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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.
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.
...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.
Is it because yachts are expensive?
What would Brian Boitano do?
Digital picture frames still suck. You get a tiny, low-res screen for prices sometimes comparable to a 24" 1920x1200 monitor. Sure, the display electronics will add some cost, but come on.
I always tell people to go to the store to get their digital pictures printed out. It's far cheaper than owning & maintaining your own printer, and typically higher quality. Commodity color lasers (of which I am a fan, too) really don't produce nice super-high-res color glossies.
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.
I got my first inkjet printer around the time my daughter was born, seventeen years ago. Inkjet printers may be many things -- including sharp-edged tools to gouge the hell out of people's wallets -- but they are not a fad.
Digital picture frames are not a replacement for printed photos. They're arguably tacky, especially on a wall with a power cable, they're small, they emit rather than reflect light which is often undesirable, and they have a smaller color gamut and much lower resolution than (good quality) prints, to say nothing of being overpriced themselves. When I just want to look at my pictures, I already have a monitor that's larger and higher quality than any digital frame. The biggest detraction is their power consumption. You can buy a lot of ink for what it costs to power a bunch of digital frames "around the house".
All that said, yes, the ink is grossly overpriced. I expect this will change in time as patents slowly expire.
And the expression is "short-sighted", not "short-sided". The implication is that people are, metaphorically, not looking very far ahead, not that they are somehow impaired by being tiny polygons.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
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?
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.
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.
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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.