HP Explains Why Printer Ink Is So Expensive 651
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."
Photos != inkjet (Score:1, Informative)
I think the inkjet business is going to shrink and better technology will replace it. Not soon, but eventually. If companies need to print they use laser so inkjet has become a niche in my personal opinion.
Re:It's their business model... not the cost of in (Score:4, Informative)
Walgreens Drug stores are doing refills for $9.95. I suspect that usually that works pretty well.
Re:Razor Blades (Score:3, Informative)
"In 1901, the American inventor King Camp Gillette, with the assistance of William Nickerson, invented a safety razor with disposable blades. Gillette realized that a profit could be made by selling an inexpensive razor with disposable blades. This has been called the Razor and blades business model, or a "loss leader", and has become a very common practice for a wide variety of products."
No, it's just HP bei (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Give me Laser Toner any day of the week (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Kodak Printer (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Give me Laser Toner any day of the week (Score:4, Informative)
I've seen HP mono laser printers go for $150. Newegg's got a Brother mono laser for $70 + $2 shipping right now.
Price per page (Score:1, Informative)
Disclaimer: I'm in the remanufacturing industry
HP doesn't have an excuse. They have sold efficient printers in the past. Lets look at a few comparison inkjets currently sold by HP:
HP #21 [amazon.com]
Retail Price: ~ 20.00
Pages: 190 pages at 5% page coverage
HP #88XL Black [amazon.com]
Retail Price: ~46.50
Pages: 2450 pages at 5% page coverage
You do the math. $40.00 buys you either 400 pages or 2450*. (*side note, the print head is separate from the 88 style cartridge. It is rated at about 40k pages for around $70.)
Furthermore, the 88 is more efficient price per page than some of HP's laser cartridges. Case in point:
HP CB435A [amazon.com]
Retail Price: ~74.99
Pages: 1500 pages at 5% page coverage
You do the math. And the fun part? They don't sell 88 printers any more. As soon as people in my industry reverse engineer the carts, they release a new series of printers.
Guess what kind of inkjet printer I use?
Re:Give me Laser Toner any day of the week (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Give me Laser Toner any day of the week (Score:3, Informative)
Do cheap, new (not used and refurbished) laser printers exist for consumers?
Go to Okidata.com. There you will find a B4600 for $299.00. Sure, that's not the $90.00 you'll pay for an inkjet, but you would go through at least 10 inkjet refills by the time your first $30.00 toner cartridge runs out.
You can find better deals online than what you can find by going to the company's website. I remember a Brother Laser printer with wireless networking for $100 about a year ago.
I mention Oki because it's what I use. But HERE [google.com] is another Brother.
Re:It's their business model... not the cost of in (Score:3, Informative)
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 Phaser (Score:4, Informative)
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 [google.com].
Brother Laser Printers (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Give me Laser Toner any day of the week (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Bulk ink is about $100 a gallon (Score:5, Informative)
And that's the retail price. [atlanticinkjet.com]
CISS systems and bulk ink (Score:2, Informative)
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!
Re:Give me Laser Toner any day of the week (Score:2, Informative)
If you have one of those colour photo printers with CcMmYyK, or CMYRGBK or some other strange arrangement of ink you have other benefits such as a very wide colour gamut that some high end monitors have difficulty comparing to let alone your $100 frame.
Anyone who puts a digital frame above a print simply does not valve the print. It may be valuable for those people who picked up a digital camera and then stopped getting their pictures printed as they were only printing them because they had to anyway.
Re:Give me Laser Toner any day of the week (Score:5, Informative)
Nearly all monocomponent toner is abrasive-it has to be, it has iron filings in it to allow it to be carried on a magnetic brush.
Dual component machines use an iron filing based developer and seperate toner, but both methods are abrasive.
AFAIK, there is no laser that does not use soem form of iron filing
A tip, but the printer with the largest drum diameter you can, larger the drum, longer the life.
Re:It's their business model... not the cost of in (Score:3, Informative)
Modern fusers in lasers are instant heat, and require no warm up time(They have a ceramic element)
Older lasers had a heated roller(Via a 800-1000W lamp) that did have a long and relatively expensive warm up time.
I have proof that ink is inexpensive to produce. (Score:5, Informative)
Want the proof? Take a look at ink and printer prices in various countries.
They are not charging what the ink is worth, they are charging as much as people is willing to pay. Example:
HP's C8721 cartridge retails in the US for u$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.
Re:It's their business model... not the cost of in (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Not exactly customer-focused ... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
They're mad at Canon (Score:4, Informative)
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 [slashdot.org] 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.
Re:Not exactly customer-focused ... (Score:5, Informative)
Don't use the bundled software.
You can scan through MSPaint in Windows just fine, as long as there is a basic TWAIN driver available.
HP ink carts are different (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:It's their business model... not the cost of in (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No sensible, honest person would work for HP? (Score:2, Informative)
Skip the photos, go laser for everything else (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Give me Laser Toner any day of the week (Score:3, Informative)
Printing digital photos costs about $0.10 at Costco. Anyone with half a brain doesn't print every single digital photo they take; that's part of the point with digital photography: you can take all the photos you want, and only print the really good ones. And even if they printed all 2000, that's only $200. You're not going to get a decent color laser and a digital photo frame for that price.