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."
Re:Give me Laser Toner any day of the week (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, apparently HP has a patent on a way of making toner abrasive so it wears out the drum faster, allowing them to sell more drums to customers. In fact most HP printers combine the toner with the drum, making their printers some of the more expensive ones to replace toner in.
But it makes excellent prison tat ink!! (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [rankmytattoos.com] for making the gun is pretty simple, (use this [katerno.com] 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.
Re:Go laser, or pigment based inks (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:No sensible, honest person would work for HP? (Score:5, Interesting)
And thats just the ink. The R&D and engineering that goes into the cartridge and printer is unbelievable, and you get one of them for your $35 too, your own little piece of a few billion invested in R&D, tooling, and cartridge factory. It stinks to have to throw it away, but that's the model you bought into when you bought a cheap printer with disposable cartridges. There used to be lots of piezo-base (and other) printing technologies, but while the ink refills came in pints for cheap the printers were expensive, and no one bought them (not my printers, anyway).
If your idea of accurate pricing is how much a refill maker charges to rip off HP's formulations, have HP effectively give away the cartridges, and have you do the labor filling them, then I guess you could say the ink is cheap. I hate spending money on those cartridges too (more so my large format Epson), and I refill them sometimes, but I dont begrudge HP their business model, especially since we are all the people that made it the dominant technology by buying into it.
Re:Give me Laser Toner any day of the week (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Brother (Score:3, Interesting)
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".
Hogwash. (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Ink is not expensive to make. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Shill for HP (Score:2, Interesting)
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?
Re:Give me Laser Toner any day of the week (Score:1, Interesting)
I bought a color laser printer over two years ago, and haven't had to buy toner yet. I haven't been careful about what I printed...the printer volume page says it has printed 3463 pages, all the color toner cartriges indicate 100% full, and the black toner is 60% full.
I'm never buying an inkjet again.
My Dell 1320c I bought like 2 years ago, on sale at the Outlet.
The color toner carts are still at 100%. The black went from 100 to 20% in like a month, which was damned impressive as I didn't print anything that month.
So I set the printer to 3rd party Toner mode in the HTTP setup. It's printed for like 18 months since then. No quality degradation at all.
As far as I can tell, the Dell toner cartridges have a timestamp inside their firmware, and after a certain point -- it's empty, even when it's not.
Anonymous cause I used to work for Dell, and it was a Dell RM (Tier 2 tech) who taught me the trick about entering the HTTP setup and setting "3rd party toner" to true.
Re:No sensible, honest person would work for HP? (Score:3, Interesting)
Some ink cartridges cost more than a low-end CPU
Actually, pretty much all branded ones do-- a Sempron 140 can be had for $33 (including shipping); pretty much any ink cartridge costs more than that, and a complete refill costs around $100.
All you need is a tank and some algae... (Score:2, Interesting)
Get a pet squid. Problem solved.
If you're using an inkjet, you're doing it wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:No sensible, honest person would work for HP? (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree, HP is being ... less than honest.
Rubbish, yes I can buy an 'XL' cartridge that will fit my printer, it won't work however. I own a 'home' and not a 'business' class printer. The chip inside the cartridge deliberately PREVENTS it from working even though the carts are interchangeable on the business printer.
Re:No sensible, honest person would work for HP? (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's the conclusion I came to after believing the Slashdot line about printer ink: Yes, the manufacturer makes the best ink. The difference is astounding. It doesn't run; it doesn't clog. It's worth the money.
And here's a little tidbit from a different source:
I once interviewed with a company that made rubber. Yes, rubber. Any kind of rubber whatzit. I walked in thinking "what am I doing here?" and walked out thinking "rubber is fucking cool!" I didn't get the job, though.
But I digress.
One of this company's clients was HP. This company's materials scientists worked closely with HP on the R&D of the rubber bumpers and stoppers used in HP inkjet printers. They had to design a rubber that could be molded properly, etc., and not be corroded away by the ink. The guy interviewing me got quite excited when he was talking about this project. Evidently, all the parts--especially rubber--that will be in contact with the ink have to be developed alongside it because many inks ate through rubber, given enough use. So it was an added hurdle in the design process, and one the guy was very proud of getting over. And it was he who ended it with, "And that's why we don't refill our cartridges around here--we know that other stuff will slowly eat away the stoppers we designed."
So if you want to believe that everything is a lie and everyone is out to get you, fine. But it's not true. There's no question the ink is marked way up to cover the loss on the printers. But that doesn't mean that all inks were created equal.
Re:No sensible, honest person would work for HP? (Score:4, Interesting)
They are lying, they are trying to justify their lawsuits against third party ink vendors in an attempt to keep ink prices high.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1649866/hp-names-dodgy-ink-vendor [theinquirer.net]
http://news.cnet.com/Inkjet-refiller-lashes-out-at-HP-for-lawsuit/2100-1041_3-5647086.html [cnet.com]
There is no need for these cartridges to cost so much, once HP has done the R&D the cartridge design and ink formula need not change when a new printer comes out, and for the most part I bet they don't. No ink is worth $8000 a gallon.
http://hothardware.com/News/8000-Per-Gallon-Printer-Ink--Lawsuit/ [hothardware.com]
non-magnetic toner (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:HP continues to lie about prices (Score:2, Interesting)
Since I'm an old guy who was using PCs in the DOS era, I'm entitled to reminisce about how things were better in the old days:
In the mid 1980's, I was using a Citizen 120D, a 9-pin dot matrix printer (standard for So/Ho use at the time, real professionals were using 24-pin printers), and that cost around £150 in the UK ($180 in the US).
With inflation, that would be around £300 ($330) today.
Similarly, I had the luxury of using a DeskJet 500 in the late '80s. That was a $500 printer, but the thing lasted for nearly ten years. It was bulletproof.
For something like $100 back then, people in the UK could by a crappy thermal printer like the Alphacom 32 [worldofspectrum.org]
And that's when printers had their own ROMs so they knew how to print stuff without relying on drivers or Windows GDI. Before the cost-cutting started.
So I conclude that as printers have got cheaper, they've actually got worse. Any printer these days costing less than about $100 will be absolute crap, and for anything good, we should get used to the idea of spending $200 upwards for something that will probably outlast our PC.
Rant over. Get off my lawn, kids.
Re:Give me Laser Toner any day of the week (Score:3, Interesting)
Which one did you buy?
Re:No... (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, the price that the manufacturers charge for ink is still outrageous. Yes, it may be technologically complex to formulate a printer ink. However, that's a one-time cost, and economies of scale mean that it's more cost-effective to produce a printer ink in railroad tank car quantities than it is to produce it in demijohn quantities, and it's perfectly possible to design a printhead to feed ink from large bottles outside the printer -- one of the 'continuous flow' systems, generally with 8 fluid ounces of ink in each ink tank mounted away from the print head, so that there is no need to keep the quantity of ink low to improve print head response.
I recently got one of those continuous ink systems for my inkjet, and it works like a charm. For less than it would have cost me to replace all four cartridges with generic ones, I now have an ungodly amount of ink available. And if I ever do manage to run out, I can just refill the reservoirs for less than the system cost me to start with. It works perfectly well for the printing I do, which includes almost no pictures. For pictures I just go get the digital prints turned into real photos, and they'll last much longer than anything I could print at home, even using HP's "premium" inks. (Although I actually have an Epson printer.)
I think what's going on here is that HP is treating this as "everyone wants to print photos", and thus they assume everyone needs super high-quality premium ink. (Or at least that's the argument they're trying to make to justify their ink costs.) But the reality is, most people don't print that many photos, they print out stuff to read, or maybe a cute graphic, or a spreadsheet to reference, and so on. Stuff that doesn't need high quality inks, it just needs to be good enough to read it. And the cheap generic inks you can get for continuous ink systems more than meets those requirements. But HP and company doesn't want you to know that.
Now I've seen suggestions that the ink may eventually cause deterioration of internal parts of the printer, but by the time I run into that problem, I'll have saved enough money from not buying the expensive ink cartridges to buy at least 3-4 printers to replace it with. Even if I have to buy a new continuous ink system for the replacement printer, I'll still come out ahead. The printer companies know this, and they really don't want all consumers to find out about it, because then their entire business model (practically give away the printers, charge out the wazoo for the ink) will collapse and they'll be screwed.
Re:Razor Blades (Score:1, Interesting)
Or you can spend a premium on a nice razor, like the old safety razors [classicshaving.com], and purchase replacement blades for around $0.50 each.