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."

Comments

Re:Razor Blades

[socsoc]

Razors? The scooter?

Re:Give me Laser Toner any day of the week

[mrmeval]

Samsumg ML-2510 with a starter cartridge $59. It's USB and works well if you DO NOT use Samsung's broken installer. Incredibly fast and the toner is perfect for PCB masking to etch with ferric chloride or masking brass to make an electrolytic etch. The toner makes a damn tough coating once you get it transfered. I've had to use strong paint stripper to get it off. I've had good luck using a digital hot plate to make the transfer, not so good luck with a standard clothing iron.

You can see a photo of brass etching here. The defects actually make it look better than a perfect reproduction of the image used. I made this for a friend who is a Disney employee.

http://mrmeval.is-a-geek.net/~mrmeval/images/blogstuff/brassetch/brass-after-final/dsc00064.jpg

Re:No sensible, honest person would work for HP?

[bluefoxlucid]

I designed a CPU from scratch after learning assembly in 11th grade. It only took a few transistors (I didn't know what an AND gate was...), I gave it a 4 bit insn set including MOV, ADD, SUB, and JMP. It occurred to me that having 15 different JMP insns (JNE, JE, JZ, JA, JAE, JB, JBE, JG, JGT, JLT...) would suck; so I gave it a flag register (like on x86) and began to model my insns off x86 (JE == JZ, etc).

Then I abandoned that idea and decided to have just the insns MOV, ADD, SUB, JMP, AND, OR, XOR, NOP; if the high bit was set, then the next 4 bits were interpreted as a conditional. So effectively I had JMP $c000, or 'JMP [E] $c000' rather than 'JE $c000'.

I thought this was cool because of the listings I got. The code was messy without CMP or MUL or anything, but it worked on paper. But things like, say, 'if (a == b) { a++; }' would render like this normally:

MOV $a0, a ; Copy to a scratch area
SUB $a0, b ; subtract
JMP [NE] @01 ; Jump on zero flag clear (i.e. JNE, JNZ)
ADD a, 1 ; a++
@01:

But with the way I did things, this could be done as such:

MOV $a0, a ; Copy to a scratch area
SUB $a0, b ; subtract
ADD [E] a, 1 ; a++ if equal