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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.
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.
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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
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 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.
And that's the retail price.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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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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.
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.