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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!
It's just like Razors and Razor Blades. That's how Gillette and Schick make their money.
Walgreens Drug stores are doing refills for $9.95. I suspect that usually that works pretty well.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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
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."
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 $300 inkjet. The problem is you bought an inkjet. Go laser.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Modern fusers in lasers are instant heat, and require no warm up time(They have a ceramic element)
Older lasers had a heated roller(Via a 800-1000W lamp) that did have a long and relatively expensive warm up time.
Printer ink is made from unicorn blood.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
I am a long time printer tech. Be aware that toner can get damp, and then must be replaced (It conducts the static cherge away causing poor quality). It is not as common as inkjet problems, but does happen.
That said I would never buy any kind of inkjet, they are all crap.
Want the proof? Take a look at ink and printer prices in various countries.
They are not charging what the ink is worth, they are charging as much as people is willing to pay. Example:
HP's C8721 cartridge retails in the US for u$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?
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.
From the website you referenced:
From that information, looks like it to me.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
HP Professional Series Color 2500CM, ink, easy refills and built like a tank (except one part). Windows XP has a built in driver for it and the driver has a useful bug - it does not care if the print head or the ink cartridge is supposed to be "expired".
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.
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.
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.
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.
Get a pet squid. Problem solved.
Hey, how's it going?
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
I figured it was all those poor squids they had to milk that made ink such a rare commodity.
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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.
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'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.
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.
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.