Slashdot Mirror
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."
The elves are expensive to train.
...There is tender love and care in every drop!
Look. The ink is totally particle-free. No stray unfiltered contaminations bigger than 0.000001mm
The quality is assured through a 25,000,000 chineese employees, each monitoring a total 0.01 mm^3 of ink per hour under a microscope, and removing any contaminants with laser tweezers. That means only about 10 cartridges can be produced every hour, and despite minimizing the production costs, the price of the average 2,500,000 of chineese labour man-hours per cartridge really adds up! The resulting $35 price tag is really the bare minimum to prevent starvation of the employees.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I figured it was all those poor squids they had to milk that made ink such a rare commodity.
/* No Comment */
I just refill my HP 88s with ink. Not enough work to merit the external reservoir. The third-party ink works great, but it's time to alcohol-wipe the rubber parts - the paper handling isn't what it used to be.
Look here for the best (IMO) approach to making printed circuit boards with inkjets.
Bruce Perens.