this kind of truth will spin words cleverly so that the truth goes away and turns into a nice, calming fiction. It's easy to do this! Words are brilliantly mutable. One quickly learns that with a bit of skill in word-craft and a strong enough will to push through the desired version of the false picture of reality while squashing down all others, one can happily get through life without ever having to face any unpleasant truths. -Truths like being an narcissistic asshole.
This is a choice many people make; that they will face adversity with fictions. It removes the need for real work and the pain of ever being wrong or ever having to improve the self in meaningful ways. Why should one? With lies and denial, one is already perfect!
Whereas others, those who have chosen against this method of dealing with reality, are the ones who grow strong for real. It takes work and pain to face hard and unpleasant realities head-on. But when you do, you grow powerful. You reduce the amount of energy being bled away from you via unhealthy systems, you grow skills in actually working with reality; your mind grows sharp as you hone awareness and self-criticism. Little perks show up, like the realization that you no longer lose arguments because you're no longer trying to win; rather, you're trying to get to the bottom of things.
This HP idiot is a puff of smoke. He can spin words but likely has no real strength; because in the course of sculpting his lies to himself and others, he's needed to limit his own awareness; (you can't get along with lies very well if you see all the facts, so your eyes need to be muted.) Strength after strength is cut away, so that there is no ability to react when truths come crashing in through the web of words. When the web fails, there is only paralysis. No ability to absorb and grow from the light of knowledge.
Sometimes it takes a while for a liar to decay, and sometimes you'll meet a very strong one who is near the top of his/her strength curve, but the end result is inevitable. The decay spreads and eventually liars descend into mush while those who look reality dead-on and deal with it and fight to see ever more grow in strength and ability.
That's just how it is.
-FL
Ok, yet another prison reference. During my time in the Feds over the past few years, I got to see a lot of tattoos, some of them very, very good. The technique for making the gun is pretty simple, (use this for the motor) but I was surprised to find that stolen inkjet cartridges were by far the preferred ink source. The going rate for a tat was $50 in stamps or commissary, but a new, unused inkjet cartridge went for another $75. Color? Double.
And the artists insisted on printer ink. (I always wondered if it was sterile...) They must have a reason.
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
.
The gist of the issue is that HP makes a lot of money on inkjet printer ink cartridges. It is the old "give away the razor, charge them for the razor blades" business model.
Printing more than 1000 copies? Your best value will probably be to go to a real printer and get it offset printed. Laser and inkjet are both too expensive.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
I remember five years ago, shopping for a color laser print but they were frakkin' expensive! Now, I see much cheaper now. I will get one when my old inkjet dies (rarely used too).
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Most current laser printers have chips on the toner cartridges too. There are only two vendors wo don't inkjetize their laser printers. Mine is a Brother 4040 color (with IPv6!).
HP is lying, I think.
You can buy bottles of ink and fill the cartridges, and the ink works fine. They put chips in the cartridges to try to prevent refilling. If the ink were really expensive, they wouldn't need the chips.
The HP "explanation" is powerful public relations. It says, "No sensible, honest person would work for HP. The management is dishonest."
Why be abused?
What now?
Are you going to claim that printers are the same today as they were even 10 or 20 years ago (ie, there's been no innovation in the market)?
Not sure about you, but when I was growing up, I had a 9 pin dot-matrix printer! Laser printers were almost unheard of for home use. A few years later, laser printers were probably a few thousand dollars and still huge (though we had 24 pin dot matrix printers!). I don't even remember anyone I knew with a color laser printer.
Nowadays, you can buy an all-in-one printer/scanner combo with WiFi for a few hundred bucks (even including several years worth of ink). That sounds like plenty of innovation to me.
And you know what, if you're not happy with the state of competition in the market, go start your own printer company. No one is stopping you. Since you think profits are so easy in that inefficient market, I'm sure plenty of people will wait in line to loan you money.
If you're willing to pay for a real printer, you can get 500 pages for $5.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft_Yw3KheXI
In Communist China, we have a few different ways of getting around this. One of them is to use a special kit that attaches to an inkjet printer, to be able to add large amounts of ink easily to a printer. Another is to use generic ink that is cheaper than the official HP stuff. Another major way is by simply not using inkjet printers. They are so wasteful and messy to deal with that it's better without them. Most people don't buy their own printer, and just go to a local computer shop for printing. These little hole-in-the-wall shops are all over the place, and just have a few big printers and a few old computers inside that may be used. This is good enough for most people, and these places would be nice to have in the U.S. as well.
I ended up buying a little HP B&W LaserJet for cheap (around $140). In Linux it has no real special features at all, and I set it to simply throw away print jobs with errors. If I didn't get a particular document, I know that it didn't go through. That means that nothing ever gets stuck, and there are no hassles or options to mess with. It just works, and I never need to worry about toner, since I just print text. It's the perfect no-hassle printer. As for the quality, it's so much better than a random inkjet printer that it isn't even funny. It can print with the same text quality as a nice book, which is great for XeTeX and high quality fonts (Junicode ftw!).
Printing from inkjets is just throwing your money at the wind.
Systemd: the PulseAudio of init systems
I have had luck with this place who do reset and refilled cartridges: http://www.ldproducts.com/
I use them in my Epson R800.
I used to have an association with HP, and was told that 50% of the company's profit came from ink/toner. It's expensive because HP likes to make lots of money.
Be smart!! Buy a laser printer. Most of those are VASTLY more efficient.
As long as you don't figure out how much that 1500W laser printer costs to warm up and print 3 sheets of paper several times a night.
Yeah me too. I have a Brother HL-5250DN at home and after 18 months I am still using the original toner cartridge. And the drum unit and toner are separate.
Ethernet, duplexer, $250, no brainer.
Their fax machines are built like tanks, I know from experience. Now I have half-a dozen of the small printers in service at my company, and there have been no failures or complaints yet.
And you know what the best part is ? A tiny driver install. Not a 80MB "minimal" driver download from HP or several hundred for all the crap you get with the consumer HP drivers.
have you not heard of the DMCA, they will be shut down soon....
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
From the HP high-end ink-jet support end, dealing with very picky artists/photographers/GIS depts etc...
If you want good quality, you got to pay the piper.
We'd get people calling in all the time who refused to buy the HP media. I don't doubt that there is a lot of good media to choose from, but we had to ask the customer (back in the day) if they were using HP ink and media, etc.
We'd get people calling in and many never had even changed the printheads or ink cartridges (we had to get the readings on these supplies) and sometimes people would be "creative." Seriously, it's a bit much to go so much over the specified life expectancy, and we'd have to do our troubleshooting, pretty much knowing what the customer would say, in some cases.
. . . no need for paper. HP has the second best thing going. The first? Cellular carriers selling SMS at 20 cents per 140 bytes.
You bought a $300 inkjet. The problem is you bought an inkjet. Go laser.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Somebody already is. I can buy refill kits for a Samsung CLP 300 that come with a stick on chip replacement.
Modern fusers in lasers are instant heat, and require no warm up time(They have a ceramic element)
Older lasers had a heated roller(Via a 800-1000W lamp) that did have a long and relatively expensive warm up time.
The crappy thing about HP ink cartridges is that they encode an expiration date
in the cartridge.
It doesn't matter how much ink you have left, after a certain date you are booted to
the store to 'support your local printer company.'
http://www.hp.com/pageyield/articles/us/en/InkExpiration.html
Yeah, it's for your own good.
I bought a Brother HL-2140 used for $35(great deal there)
It came with a new toner cartage(guy said he bought it and hasn't printed much)
Only issue is the drum is old, but it works great.
I love the smell and heat of a freshly printed stack of paper. Try finding someone who loves a fresh printed stack of paper from an inkjet
O.o
Printer ink is made from unicorn blood.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
And the technology remains almost the same. Sure, they have made slight improvements to quality, but if you're printing photos, it's ultimately cheaper and better to get them run off at CostCo. They won't fade or smear at the slightest drop of water, and they can do hundreds in an hour. For day to day printing needs, the printer market is mostly the same as it was a decade (even two) ago. There are lots of useless gimmicks (Instant print and card preview built into printers) but about the only 'feature' that I have felt even deserves real mention is adding wireless access. Where's the improvement in paper trays and feed? (25 sheets before you have to refill?? WTF?) Where's the bulk ink or toner system? All-in-one printers are nice and all, but why not make a printer that can do 11x14 scanning and printing? If it's inkjet tech, this is a no brainer? Where's the good stuff?!
with "bullshit" already?
Want the proof? Take a look at ink and printer prices in various countries.
They are not charging what the ink is worth, they are charging as much as people is willing to pay. Example:
HP's C8721 cartridge retails in the US for u$s 21.99
HP's C8721 cartridge retails in Argentina for u$s 20.55
Mostly the same.
Except that price of ~20 dollars in Argentina includes 21% VAT, import taxes (~20%), and ~3.5% other taxes. That's ~45%. But they manage to sell it at the same price they sell in the US, where taxes for this product are much lower. Explain that.
Also, I buy my own Ink (I live in Argentina). A motherfucking LITER of Epson black Ink retails at $30. 1/2 a liter of HP black ink retails for $16.
Now, explain how a few milliliters of ink can cost as much as a fucking 1L bottle full of it? If the bottle was priced like the ink in the cartridge, the bottle would cost somewhere near $10.000. 10k for a bottle of ink? No way!.
Now, I know the ink on the bottles isn't the same a the ink on the cartridges, but it's close enough. A little difference in quality and a different dilution can't account for a 1000x price difference.
So, now matter how you look at it, they are ripping us off, and setting the price of Ink to "as much as we can get away with". There is no correlation between production costs and retail price.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
I am sure most of that money goes into competition prevention. "How can we make it harder for third parties to supply ink?"
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
The laser vs inkjet/whining about prices argument is completely invalid. It comes down to this: if you have the urge print, you are living in the past. If your business has to print, it is archaic.
The occasional situations where the government requires some form of physical document from you can be remedied by a very quick trip to some cheap-ass printing place.
Save your $38274823798234 and buy something useful for yourself or donate it somewhere.
2,000 pages? That's only 4 reams of paper.
IMHO, printers need to have handled a few more pages than that before they become worth bragging about. My Laserjet 5 has more than 73,000 pages on the clock, and was even once half-submerged in water for two days during a flood. I wouldn't even be mentioning it if the datapoints everyone keeps throwing out there weren't so low, since even 73k just isn't a very large number of pages for a good printer.
For that matter, I remember going through several 5,000 sheet boxes of pinfeed on the old Star NX1000 9-pin dot matrix that I had way-back-when.
*shrug*
Kid-proof tablet..
Why the hell can't I buy a BLACK AND WHITE printer anymore?!?!? Why?!?! Instead I have to buy a color printer, that after I get it home I find out can not opperate without a color cartridge in it. I think "Oh well, I'll print only in black and white" a week later the color cartridge is dead. But I didn't use any color, and my black and white cartridge is still half full. So i look it up on their website "Even when printing in black and white this printer uses color ink" What??!?! It uses MORE color ink printing in black and white than it uses black ink? So I figure, thats ok, I'll just not refill it. Oh no, it will not let you print if the ink is low. So I set the printer into it's change mode, pull the old cartridge and just stick it back in too fool it. But it still knows it's empty? How? I look it up and sure enough there's a FUCKING MICROCHIP IN THE INK. They put a god damn chip in the ink to force me to buy a new cartridge. So I return to the store, tell them the printer is broke and got a different brand. This one I played with in the store and made sure I could print without a color cartridge in it. For the love of god, someone please invent a USB dot matrix printer for me.
That said, the cheapest ink is made by Canon. The ink is a whopping $4 a cartridge online, or about $6-7 if it requires a chip. That's still expensive, but it shows you how full of it HP is.
That said, though, get a color laser printer. All of them now do Postscript as well, which is a god-send that is often overlooked. This alone makes it worth getting a laser printer. But now you can get color lasers for $250 or less. Note - the model to look for is the Samsung CLP315 - it's not very fast, but it has fairly inexpensive toner and can be found for about $150 or so. Better 315W is a bit more expensive, but does networking and so on. Figure $250 new for it.
My single question is why isn't there a "regular grade" of affordable ink. I refill. I buy ink by the pint. For most printing of web pages and such, the printout is very acceptable. Having $5.00 carts for printing a mapquest route is all I ask. I can save the $60 color cartridge for printing photos, but at the current price, I take the digital prints to Costco. I get prints without streaks.
My main printer is an old HP Laserjet III with a memory module. HP no longer makes toner cartridges for it. Aftermarket cartridges are 4/$100 with free shipping. Instad of a page yeild of maybe 1,000 pages, I get close to 7,000 pages and the toner never dries out or expiers. I buy toner once ever few years, not several times a year.
For music inexpensive MP3's are good enough. Printer ink needs an equivilant that is affordable.
The truth shall set you free!
I have known about ink refilling for over 10 or 11-years ever since my friend introduce me to his syringe and his tiny Epson ink cartridges. Him and his father would go out of their way to buy ink in bulk from specialty printing stores before ink refilling was even known to be possible by common people. He showed me how it was and as long as you get the knack for it and hit the syringe in the right spot on the cartridge this becomes a routine and clean situation. He later experimented with flexible plastic pipes going directly to his cartridges and large ink tanks on top. I thought it was pretty geeky and cool watching them printing every little picture they could.
I personally am a digital guy and I never had a need for printing. I lived without a printer for almost 5-years because if I ever needed anything printed I would just do it at work or at worst a friend's house every 6-months or so. Then one day a few years back I had enough money and wanted to buy a printer with specific features, an inkjet for occasional color prints, and network connectivity so that multiple computers in my house could print without having to have the main computer on all the time, large ink cartridges for lower ink price and more volume, and with duplex printing so that I could save paper when I do need to print something like tax forms, movie ticket passes, etc. I look around for two years and couldn't find any model that would quality so I stopped my search until one year I came across this printer.
HP DeskJet 6127 Color Inkjet Printer (C8959B) - Network, Duplex, Large Cartriges
HP 78 Inkjet Print Cartridges - (C6578DN) $39.99 (~$18 on eBay), XL (C6578AN) $60.99 (~$20 on eBay)
HP 45 Inkjet Print Cartridges - (51645A) $35.99 (~$16 on eBay), Double (C6650FN) $63.99 (~$24 on eBay)
Since I do not print very much at all, maybe 1-page every 2-weeks when I go to the movies, a 4x6 picture here and there, and some forms every few months I don't use very much ink at all. I also buy the HP 78XL size tri-color cartridges on eBay for ~$20 and HP 45 black for ~$16 from photo stores that seems to sell them at a loss and I get them for a third of the retail HP price.
Ink Price Collusion
I still think that $20 that price is fair for a large cartridge with XL capacity and $15 is a reasonable price to pay for a large size black cartridge. I believe that there is a lot of technology that goes into producing a uniform and consistent liquid that is color matched against industry color standards with UV treated dye type inks to retain the printed image for a long period of time. However, the retail prices that HP charges for ink are astronomical and their chipped cartridges with forced expiration dates just show the company's dishonesty when it comes to selling this refillable product to force the consumer to keep on paying and paying whether they use up all the ink or not. Since they do produce high-quality dye based inks they could easily replace those expiration date chips with a simple note of "please shake vigorously after this date and wipe printer head with a moist tissue to remove any hardened ink" on the cartridge to get it working again. Other manufacturers like Lexmark have also followed suit and I do believe that there is collusion in the printing ink market but the government hasn't stepped in to resolve the issue because none of the small law suits throughout the years have showed enough evidence to really make this stick to these companies.
Forced Obsolescence Through No Driver Updates
Another issue is the planned obsolescence of printers through lack of drive updates for new operating systems that HP has taken up as a company goal
And you know what, if you're not happy with the state of competition in the market, go start your own printer company. No one is stopping you. Since you think profits are so easy in that inefficient market, I'm sure plenty of people will wait in line to loan you money.
Patents are one thing that stops innovators from entering established markets. But of course it's always the evil market's fault when people don't get what they want.
Is that also why modern laserjets are so much smaller?
Learn something new.
The lesson is that you DON'T buy HP printers.
HP printer ink (and toner) is expensive because HP makes it expensive.
There are plenty of printers from other companies (ink-jet and laser) that dont require spending big bucks on ink.
Those who say "you can always get it refilled or use 3rd party cartridges", better answer is to buy a printer where the OEM cartridges are cheap enough that you dont NEED refills or 3rd party cartridges.
delivers a thorough nerdly smackdown. Props for not neglecting the side points in addition to the main one.
Hogwash. All of it.
There's no way it actually costs that much. Consider that an HP #15 black ink cartridge (a common cartridge for HP consumer inkjets) contains 25mL of actual ink and costs $35.99 US. That comes to $1,439.60 per litre or $6535.78 per gallon. Right, HP, we totally believe that ink costs this much.
If you must buy an inkjet, be sure to check, beforehand, that there are realistically-priced replacements cartridges available from third-parties. I have an older Epson printer (model C62) for which I can buy replacement cartridges at about five bucks a pop. This actually makes inkjet printing a practical option. There is nothing wrong with the ink either; the results are perfect and glossy photo prints are great. I wouldn't expect them to last for years and years without fading, but if I want an archival print, I'll take it down the local print shop to have it professionally done anyways.
HP, do you really expect me to believe that the remaining $30 is for R&D and manufacturing costs?
I worked on the paint and coatings field for 40 years as a Chemist and TD. Waterborne ink raw material cost rarely exceeds $25 per gallon. Even with hyperdisperants and basket mill grinding the cost to produce is about $30 per gallon. The packaging and chip add another buck. The PR from HP is pure BS.
My Lexmark X204n mono laser printer cost me $150 at Fry's. It has a color scanner, and you can print/scan via ethernet (you can scan via Java plugin on the printer's web page = works on Linux, or you can install a special driver on Windows).
...well, not quite, but pretty damn cheap, if you simply get it with a remaindered printer. Sure, it's not very environmentally conscious to buy printers just to get the pack-in ink cartridges, but it can be very inexpensive. I picked up a bunch of Epson NX100 series printers a few months back that just cost me sales tax on the printers (about $2) and a stamp for each. That's pretty good for a full set of 4 cartridges. In years past, I've gotten multiple next-to-free printers manufactured by HP too with rebate deals like this.
I usually keep an extra printer or two sitting around in case the active one goes bad (or a friend needs a free printer). It's also not a bad way to get some almost free motors, though most of the printers end up going to Printer Heaven as virgins.
Not environmentally friendly, but I'm happy to help printer companies lose money from selling products that are designed to fuck the consumer...
Are you a shill for HP?
Even with the R & D costs there is no way a cartridge should cost USD30 plus. Follow the money...look at the profit margins of their printing division and you will get an answer. These are commodity items sold in the millions...not aircraft or rocket launchers or super computers.
But HP is less-evil compared to Canon...they have a chip in the cartridge which counts the number of pages and (whether you have ink or not) it will stop / deactivate the cartridge after hitting a max value.
Why cant some Chinese companies reverse engineer and bring out printers and inks which are cheaper?
Why then are the 3rd party refills so cheap? Considering that the cart is "disposable" it hardly matters if the 3rd party ink damages the disposable print head eventually, no does it?
They wouldn't go through so much trouble and legal shenanigans with the chips on the carts if most people were actually that unhappy with the results from a cheap refill.
I have no doubt they have some significant R&D invested, but the 3rd party suppliers do as well. Given the level of effort and legal contortions printer makers go through to try to prevent cart chip cloning, I have no doubt that they would sue all of the 3rd party ink suppliers if they merely ripped off the expensive R&D. So, apparently the other manufacturers were able to do their own, including extra effort to avoid stepping on an IP landmine and STILL sell the result for significantly less.
Its easy to see how print cartridges make up the vast majority of HP's income. Its hard to imagine the chips in the cartridges being so freaking important, if they are, they why don't they just build them into the printer? And let the ink, be just that, ink.
Did they explain why a multifunction device like the HP OfficeJet 4110 won't *scan* unless the printer portion has fresh ink?
This is why I will never buy a multifunction printer/scanner again.
Printers represent the most dreaded part of an IT guy's work day. HP being one of the top time wasters.
I don't understand why but printers are the shittiest products you can find , every manufacturer insists on having their own way of dealing with drivers and hp being king at bloatware.
Then there's the windows printing system that absolutely sucks balls.
When it's not the drivers it some sort of failure in the paper loading mechanism or the optical paper detection sensor.
There's no standardized way of remotely managing them , no way to tell if they're working properly or _WHY_ they fail to print when they do.
All i want from these cretins is ONE reasonably priced , reliable printer that would work with bare-bone drivers , have a proper network printing system and management interface and not SUCK so much that i can't deal with actual problems.
All in all this whole thing about R&D is just bullshit , if they'd spend less time building up so many new printer models that have no significant technical advantage , just that they look different and require new drivers the size of an operating system service pack they'd probably have enough cash to stop ripping us off on ink.
Easy... Inkjet cartridges (from everyone but Epson) have the print heads and spraying mechanism built-in. Your 1L bottle does not.
Now, you might get lucky and be able to refill one of those cartridges a few times, but if you print low volumes, and/or you live in a harsh climate, you might find the heads clog up about as soon as you run out of ink.
Now, it's more or less a sleazy trick that manufacturers are selling smaller and smaller cartridges, ensuring higher prices per litre, but the fixed cost is there.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Then perhaps you should either A) buy business grade, or B) stop buying HP.
I do know with dell laserjets, the low-end (3-400) printer's toner is about double the price of the 12-1500 printer's, so after 2 refills the difference is covered.
After being gauged for HP540 and a HP all-in-one refills, I shopped for the next printer by spec (can it fax send and receive legal size, page feeder, etc) then by refill - has to be DIY. I settled on a brother MFC665CW and the ink tanks are just that - plain tanks. I get the NCR generic refills at Walgreens and have been refilling for years now - its not laser quality, but to date I have not lost any money or my job because of inkjet. Also - I showed the wife and now when she needs more ink - no waiting for me - she refills at her content. Total cost - maybe $20/year. Now about photo's - this is more philosophical - why are we so gullible in this capitalistic society that "I am more independent if I hand you my hard earned cash for the ability to print inferior pictures AT HOME??" Oh.. and I just ran out of ink - give me $80 and a trip to Costco - be right back... Remember walking to 7-11 to use the copier - its OK to not have to be Mr. Will Rogers I can do everything at home - if not, I'll buy it. For all of us from the 70's, I'm happy to have my own communicator now - yes the lid on my Treo case flips shut. Spock would smile. And lastly, NO home printer stands a chance against a high quality $30K+ photo printer beast at your local store... If my home printer worked so well, why are they using Yaris size printers behind that counter at the store? Did they miss the memo?
Get a pet squid. Problem solved.
Hey, how's it going?
Buying a higher end printer can cut the cost per page quite a lot. And if you're paying 20 bucks for 400 page of ink, you really ought to think about it unless you go through less than a ream of paper a year. HP 940XP ink tanks give about 2200 pages for about 31 bucks after the rewards program my chain store offers. Before that there were the 88XLs which were pretty similar. Sure, the print heads don't last forever, but laser printers have drums, so I see little difference there. Kodak and Lexmark both have printers in the store where I work which also have a fairly low cost per page. Customers ask me what the benefits are between an inkjet and laser, and it's coming to the point where I can only suggest laser printers to people who need a heavy duty cycle out of the machine (more than 10k pages per month), or absolutely positively need the stuff they are printing to not have water soluble ink on it. Then again, maybe my store just offers crappy laser printers.
As for refills, the chain I work for is happy to sell those. They mark it up nearly as much and don't pay rewards on them, and there's a niche market for nitrile gloves as an add-onn there too, so the profit is actually better.
Next printer.
Also, in fairness, I bought this last printer almost three years ago and have only gone through 4-5 full ink sets.
I wonder if somebody out there is making a living selling little DIY electronic doodads that bypass that "feature."
What?! And violate the DMCA?!
I'll admit I was an HP fanboy and supporter for a long time, but last year my family finally got tired of the HP ink costs. We switched to a kodak, and I'll be honest, their inks cost 25% of what HPs do and they even seem to last a bit longer. What's more, when printing things like pictures, they seem to be hyper accurate and clean compared to HP. I may never buy another HP printer again.
You and the parent both have pretty good points (though I find RenderSeven's sharing of experience more interesting--regardless of what you feel about his opinion and experiences).
I also agree that HP is sort of not telling the complete truth; on the other hand, I can explain the cost of ink cartridges in a way that their PR department wouldn't be too thrilled with: It's to recoup costs for developing the printers. Remember, it wasn't that many years ago when HP and Lexmark both started selling their low end inkjets at a loss, expecting that the cartridges would not just offset the costs but also bring in some additional profits. Presumably they were both in fierce competition for the low-end market. As the GP rightfully pointed out: No one wants to buy expensive printers with cartridges that are refillable (or cheaper). A sibling post in this part of the thread also reminds us that HP's business model isn't new. This is something that Gillette found out a long time ago. Really, it's just consumerism at its best. Consumers generally feel they're getting a fantastic deal if they only paid $75-$100 bucks for a printer with all sorts of nifty features. It doesn't matter if they wind up spending 2 or 3 times that amount in ink cartridges over the lifetime of the device, because--by golly--the printer was dirt cheap. Sad? Yeah, but it's true.
Anyway, to the subject of my post: If you're printing out pages and pages of black and white reports with an inkjet, you're doing it wrong (color is justifiable). I have a cheapo HP laser printer that I got for around $100 back in 2005, and it got me through the rest of my excursion back to university. I must've cranked out somewhere between 1000-1500 pages of paper through that poor little thing, and oddly the toner cartridge still works fine even though I'm sure it was only rated for a maximum of 800 pages total. (Yeah, I'm running with the original that shipped with the printer.) 'Course, now that I've said that, it'll probably crap out--but it's performed leaps and bounds better than any crummy inkjet I've owned, including a much more expensive inkjet my father purchased back when I was in high school (which came with separate print heads).
I hate printers, I really do, but I think I hate inkjets far more than any other design.
He who has no
Nope, that was ruled against quite a while ago, the DMCA does NOT cover printer carts because there is no creative work being protected.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Dude, any quality workgroup laser will do ~1M pages before needing any major work. We have some Xerox MFP's that did more than 1M pages in the first 14 months.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I figured it was all those poor squids they had to milk that made ink such a rare commodity.
/* No Comment */
dmca=digital millenium copyright act
you can have a copyright on ink?
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
*looks at his HP printer with genuine HP color cartridge that requires he get it flowing with a little warm water before he wants to do any printing*
yes. incredibly reliable. This thing clogs almost as fast as I can use it.
I used to work at Lexmark tech support. Everyday i sent out a few brand new printer with UPS. Their business model was selling ink. Give away the printers for free and then have people buying the ink. If a printer is broken they lose money.
To get a new printer no reciept was needed. There was no validation on serial number nothing.
Dude, I know. My prior printer was a Laserjet III with 1.6 million pages.
You preach to the choir.
Kid-proof tablet..
HP cartridges cost almost twice as much as the ones from their competitors. I know, this is slashdot and people want links but I don't feel like spending time to search the obvious. to give HP some credit, their cartridges include new heads but it is another known fact that heads last much longer than a single cartridge and this is an unnecessary and unecological design decision.
"Ink technology is expensive, and you pay for reliability and image quality"
This doesn't even pass the chuckle test! It's pure bullshit. The truth is that you pay the monopolistic prices and that's why the ink is so expensive.
Most consumer grade dry toner is made of magnetite dust (filings gives the impression that the magnetite is much coarser than it actually is), and a carrier which is wax and/or resin. The reason most consumer grade toner has iron in it, is because that allows the stuff to be applied to the to the image drum by brushing 'waves' of it with a magnetic roller assembly.
Non-magnetic dry toner exists, but its more complicated and fussy to get it on the image cylinder. For example, the Midax print engines (Delphax technology based) I used to maintain could use either, but required a different toner delivery assembly. The 'nonmag' toner hopper delivered toner to the image cylinder by blowing air through a sintered metal plate to make the layer of toner above it behave as a fluid. If things weren't Just So (down to things we didn't control very well such as ambient air temperature and humidity, fumes from flexographic ink, etc) it would work poorly if at all. When it did work, we could run the paper web through the press at up to 400 feet per minute or so.
I would love to see this guy explain why the same ink delivered in bulk is so much cheaper, even when from HP?
See link.
http://www.thefind.com/computers/info-hp-designjet-z6100-ink-cartridges
HTTP/1.1 400
Except that price of ~20 dollars in Argentina includes 21% VAT, import taxes (~20%), and ~3.5% other taxes. That's ~45%.
Summing of percentages applied on different initial quantities does not equal the sum of the percentages, this is basic math.
Why the fuss about "alternative" products, about cheap ink from other sellers? Why shield your printer ink with layers of patents and chips on the cartridge that count the pages I printed? Appearantly you are so sure that your customers want that superspecialawsome quality (yeah, right...) of your ink, so why do you deem it necessary to protect it against competition? And don't those chips make your ink even more expensive, pointlessly. Oh, you need to count the pages to ensure quality.
Yeah, right.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
For most people, I would agree, refilling ink is probably good enough...
But you should also consider that there are people with higher requirements than you - people for whom colourfastness and print longevity also come into play.
I do have some photo prints from cheap ink, and some from original ink cartridges (Epson, in this case). The ink on the cheap prints is already fading - while the original photo ink images still look fine - and they were a few months OLDER (i.e. from the original cartridge fill; before I bought some 'refilled' inks).
For printing listings, texts that are going to be thrown away again 'soon-ish', the refill-inks will do me nicely. If it's for keeps - the original inks turned out a lot better...
YMMV
It really does seem like another one of those debates where some random gimp user (and I quite like gimp for what it does), simply doesn't see ANY use for photoshop, just because HE doesn't have one...
They make color laser now?
I must research this. As someone moving across the country, I think I'll be donating my existing HP printer to some sucker^H^H^H^H^H^Hnice person who needs a printer, instead of shipping it.
Mmm, color laser. All I gotta say is, last century, I had a monstrous Epson, that literally caught on fire and died after about six years of heavy use - but the toner cartridge (original, mind you) was still at 60%.
I'm sure HP will tell me that without their Magic Ink, I'll have a horrible print quality, but hell - I have a horrible print quality now, even with HP's Ink Made From the Blood of Seraphim. Comes with using their sub-$50 printers. Which is the way to go, given that you need to trade a working kidney for each ink cartridge.
I've come to consider high ink costs as an environmental benefit. I know a number of people who are printing less and less as they've worked out what it is costing them, even in more reputable alternative inks (I say "more reputable" there as printer ink is definitely something you shouldn't buy the cheapest knock-offs of - they will knacker precision parts of the printer if you get a bad batch which will be particularly annoying if you have a model with a fixed multi-use head instead of one with a new head per cart).
Personally I long since switched completely to a laser (having for a short while used a B/W laser alongside a colour 'jet). You still pay too much for consumables on consumer grade models but get far better value for money than with ink, you don't waste many pages worth of toner/ink if you left the printer unused for three weeks so need several head-clean runs to get all the nozzles ungummed, output on paper that doesn't cost an arm and a leg is much much better for any output type from text to photos (particularly text), and for those few occasions where my laser doesn't quite cut it as I want a particularly vibrant photo I just use the local supermarket's photo printing machines which work out cheaper then running your own inkjet and produce better results too.
The HP C8721 can be found online for $3.95, and if you spend $75, you get a $15 gas card rebate (I don't get the connection, but who cares).
Ignoring the rebate, the 4.2 oz refill can be found for $7.50
That would be about $60 per liter, not 10,000. This is roughly double the cost for buying print heads, which have things beyond just ink (like microchips, R&D, and a profit margin).
Incidentally, I notice that the article takes a jab at Canon, which is breaking their code and talking about the price of ink. I remember a very different story Slashdot ran a while back which shows just how absurd things are right now.
If anyone here does a lot of printing, I'd say to look up continuous flow systems. People buy gallons of ink and feed them into the cartridge. Yeah, sometimes they have problems, but they get a new print cartridge when they *need* one, not when it's empty.
All this talk about technology and time invested is largely a smokescreen. Do you want to know what's in that ink cartridge? Some colored (or black) dye, a little alcohol and water and some glycol for body. Adjust the non-dye components for best results. Or buy ink refill kits; they're pretty close to the factory formulation and work perfectly well no matter what HP's marketing machine would like you to believe.
How about that "more pages from HP ink" claim? That's like a oil company claiming you get more miles per gallon from their gasoline; in other words, bullshit.
What they're really doing is playing the old "the razor is free but you have to buy our blades" game. Instead of charging you what the true retail value of their inkjet printer is, they give you a discount on the purchase price to bait the "it's on sale!" folks in - then they stick it to you on the ink and make up the difference and then some over the life of the printer. How long will your printer last? Until HP says it's dead - they'll discontinue the ink cartridges and that's it for your printer.
And as long as they can keep the public (and the government) snowed about all of this they'll continue to rake it in. Have ink formulas improved over time? Yes, they have. 1 Billion a year worth? Nope, not even if you pad the budget with lots and lots of hookers and blow. It's just a simple dye formula, not rocket science. Their greed is amazing; they equip their ink cartridges with chips that do NOTHING to improve the operation of the ink cartridge - their sole function is to cause good cartridges to fail early ("to provide the best printing results") and prevent you from refilling their cartridges ("to provide the best printing results"). How about to "enhance HP's bottom line" instead?
Once upon a time HP was a technology company that stood behind their products. Now they're a second-rate consumer electronics company that depends on the revenue from printer ink to balance its books. I mentioned the formula earlier in this message - price out the ingredients and see what it costs per gallon to make and you'll never look at printer ink the same way again. What a scam; they've snookered you folks into paying $35 for a plastic box containing less than a penny's worth of dye.
You know what's really sad? The cartridge refill people are taking you to the cleaners on ink, too. Not nearly as bad as HP does but how do these people sleep at night?
It was an HP printer and that was about $17 for black and about $21 for color.
What happened?
Bait and switch.
Ink prices went up so much that when Microcenter had the same printer on sale it was cheaper to buy the new printer with its included full HP ink cartridges then it was to buy the ink separately. So I bought the printer, now I have a back up and when the sales person aske me if I wanted a warranty plan for a bit more money.....
But what do I have a back up for? using expensive ink cartridges.
What a waste... I'll probably never use that printer as by the time I need it it'll be yet cheaper to just buy the next new printer at a sale price that has ink included..... front end of bait and switch....
Anyone swallowing the Big Pharma line that drugs are so expensive because of the R&D costs are invited to look at a few Pharma Annual Reports and compare the spend on R&D and that on Marketing.
I wouldn't be surprised if the same dynamics applied here.
hard copy
What is expensive is all the anti-refill technology HP build into their cartridges. Once you get past that, about any no-name ink will work.
And of course ink is expensive because printers are cheap. Printers are cheap to lure you into vendor lockin.
"Ink technology is expensive, and you pay for reliability and image quality."
I guess that explains why every time I go to use it my HP inkjet printer it has clogged up and I have to waste several pages and plenty of ink just to get it cleaned up enough to produce a decent printout. Granted, I go a couple of weeks between uses, but why can't a printer handle a duty cycle like that? By contrast my laser printer handles printing just fine whether I'm printing every day or leave it for a month, and the toner costs a tiny fraction of the per-page costs of the inkjet.
Between expense and unreliability, clearly inkjet technology isn't yet ready for real-world use. Buy a laser printer.
Patents stop people from copying someone else's design. They don't stop someone from "innovating" a new product to meet the market's demands. So, yes, patents will keep you from starting a company that sells replicas of HP's printers and cartridges (which is a good thing), but they won't stop you from designing your own printers and cartridges.
both suck... I wish they would put just 10% of the revenue from ink sales into developing software and drivers that actually WORK. God.. it's miserable trying to keep their printers working properly, especially on a network.
"Ink technology is expensive, and you pay for reliability and image quality."
I guess that explains why every time I go to use it my HP inkjet printer it has clogged up and I have to waste several pages and plenty of ink just to get it cleaned up enough to produce a decent printout. Granted, I go a couple of weeks between uses, but why can't a printer handle a duty cycle like that? By contrast my laser printer handles printing just fine whether I'm printing every day or leave it for a month, and the toner costs a tiny fraction of the per-page costs of the inkjet.
Between expense and unreliability, clearly inkjet technology isn't yet ready for real-world use. Buy a laser printer.
I completely agree. Ink-jets work best (least worst) when they're in regular (if not continual) use. But regular use means you really get stung by the price of the inks.
Many people with ink-jets use them only occasionally, at most once or twice a week. So the ink dries up, and you have to use way too much just to get the ink flowing again.
(Where are mod points when you need 'em?)
Oh, how convenient: a theory about God that doesn't involve looking through a telescope.
HP laser printers are workhorses and IMO the gold standard in affordable printing. I remember one ancient Laserjet 4 that was still chugging along after a decade of use and this is by no means atypical. Most people would rather buy a cheap $50 inkjet then spend $500 on a decent laser model, even though the lifetime costs are far, far less.
I want my Cowboyneal
It's the same reason why cell phone contracts are binding for two years, or why text messages are so expensive to transmit even though it is proven that they present absolutely no overhead to the provider.
The recurring cost pays for the device (the phone or the printer) many times over.
"Get a device worth $X FREE!*
(*and pay us $X/10 over the next 24 months, adding up to $2.4X)"
Free? Awesome deal!
You don't even have to spend that much for a decent home printer. I got a Brother laser printer 4 years ago for about $200 and have run several thousand pages through it with no problems and only one new cartridge. It's fast and does a nice job printing. I'd highly recommend the Brother printer - but as someone else said, the HP Laserjets are the gold standard.
Kodak has been producing printers with very low margin on the consumables, but consumers are attracted to the artificially low printer prices from the other companies. So while HP is full of it when they claim that ink is fundamentally expensive, consumers share a lot of the blame when they overwhelmingly vote with their wallet to pay less up front and a lot more later. It's just like how consumers share a lot of the blame when they consistently choose glossy displays on notebooks which are absolute garbage when it comes to its usefulness.
Last I checked, type writer ribbon was dirt cheap and just about did the same thing. HP and others trying to monopolize areas should take a long term think and realize they are going to kill off their market one day due to their greed. Make products that work for the people as opposed to ones that maximize profits for the shareholders. At the end of the day your company will be stronger and richer if you make a consumer friendly product for then you will win everyone over and have a larger market share, make a product people hold their nose to buy and you will lose them first chance they wake up and see another option. One day people will grow tired of the game and go back to something that works without software or expensive support items (it's not like we are made of money anymore) and still can carry a message. Ludites never complain about HP, and they still communicate.
HP printers are lame.
Canon is the good one, because it has better printers that actually work as they should and also you can replace the printing membrane if it gets clogged badly.
The inc price is about 20€ per year, if you buy it from a third party. The original one is cool too.
Ink cost for inkjet printers shouldn't be a big issue because those who print more than very few pages either buy a laser or a CISS system. I have been using two of the latter for years and at the cost of a brand spare nanocartridge I get 1 liter black or 0.5l color. Less than average quality Highlands.
You don't buy HP if you want quality, you buy HP if you want non-stop support calls 24x7.
I hate printers, I really do, but I think I hate inkjets far more than any other design
Agreed.
Inkjets (especially the cheap ones) have higher running costs than most other printer types but that isn't the worst thing about them. The worst thing about them is if you leave them unused for a while they clog up. With a HP this means new cartridges. With an epson it generally means a new printer.
Another thing i've found is that the cost of inkjet cartridges tends to go up significantly over a printers lifetime. Especially if you want the genunine ink.
Lasers on the other hand you can put in a cuboard for a long time (longest i've tried is about a year but I don't see any reason it wouldn't go on almost indefinately) and they come out printing as good as when they went in. Not sure about laser cartridges since i've never been responsible for one that needed a replacement.
Unfortunately colour laser printers are still rather expensive and bulky. Especially if you want a network port on them (i've decided that every printer I buy from now on should have a network port and support at least one out of postscript or pcl).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
HP's ink carts contain not just the ink, but the nozzels as well. In fact, HP printers do not have print heads, because the ink carts ARE the print heads. Every time you change the ink cart you change the print head. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. It's good because you don't have to worry about clogged ink heads, you get a new clean head every time you run out of ink. It's bad because it's more expensive to do it this way. Epson ink carts ONLY contain ink. The print head is in the printer. That sucking sound you hear everytime you turn the printer on is the sound of the printer cleaning the heads, and they waste some ink doing it. However, I still think HP overcharges for ink.
Or see if you can get a CISS system for your existing printer.
HP could offer a B grade cartridge with inks of a slightly lower quality at a significantly lower cost and see what the market prefers.
A similar model works with CPU's and memory, or they could just be full of BS.
Why is it then, that others manage do produce just as good ink for $5 a 100ml bottle? Hm? :P
No. The quality is not worse! Now imagine what they would be able to produce for your, what, $40 for what, 30ml? I bet it would be some super-ink that NASA thinks is to advanced to explain to our new Alien visitors, as they only got advanced warp 10 tunneling.
Same thing as with the MAFIAA: Your business model is fucked up. And that fucked up your market. And you got only yourself to blame for it. Accept our terms ($5 a 100ml bottle) or fuck off. We don’t need you. Another company will fill your void an days.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I remember several years back, a new hire training at Dell told the class that you should offer free printers to folks who were upset because printers didn't cost them crap. They would have a new repeat paying customer who was happy they got a free printer and the ink made them so much money. The trainer even rubbed his two fingers together and grinned.
This is just an attempt to rationalize things. I work in the printer industry. We do much larger printers (from really huge things like billboards to really small stuff like printing on commemorative coins), and a large part of that involves testing different ink formulas. Most of the experimental inks we test with cost us at most a couple of dollars per liter, and customers that buy our printers usually spend pennies per liter. The obvious argument is that purchasing ink in bulk makes that possible, and that packaging smaller amounts increases the cost per unit. Even taking that into account, desktop ink is wildly overpriced.
I can buy black ink refills at the local dollar store and the quality output from them is identical to the $20 replacement cartridges at Staples - so don't go telling me the cost of ink is due to the cost of the technology - we all know it is because of the way printers are soled, via the Gilette model - even Kodak has confirmed that and released their printer line that costs more at the outset but is very cheap to buy ink for.
I still use a LJ4+ with 12MB ram at home. I spend about $20 for a Xerox branded toner for it about every three years and get about 5000-7000 pages out of it. It's slower than newer laser printers and has a page count of over 150,000 but still going strong and producing quality output on a wide variety of paper.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
If China can produce high quality print cartridges for, in some cases 1/10th the cost of American made, it points to the fact that most of the price is markup to "whatever we can get away with". And by "high quality", I mean "good enough for my graphic designer wife who's been in the industry for 15 years and can be a real nazi about print quality." HP can't afford to confirm how great the markup is. The backlash from their "competitors" (read "those in collusion") would be staggering.
Actually, those taxes are applied all at the same time (if you wanna buy something from "outside") you gotta pay a 45% tax in customs.
You should have read Argentinian tax law before questioning his math ;)
Why is it, when a new version of an OS, any OS it seems, comes out, printer manufacturers seem unable to have a functional driver available? This, despite the fact that they know well in advance and most of them have access to the OS vendors. win2k, XP, Vista, win7... Every time a new OS is released I get stuck finding workarounds or unsigned/hacked party drivers because some relative had to have a new computer and they can't print coupons anymore. You shoulda seen the nightmare I went through with my mother in law's brand new win7 laptop and her 2 year old HP printer. Even on the HP website, they seemed confused; alternately suggesting using a vista driver while offering a win7 driver for her printer (that didn't work of course).
Personally, I think they just hope most people will give up because they need to print NOW, and buy a new "YOUR OS COMPATIBLE" printer. The fact that 12 months later they always seem to magically produce a stable, fully functional driver kinda reinforces that thinking.
For that matter, why do you need to download a 100mb "driver package" to print a b/w text page...
The market does work. There are companies selling printers that use less expensive ink. Someone earlier mentioned Canon. Kodak also makes a printer that uses inexpensive ink. The Kodak printer doesn't have particularly good print quality (at least not yet), but they sell a full set of replacement cartridges (black and color) for $24.95.
The reason that ink prices haven't fallen sooner is patents that limit the ability of competitors to build a competing product and the low quality of early printers. The patents are starting to expire on some of the base technology and print quality has reached a point where further innovation is going to cost exponentially more to improve print quality and that improved print quality will be of less and less concern to the average consumer.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Like generic cartridges that cost less than half as much as brand cartridges...
Refills that cost less than half of new...
Do it yourself kits that reduce the cost to a pittance at, AFAICT no discernible drop in quality...
I bought a C7280 for cheap a while back. A set of all 6 #02 cartridges and a pack of photo paper bundled costs 35.99. It's from HP, so I have yet to understand why some cartridges cost more than others. It's a great photo printer, I can print about 30 8x10 sheets before any of the cartridges need to be replaced (although the black is larger and needs less replacement). So yes, the most important thing is check the cartridge price before you buy the printer.
There's not much more an explanation than that people will pay that much for ink. If they wouldn't, such ink wouldn't be available since it wouldn't sell. I've done my part by giving away all my inkjet printers and vowing never to buy one again. Now I'm toner-only.
No getting around it though: Ink is still expensive, particularly if you have to use that inkjet printer for black-and-white text pages."
Which only supports what I already knew - I save money by buying toner for my old laserjet 4 and using it for all my greyscale printing. I can buy refurbished or refilled toner cartridges for this old workhorse by the truckload for pennies and the print quality is more than acceptable for my greyscale needs.
... pretty much never. I rarely have a true need for color printing in my everyday life.
Yep, when I hear them confirm what I already knew about that, it makes me want to buy an inkjet
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Then... why refills are so cheap?
You pay for one liter (divided in three colors + black) almost the same price as ONE cartdrige (20 cc - that is 0.02 liters).
Quality is almost the same for the average job (Joe)
Also when my razor gets dull I hone it and then it's sharp again; I don't have to buy something else.
Name-brand safety razors attach to handles. It used to be the case that most of the engineering work went into the handle, yet most of the revenue was on replacement blades. (This is where the expression "razor business model" comes from.) But the analogy has become less accurate over time. Starting sometime during the era of Gillette Sensor, the handle was simplified, and the cartridge with blades in it became far more sophisticated. This became especially apparent when Gillette introduced the MACH3 and Venus products, which added a spring-loaded pivoting head and non-stick coated blades to the razor cartridge.
I suspect so - if not as a living, then as a hobby. I've got a friend that picked up a chip for a Samsung color laser printer, allowing him to use refilled toner cartridges. The color prints (on stock paper) are quite nice (though not quite 'photo' quality). They're certainly "publishing" quality.
All told he's got about $80 invested in this printer (and he got multiple color drums with it). He's printed several thousand pages by this point; it's a damn good investment.
There's really no incentive for an "inkjet". If you need/want to print photos, you get a photo printer. If you need/want to print documents, you get a document printer. There is no such thing as a "general purpose" printer, so don't pretend there is by buying an inkjet.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
...in this comparison.
You and I help subsidize the R&D of those drugs, and the drug companies spend far more money advertising those drugs than they spend developing them. Hell, they spend more money bribing (oops, I mean "lobbying") politicians than they spend on researching those drugs. The usual corporatist elements of our mainstream media like to play up the cost of R&D by pharmaceutical companies to excuse the fleecing they give the American public (but somehow not other industrialized countries), but those claims are pretty much horsesh*t too.
I agree that HP is feeding us a bunch of horsesh*t (the real reason was summed up nicely by Publilius Syrus: "Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it"), but I don't think the comparison you make is necessarily a good one.
...with so many people banging the gong. A quarter way through the article, I had to get my hip waders out, the BS being so deep. Half way through I pretty much closed the page up, I could not stand the PR parrot and his drivel. My god, do they still believe in that, even though almost all his points are pretty much demolished?
They simply need to tear down their current pricing structure for printers and consumables, rebuilding it into a more balanced, more consumer friendly pricing scale.
What really got my goat was his arrogant statement that "Manufacturers have to police themselves." They have been and their yields have come up, but at a cost for the consumer to pay.
His sniping at Kodak was a simple diversion from the actual issue at hand, an easy trick for a PR flak.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Why not just refill the empty carts with some gulf oil? WD-40 worked great in the dot matrix days.
Expect Epson and Lexmark to go down the same route. Ink printing is proven to be more environmentally friendly than laser printing until you get to really large units with separate drums and toner tanks, and these are a small fraction of the market, as they need high volumes to justify the initial costs.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Network ports are cute, but I find I get more mileage out of a basic Linux box running Samba. That way, I can install ALL my printers on one box and manage them centrally. The Linux box usually costs less than the ethernet option on the printer... and in my experience works more reliably.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Don't use the printer for a week and the ink nozzles clog up, at best requiring wasting ink to clean the damned things out, and at worst requiring purchasing a completely new cartridge. Then of course there's the simple fact that ink on paper causes the paper to wrinkle which, obviously, ruins whatever perceived image quality there is, and all bets are off if you let any other liquids hit the paper.
No, ink is expensive because the printers are cheap. The cost of manufacturing inkjet printers is offset by how much ink you have to purchase for the damned things, which is, incidentally, why color laser printers cost several hundred dollars, toner cartridges for a full four-color set run as much as a new high-end (multifunction) inkjet printer, but you easily end up saving money in the long run if you consider just how much equivalent ink you'd have to purchase if you cheaped out on the printer. Plus, toner doesn't dry out and since it's more a plastic than an ink, getting it wet doesn't ruin the print. And the printers themselves are generally just built better.
Hell, for casual use, a color laser printer might run you $400 for the printer and it'd be a good year or two before you use up the toner cartridges it comes with. Compare that to buying new cartridges whenever you run out of ink or the damned things get clogged up and dry out from disuse.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
I was hoping they'd pop one PowerPoint slide that simply said: "WE LOVE MONEY".
No sig for you!!
The last HP printer I had, blew two full black ink cartridges into the well below the rest spot for the printer head.
$30 worth of ink shot into a pool useless sludge.
HP is just trying to spin ripping us off. I stop buying HP printers because the ink was so much more expensive that everyone else. HP once dominated the printer business but they got greedy ( most likely hired too many borg and not enough engineers) and just started ripping off their customers. Soon it will be " oh ya HP used to be in the printer business". They hired too many east coast borg and they will trash the business same as happened on route 128 back east.
i have no idea why people use inkjet printers,
If HP was being honest they would release their books and show their ink cartridges only have a margin of 10%. Everyone knows the margin is probably 200%, this just makes them look dishonest as well as greedy.
A good color later printer can be found for between $300 and $500, often with multiple trays, network cards, and multi-thousand page life cycles. They're a bit bulky, and probably should be on their own small table not your desk, but they're MUCH better, and cheaper, than inkjet for everyday jobs, and you don't need to print photos at home...
Print in draft mode when you can, omit images and backgrounds printing websites when you can, and a good color laser system can go 7K-10K pages on a set of cartidges, which can be found online for $30-50 a piece.
They print great, are easy and cheap to have repaired, are quick, and last a decade or so.
For photos, between Snapfish, .Mac, and a few other similar services, you can have ridiculous quality dye-sub photos printed as opposed to ink for under $0.10 per image. Uploading them also means printing fewer on your own to give to family (upload and album, let them print what they want on their dime). When in a pinch, a walgreens or CVS is never far away and you can print images there from a memory card for less than you can print them at home (and often in better quality too).
We used to run through about 300 images a year, maybe more. now i don't even have an ink jet printer in the house. I get 40 or 50 good prints done per year, 5-8 at a time, from Snapfish, usually for free for re-opening an account as i use it so infrequently. We do calendars, Christmas cards, invitations, and other large prints through .Mac cheap and the quality is impressive.
Everything else gets printed on the laser, with the printer defaulted to black/greyscale only unless I need color for some reason. With my wife as a teacher, we run about 4K pages a year. I buy a $50 XL black cartridge about once every 18 months. I used to spend $50 on ink every 2-3 months easy, mostly just black. It was nearly 2 years before the starter color cartridges ran out, and with 5X the capacity in the replacements, the ink will likely outlast the printer at my pace, though with a big laser, and 150,000 page lifecycle, i might have a still-working printer without available cartridges first...
Screw injet, you don;t need it anymore. Times changed, getting professional prints doesn't cost $0.50 each anymore, it is NO LONGER CHEAPER AT HOME.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
The only thing you have to know is that the manufacturers purposely make it difficult to refill their cartridges. This proves that their ink is simply way overpriced, and all the marketing hot air in the world will not explain away that fact.
NHA
(Incidentally - premium razor blades are one of THE biggest consumer ripoffs of all time. Every time you buy a Gillette Mach 3 cartridge, you're spending 3 dollars on 25 cents worth of materials that aren't really much better than a 30 cent disposable. The only thing cheap about cheap razors are the handles. The blades are as sharp as the expensive one at 1/10 the cost. Behold the power of marketing.)
I have shaved with cheap single blades that come in packs of twenty and I shave with the four-bladed fusion. I cannot get the job done with the cheap single blades. It's not marketing -- they are better.
Brown says, adding that users concerned about cost per page can buy 'XL' ink cartridges from HP that last two to three times longer. (Competitors do the same).
Collusion?
Just because they use similar business practicies, they are colluding? If that's your standard, the following industries are colluding:
1) Airlines are colluding because many of them charge for handling your baggage.
2) The entire fast food industry is colluding because they all give you a discount when you buy a meal with a drink and fries.
3) Many public transportation agencies are colluding because riders get a discount on fares when they buy monthly passes.
I used to work for Staples. I talked to the reps for all the major companies (Canon, Epson, Lexmark, and HP). We stocked more HP machines than virtually any other kind, and many people bought one machine or another. As a quick aside, it was humorous helping people find the ink when it was time to get new cartridges. Popular answers to the requisite "which machine do you have" were "It's the one that scans, copies, and faxes". After a while I got a bit cynnical and would bring them over to the entire aisle of multifunction machines and said "Every single one of the machines here fit that description, can you give me anything more specific?". Other times, the customers would come in like walking car analogies: "I have a 2006 HP Photosmart". I had another lady come in, needing ink for a four year old printer, figuring that we'd still stock them because "it's a great printer". I kept thinking to myself, "these machines are several years old, have these people REALLY never bought ink before?" But I digress.
HP is the poster child for a plethora of issues with inkjet printing in general. First off, many of their newer models have less than 10mL of ink in the cartridges. I slightly envy people who have machines that take the 45/78 inks, since those cartridges have something like 42mL of ink and cost $30, whereas the newer 94 catridges have 11mL and cost $20. I'm sure the 94's are a bit more efficient, but I doubt that any of the customers I helped with printers knew to ask "how much ink is in the cartridge?" before they bought it, though some knew to at least look at how much the refills cost. It's a really misleading game, which is kinda depressing.
The other thing that irks me about HP (as they are the most guilty of it), is their ridiculous driver install packages requiring several hundred MB, and the ridiculous amount of crap that finds its way into the device manager. I mean seriously, when Epson and Canon can both have 9MByte driver installers, there's no reason to not at least make a custom install more than "add icon to desktop". Ugh, I hate installing them; they take the longest and because of all the crap, I have spent more time beating HP drivers into submission than any other printer brand.
Lexmark has different issues. Besides their pathetic Linux support (I'm a Windows user, but I do prefer seeing a flag, a fruit, and a penguin on my peripherals), their inkjet print quality is beyond craptastic. I remember when those portable photo printers where the hot gift item one year (2006, I think, perhaps 2007). Epson, Canon, and Kodak all had dye sublimation printing, and they all looked really good. I was partial to the Epson prints myself, but they all produced nice results. HP had essentially a single-cartridge inkjet job, which wasn't spectacular, but was acceptable. Then, Lexmark came out with their model. They were late in the season; we didn't have them until after Black Friday. They brought something to the table that no one else did - integrated CD burning. As techs, we all thought it was a great idea - bring the printer on vacation along with a 5-pack of CD-R media, and do card dumps at the hotel and leave the laptop at home. Keep in mind that this was back when 1GB cards were over $100 retail and 512MB was at a sweet spot in price, so it really worked out well in that regard. We were all so stoked about this printer. Even though we all had a disdain for Lexmark's standard fare, most of us took a serious look at this thing - then one day, we saw it print, and we were horrified that Lexmark would actually sell this crap to customers. There was banding, a canvas-like pattern, a yellowish tint, terrible blacks, and they took forever. I cannot TELL you the letdown that we all had when customers came in looking at it and we said, "if you're looking for a portable camera card dumper, go for it. If you want something that spits out photos you'll WANT to look at, there's this Epson over here...". Chalk it up to whatever you want, but "good enough for color in Excel" and "good enough to hang on your
They should indicate the number of cleaning cycles you can get out of a given cartridge. I gave up on inkjets a few years ago (color laser for everything except the best photos, which get printed at a retail outlet (its cheaper)). That's because invariably when I went to print a photo one or more of the nozzles would be clogged forcing me to run the cleaning cycle three or four times. By then I would need a new cartridge. I'm betting that most full cleaning cycles use about 1/10th of the total ink in the cartridge. I've spent maybe $80 on toner in 10 years of running laser printers at home. The photo's printed on the inkjet probably cost me close to $10 each.
Most people just don't seem to notice the quality issues when one or two nozzles are clogged (or they just assume thats the way it works). For those people (my wife) the laser prints on glossy paper are just as good. I on the other-hand want the image to be perfectly clean, and for that I use the little online print function my local photoprocessor has. Those prints cost me ~$2 for a 8x10, and the quality is usually the best available as they upgrade their printers every year or so, and they keep them in tiptop shape. For the dozen or so photo quality prints its a no brainer.
I'm a photographer. Find me a laser printer that will do gallery-quality photos and I'll use it. Laser printers aren't appropriate for every job
The lab I use can profitably sell me 50 11x14 archival quality giclee (inkjet) prints for less than $70 -- that's including ink, labor, paper, packaging, and shipping. So why in the hell does it cost me over $120 just in ink to make the same number of prints myself? You know the labs not spending anything close to that on ink.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
However, no one ever said that you had to buy into the manufacturer's game. If you don't like HP's inkjet prices, then don't buy it.
If this was directed specifically at him, then it doesn't say anywhere that he *did* buy HP!
Or perhaps it was aimed at the audience in general (i.e. "no one ever said that one has to buy into the manufacturer's game. If one doesn't like HP's inkjet prices, then one doesn't have to buy it").
Either way, it's BS. Your implication is that because anyone has the choice of buying HP's ink they either agree to it- in which case they can't really complain- or that they should shut up and not complain.
Just one thing; it's quite reasonable for someone to criticise something even if they have no intention of buying it.
What you say is just another example of a far too common assumption around here, that the freedom offered by "don't like it, don't buy it" somehow nullifies any right to criticism- essentially that it extends to "you have the right not to buy it, therefore you have no right to criticise it". Wrong.
You could say that those who buy it knew what they were getting into and don't have the right to criticise. That's open to question. But it's downright wrong and overly entitled to assume that someone exercising their right not to buy has no right to criticise.
As I said above, there was no sign that the GP *had* bought HP anyway. And you have no right to expect him not to criticise the company for their overpriced ink.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Please, learn metric and post again.
I don't understand your archaic, unscientific units.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
I hardly print, so it peeves me when my Epson inkjet refuses to print due to "low ink" when my cartridges are newer then the ream of paper that I bought 3 years ago. Most of my printing are occasional "disposable" things like concert tickets, directions to supplement a GPS, forms to mail in, travel itineraries, ect. Last week, when I went to the store to buy a whole set of ink cartridges so I could print out a measly 1-page form to mail in, I was shocked that I could buy a complete B&W laser printer with ethernet for less then the cost of new ink cartridges.
I bought the printer. It's faster then my old inkjet that would spin its gears for 3 minutes before printing, and because it plugs directly into my router, I can set it up on my Macs without having to use half-baked installation disks. Color would be nice, but I really am not in a position to spend the money on a good color laser. In contrast, for the amount of time that I really need color, I'm better off running to Kinko's, because I'd end up running to the store to buy ink anyway.
No, I will not work for your startup
Your definition of "worth it" meets their price point, and their price point nets them an insane profit. Good for you! You've found a product you like at a price you're willing to pay, everybody wins.
*shrug. Your dollar; your decision on how to spend it.
You say I have a choice of how I spend my money, but I really don't. Well, here are my "choices:"
In reality, I have no choice in how I shave -- I have to use expensive razors because they work for my face.
I also have no choice in what I pay -- I pay the market rate for razors. Given the amount of blades I buy, I am a price-taker.
Most people would rather buy a cheap $50 inkjet then spend $500 on a decent laser model, even though the lifetime costs are far, far less.
If we are talking black and white laser, they are easily available for under $100. I bought mine about 5 years ago for $100, then added a NIC to it's parallel port for a total of around $150. I bought a newer model of the same printer, network capable, for my mom about 4 years ago for $80. Just watch Office Depot, OfficeMax, or Staples for a sale. And Dell sells a color laser for under $200.
The biggest advantage for me since I don't print often, no ink to dry out. My last inkjet I got ONE use out of it, then had to buy a new print cartridge because the printhead was clogged.
Another day, another update to a Google android app.
My sister was a chemist who spent a while formulating inks for a competing printer company years ago. According to her, the price of the ink is a complete rip-off, pure and simple. The price of the ink has nothing to do with the manufacturing and materials cost.
What does a network port have to do with Linux and Samba? I use both, and since my printer has it's own network port I can either print through the server or directly from the desktop. I paid $50 for the network print server that attached to the parallel port on my printer, but if I bought a new printer now the network capable printers are only about $20 higher. And I can save that much by not having to power a PC print server. Also, I'm not limited by the number of parallel ports on my server, just by the number of ports on my switch.
As far as reliability, in 5 years I've never had to reboot this dedicated print server. And I've never had to install a software update or security patch. Like the printer it was install, configure, and simply use.
Another day, another update to a Google android app.
Why would I do that? /. is a US centric site, and if you don't understand, you can use google to convert on your own.
Lazy bastard.
Maybe I impress easily but I was impressed.
No one is claiming that the engineering in ink cartridges isn't impressive. This has very little to do with the economics of what price the cartridges should sell at over of the long run. Also as impressive as the engineering might be in the ink cartridges, the printers themselves are pieces of shit. Inkjet printers are engineered to be as low cost as possible and as a result they break easily, perform badly and are generally highly annoying to use. I never use an inkjet when I have a laser printer available to me. I simply will not buy a consumer grade inkjet from HP. They break far too easily and are too expensive to operate.
And thats just the ink. The R&D and engineering that goes into the cartridge and printer is unbelievable, and you get one of them for your $35 too, your own little piece of a few billion invested in R&D, tooling, and cartridge factory
Ever hear about economies of scale? All those R&D and engineering (and tooling and PP&E) costs are fixed costs once you go into production. As production ramps up the per unit cost should come down as the fixed costs get amortized and become an increasingly smaller amount. What we should see is ink cartridges being relatively expensive at first and then dropping in price over time similar to what we see with computer chips. The engineering is DONE once it is in production and the costs should reflect that fact.
HP keeps prices high through a combination of patent protection, scale, lock in, marketing, bribery (allegedly) and probably oligopoly. There are only four major vendors of inkjet printer (HP, Epson, Canon and Lexmark) and all of them share the same "razors and blades" business model pioneered by Gillette. It's not that hard for a small group of companies to (tacitly or explicitly) collude to keep prices high because it is in all their interest to do so. Hard to prove but they're smart people and understand the game. If there were more participants in the market it would be harder for them to keep prices high but it's not an easy market to get into.
If your idea of accurate pricing is how much a refill maker charges to rip off HP's formulations, have HP effectively give away the cartridges, and have you do the labor filling them, then I guess you could say the ink is cheap.
It is cheap. The ink is being sold at a tremendous markup or else the business would not be profitable since the printers are being sold at or below cost. HP chose the cheap-printers/expensive-ink business model. If someone undercuts them I'm not going to shed a tear. It was their choice and they can choke on it if the business model doesn't work. I have zero sympathy for them. I think they sell a crappy product and I think they rip people off. I used to respect HP but not anymore.
I dont begrudge HP their business model, especially since we are all the people that made it the dominant technology by buying into it.
Speak for yourself. I use a laser printer that prints 20,000 pages on one toner cartridge (Lexmark Optra) and I get printouts for $0.025 per page versus $0.10-0.15 for simple black and white on an inkjet. Desktop laser printers are available for under $200 these days and the per page cost blows inkjets away. Unless you have a specific need for an inkjet (usually photos or large format drafting) you are a retard if you buy an inkjet.
Actually they are not much smaller, if you look for example at the now ancient HP Laserjet 5, it is just as small as any modern printer.
Size is really related to the paper size the printer must handle.
The use of smaller diameter drums and these kinds od fuser does reduce the size a little, but not much.
Do laser printers do good photos on photo paper?
Not the ones you or I are likely to buy. There are high end laser and copier units (big $$$) that are used in photo processing and print shops that can produce images of similar quality. The $1000 color laser is fine for the occasional marketing brochure but my experience with them to date has been that you still need an inkjet or similar printer (say thermal wax transfer) for the best quality images.
To my mind printing images is one of the only two remaining reasons to buy an inkjet anymore. (the other is large format work) They do a pretty good job and are price competitive with other technologies for those purposes. Black and white text though is a total waste of money on an inkjet.
Slashdot is US centric, that is true. But above anything, it's Geek-centric. This is news for nerds. We are man of science. And we all use metric.
It doesn't truly matter what most people in your country uses. You used units of measure made for monkeys. If that's all you are, I recommend you head over to Fark.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
HP laser printers are workhorses and IMO the gold standard in affordable printing. I remember one ancient Laserjet 4 that was still chugging along after a decade of use and this is by no means atypical. Most people would rather buy a cheap $50 inkjet then spend $500 on a decent laser model, even though the lifetime costs are far, far less.
I still use a 4 Plus as my primary printer at the office. It originally used an external print server but I found an internal one for $5 at a university surplus sale a while back. I also picked up a 2100TN at the same sale for $10 to take home. That one replaced a 3P that I gave to my girlfriend's parents who were running through ink like crazy. They didn't believe me when I said I had a printer that would go for years between replacing the cartridge. The 3P is still going strong on the same toner cartridge it had when I gave it to them three years ago.
I'll never buy an inkjet or recommend one. Laser always.
this is my sig
Where do you get toner for one of those for $20? I got that exact printer sitting here, needs a new toner cartridge, and I wasn't too thrilled about spending around $100 for it (though I know it'll last a loooong time). Thanks.
Seconding the Brother recommendation. Been quite happy with mine.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
HP consumables (i.e.: ink cartridges) were the most profitable division in HP for a long time (probably still is). Just read old analyst reports. HP consumables (i.e.: ink cartridges) also are very profitable for retailers, with a very high profit margin per square foot. Ask any electronics buyer or global sourcing veep. The packaging costs is more than the ink (cartridge with proprietary IC and nice color box). Many printer manufacturers sold printers at zero margin or a LOSS, in order to get that ink consuming box (i.e.: printer) into the hands of the consumer so they will buy the ink. Must be quite embarrassing to actually bold face lie about it! Get an equity analyst asking the same question, and the answer is going to be lot different!!!
Real men don't need signitures!!!
thanks God its saving paper and hence wood and hence forest and hence environment and hence earth and hence future!
shreshtha19
Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it. Publilius Syrus (~100 BC)
http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/34596.html
Slowly waving my hand - "This is not the sig you are looking for."
Over the years I've owned HP, Epson and Canon inkjet printers. I refill as much as possible (with the HP, you can only refill so many times before the cartridge fails). One thing I've found to be true across the board; if you buy from a reputable source, 3rd party refill inks are AT LEAST as reliable, the output looks as good if not better, and they're typically about 1/20th the price.
It seems that all that quality is only expensive from the OEM; 3rd party ink manufacturers can deliver the same quality for a tiny fraction of the price.
I finally switched to laser when color lasers got cheap. Now that I've given up on printing my own photos (even with refill inks, it's cheaper to just let CVS or some other local store print my photos), I print so little that with inkjet, the nozzles would clog up between print jobs. With laser, I can let it sit for 6 months, print a job and get perfect results.
You joke, but I can print white (and silver and gold foil, metallic magenta, clear finish, etc). Alps thermal resin printers FTW - too bad they pulled out of the US market - they didn't adapt to the cheap printer/expensive ink scam (and had major design flaw/warranty issue with many printers). You had to know why the printer was worth $600...thermal transfer ink ribbons that never dry out and can be put back in the printer after 10 years and print as good as new. Oh, and dye sublimation photo printing too.
What surprises me is that the laser printer I purchased was relatively cheap. It works great with CUPS (setting it up was slightly painful, but it does great over the network), and--as I said--it was CHEAP! I can't understand why anyone would want to purchase an inkjet over something like this HP laser printer I've got for general purpose printing. Color photos would be the only valid reason, but gosh, I can't imagine NOT having had this printer while I was in uni. Required purchases of replacement cartridges every few months? No thanks! (To be fair, it was about $20 more than the inkjet sitting next to it, but I considered getting a laser printer for that price a steal.)
But you're right on the money, and I think maintaining this little guy is going to be FAR cheaper than any terrible inkjet I've ever had. Even if it dies this year, I'll have more than gotten my share of usage out of it.
My only gripe though is that the cheap HP laser printers follow in line with their inkjets: The printer firmware is loaded by the driver. I don't really have any expectations of how long it might last, but judging by your experiences it might just surprise me!
Thanks for sharing!
He who has no
Gah, tell me about it. I believe I mentioned in my original post an inkjet my folks had many years ago. It cost a small fortune, had separate print heads, and separate individual cartridges for each of the 4 colors. If you didn't print something at least once every two weeks, the print heads would be rendered useless. Worse, they weren't cheap.
As you alluded to, though, being as it was an HP it did have replacement capabilities. The quality was fantastic, though. Not that I'd ever buy one again--I've grown to hate inkjets.
I still don't know what happened to that printer. I think my parents have it boxed up in storage somewhere--I know I don't have it. Regardless, I vaguely remember being unable to find replacement parts period! It seems to me that toner cartridges are generally fairly standard for a number of printer models and typically much easier to find (correct me if I'm wrong). Sure, they're more expensive than ink, but they last longer.
Judging by some of the comments I've read and my own personal anecdotes from friends, I should think you're right. After all, toner is little more than little beads with dye in/on them (hence why you never want to wash it off with warm water--heat sets the ink and melts the beads).
I know this is going to sound ridiculous, and it probably wouldn't work in a high volume environment at all, but I've found that CUPS on a simple *nix box works perfectly fine, even if you have a USB printer. Yeah, it probably isn't an optimal solution for anything more than casual printing, but I can print to it from anywhere in the house on any system. It works fantastic for my needs, and it might even do well for a (very) small office environment, too. Depending on your own needs, this solution is definitely worth exploring.
Be warned, though. The laser printer I've got is one of HPs somewhat more recent models (late 2005 vintage/early 2006) that requires the driver to load the firmware. I couldn't get it working under FreeBSD back then--I'd imagine it'd work great now--and it took some effort under Gentoo to get some of the associated start-up scripts working. If I knew then what I know now, I probably would've shelled out a bit more to save myself the couple days' worth of headaches trying to get it to do precisely what I wanted.
On the other hand, for a ~$100 printer, I can't really complain. Especially when I abused it as much as I did and it still works fine.
He who has no
Agreed. I think my post is now the grandparent post to yours, and I certainly don't want to disparage your recommendations. The laser printer I settled on was sort of a spur of the moment "I need a printer for my classes, and I'm at the store" buy. (Well, I did some research and had a vague idea of what'd work with CUPS, but it was mostly spur of the moment.) IIRC, the HP was ~$100-120 (HP Laserjet 1020)--Amazon has it listed at around $114, so I guess it hasn't really changed much.
But you're absolutely right, there's no need to spend an arm and a leg on a laser printer. Hence why inkjets are a stupid idea, especially for high volume printing!
He who has no
Brief addendum:
The price I cited isn't exactly correct. Serves me right for looking at Amazon when I'm half-asleep.
It's the price quoted for the used versions of the printer. There is a newer model, though, that's about $150. I'm pretty certain I didn't pay any more than about $120 for mine back 4-5 years ago. Either way, it doesn't really change the point--laser printers are pretty cheap if you're willing to settle for something that might not have a bunch of features or necessarily print the fastest.
He who has no
I think the poster was just alluding to one of many use cases.
My situation is similar to his: I have a box I leave on all the time that I use as a development machine, file server, and so forth. My laser jet's plugged into it from which I run CUPS + Samba. Granted, I purchased the printer well before network capabilities were really all that common, and while I do vaguely remember the various pluggable print servers--even some routers with that capability--it wasn't something I considered. It works fine for what I've needed it for, though, and I could have printed stuff when I was away from home, at the university (assuming I could upload it to my box at the house--not that I ever had the need, but I certainly knew that option was available).
Your solution does sound optimal, and I might even go that route if I buy a new printer or decide to stop running my file server for whatever reason. I can't really say that using existing hardware (existing box running some version of *nix plus a few hours of my time) and CUPS + Samba was a terrible decision, though. It's worked out great!
He who has no
That's disgusting! It's also not really all that surprising.
My father bought an HP 2000c (I think?) years and years ago. It was a fairly new model at the time, quite expensive, and came with separate print heads for each color (CMYK). It also had separate ink cartridges for all four colors, so if something wasn't working, you'd likely have to replace at least two components: a print head plus the ink cartridge.
In the end, I think my folks boxed it up and packed it away somewhere. During my high school years, I vaguely remember that it worked reasonably well, but the print heads would need replacing over the summer because no one had much need to use it. Given the price of the components, it definitely wasn't worth it. As a consequence, we did most of our printing from a laser combo printer (also HP) at their business.
The cheap laser printer I have has been abused with a lot of pages having been churned through it, and I'm really amazed at how well it's held up considering it was probably about the same price as a slightly more advanced inkjet. Plus it's not nearly as noisy and doesn't rattle the desk like an earthquake's going off whenever it's running. Though, the warming up cycle and roller motion does still tend to scare the cat. (He hates printers.)
I think it's interesting just how many Slashdotters have posted related to my slight digs at inkjets about how much they'd rather use a laser printer. It doesn't surprise me given my experiences, and I certainly agree: Printing in volume with an inkjet is almost financial suicide. Yet, almost ironically, so is not using it frequently!
He who has no