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$ Printer Ink?

D

DruSi3r

Gawd
Joined
Nov 4, 2002
Messages
937
Can anyone please explain why printer ink costs almost as much as a damn printer. How much is profit to HP or whomever? Its almost cheaper to buy a new printer than new cartridges!!?!
 
It's just like the razor / razor blade model. Give the razor away damn near free, and make your profit on the re-useables. All printer makers do it. Think Microsoft makes any money on the XBox unit itself? I assumed this was common knowledge, but I guess not.

Atleast when you buy an HP printer, the ink is made by us, in our factory in Va. It's not from a third party, and it's not some low quality half-assed stuff either.
 
The money is in the ink cartridges and paper. They can only compete so much in the actual printer. Who knows who patented the ink jet printing process, unless they are using their own printing tech they are paying royalties or something. While in the ink dept, they sorta have a monopoly. They can patent the ink, the cartridge, lockout chips, etc. Making it difficult for 3rd parties to make compatible products. Use a 3rd party cartridge/refill kits and they can void your warranty on the printer. Basically locking people into buying their ink. Of course, there are probably a lot of refill kits that work fine, but only a portion of the people use them. And some are turned off from refilling/3rd party cartridges if they have problems with it.

Now I'm probably going to get the auto-refill system from InkProducts.com. It's the only refill system that seems sensible. You don't have to mess with cartridges, syringes, etc. Just refill the bottle.
 
That's part of the reason I hate inkjet printers. It is such a racket. I hate that consumers let the companies get like that. If everyone wasn't always looking for the cheapest damn printer possible then maybe we could have decent printers with cheap ink. Canon ink seems to be pretty cheap, though. That's why I like laser printers. Sure the toner cartridges cost more, but you get a few thousand pages off them compared to a few hundred on an inkjet cartridge.
 
I'm done with Inkjets. They're such a racket. Spend $50 or whatever changing all the cartriges. Then I don't need it for a month & forget to print anything. Next thing I know I'm spending 1/2 an hour trying to de-gunk a dried out print head. Usually it doesn't work, then I'm madly running over to Best Buy for another set of cartriges.

I've got a Color Laser on the way now. Sure cartriges cost $110 each and there are 4 of them, but at least they're rated 5k pages for color and 7k for black.
Inkjet cartriges are usually what, 500 pages if you don't accidently dry them out? 7000/500 = 14, 14 * $20 = $280... $170 difference. The laser was $600. It's got 128MB ram, 21ppm black, 5ppm color, 10/100 ether, postscript, and a duplexer for automatic 2-sided printing. Sure it's not cheap, but it'll be worth it as long as it doesn't break on me any time soon.

edit: One other good thing about lasers: Cheap $5-6/ream 20 lb copy paper works great.
 
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