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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."
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.
It's just like Razors and Razor Blades. That's how Gillette and Schick make their money.
Is it because yachts are expensive?
What would Brian Boitano do?
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
I'll accept that quality ink is expensive. I'll then point out that 91% of the time, you don't really need quality ink.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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.
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...
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
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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!
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.