Secrets that the printer companies don’t want you to know
October 5, 2009 by redsneaker
Filed under Gear
We all have at least one. Those sometimes temperamental machines that sit atop our desks and churn out page after page of invaluable data. Our printers. If you are like me, you have a love/hate relationship with these little boxes of joy. They allow you to make cyber material physical with a click of a button, but at times they like to get jammed with paper, run out of ink at the least opportune time, or possible just stop working altogether.
The printer companies know of this love/hate relationship and at times they may exploit it.
For instance, did you know that printer ink is $8000 per gallon? That makes the high cost of fuel or milk seem fairly trivial. Why is it so expensive? I wish I could say it was because it uses some rare trace element or requires special handling, but the real reason is because they can charge that much. That’s right! HP is a huge company and over 50% of their operating profits are from ink and toner for printers.
Take a look at Kodak. They have broken away (a little) from the pack and decided to not gouge us AS MUCH. So instead of $20 per cartridge, they are selling their ink for $10 for black and $15 for color. Still expensive, but not AS expensive.
The printer companies do say that you should only use their ink with their printers. I tend to think of this like the shampoo companies that say, For best results, use with the SHAMpu brand conditioner. It’s just another way to make more money, but the brand inks do tend to be thicker and of better quality than the third-party inks.
Another wonderful idea printer companies have come up with is setting expiration dates on their inks that will either stop the printer from using that ink on a certain date or make a huge fuss about the expiration date passing. Supposedly this is because the printer companies cannot guarantee the quality of ink after a certain shelf life, so instead of telling you that, they can just make that cartridge unusable now. Why? So you have to go buy more ink, of course! It’s sort of like the disposable razor industry where they practically give you the razor, but then gouge you for the blades. Maybe the razors have a little strip on them that turns from blue to white when it’s time to replace it, but they don’t stop the razor from functioning! Come on printer companies!
Many of the printer companies have been looking into the DMCA or the Digital Millennium Copyrights Act, the same law that prevents us from making copies of VHS tapes and DVDs, they want to apply to their printers, so you can’t use the cheaper third-party inks. Some possibilities include a proprietary chip in the cartridges that will allow the printers to work. If you or a third-party ink company bypasses this chip check, then you are violating the DMCA and can be prosecuted like the criminal that you are.
Lastly, did you know that everything you print from your printer may have a unique identifier on it? An identifier that could be traced back to your printer and only your printer? It’s a micro-printing technology some printers employ to help thwart money counterfeiters. That way any funny money printed will have this printer fingerprint on it and can be conclusively linked to a suspected counterfeiter.
What can you do about any of these items? Most of the time, absolutely nothing. We, as a society, will pay the exorbitant prices they extort from us and may be forced to use their brand no matter what. Perhaps they should refer to them as the Printer Cartel? Don’t tell them I said that.
Stumble It!
פורומינon Wed, 7th Oct 2009 2:57 pm
my 2cents of wisdom is to use hairdryer whenever the ink seems to be low or gone. put the ink unit under an open hot hairdryer for a few seconds, it will heat and melt the dried ink, and the unit will appear as half full once again.
Gridlock on Thu, 8th Oct 2009 2:40 am
“Some possibilities include a proprietary chip in the cartridges that will allow the printers to work. If you or a third-party ink company bypasses this chip check, then you are violating the DMCA and can be prosecuted like the criminal that you are.”
Already here… GOOGLE [ printer chip resetter ]
Ink Jet Printer manufactures most of their new inkjet cartridges with “smart chips” that send a signal to the printer when they are empty. These smart chips remember that the printer cartridge is empty, even after you refill it with ink.
To force the printer to recognize that a refilled inkjet is full, you will need to “reset” the chipped printer cartridge.
They do this so you cannot purchase the cheap ink refills and undercut their ink-extortion scam.
David on Thu, 8th Oct 2009 5:43 am
Anyone who buys an inkjet printer deserves to be ripped off! If you want to print photos, go to the pharmacy, they’ll print your photos for a fraction of a cost compared to what your printer costs. At one point I actually calculated the cost of printing photos myself, it came out to almost 1.5$ a photo ( excluding printer cost ), the pharmacy does it for 0.19$ a photo, and when they do it I don’t have to worry about ink levels or jams. I just show up a few hours later, pay me 19 cents a photo and am happy.
When it comes to printing text, I have a black laserjet printer, I get 6000 pages out of a cartridge which comes out to 0.02$ cents a page + paper, 0.03$ a page. This makes sense money wise, cause the stores charge much more than this.
I only print things I need to print, forms to fill out, taxes, emails with lists ( so I can cross it off ), so a cartridge lasts me several years. Even better, toner doesn’t expire, dry out or any of that stupid stuff. I am still running the cartridge that came with the printer I bought 2 years ago, and still have another 1000 pages to go ( sample cartridge was 3000 pages ).
I don’t think that the ink scam is a secret or a conspiracy, anyone who sees a 50$ cartridge that prints 200 pages ( of text ) or 40 pictures, deserves to be ripped off.
It’s as simple as that.
David on Thu, 8th Oct 2009 5:44 am
Correction to last phrase of my post :
I don’t think that the ink scam is a secret or a conspiracy, anyone who buys a 50$ cartridge that prints 200 pages ( of text ) or 40 pictures, deserves to be ripped off.
Seabear70 on Thu, 8th Oct 2009 5:57 am
To be fair, the generic toner cartridges have given me more trouble than they are worth. Yes, they cost half as much, but having them leak all over the drum and the inside of the printer sux.
WC on Thu, 8th Oct 2009 6:21 am
Kodak didn’t break away from the pack. If you check the contents of those $10 cartridges you’ll find they have less ink than the $20 ones.
Bob on Thu, 8th Oct 2009 7:57 am
The company I work for has installed machinery at HP for their printer cartridge lines and it is a little known fact that the starter cartridge that comes with the printers are only half full so you HAVE to buy a replacement cartridge quickly. Also the 200 pages text David referenced must be for that starter cartridge since I have an Ink Jet and only print black & white (it has an old empty color cartridge sitting in it for years or it won’t work at all) and I haven’t changed my replacement black cartridge for at least 4 years. Well over 200 pages including b&w photos have been printed.
Aaron on Thu, 8th Oct 2009 9:23 am
I purchased an inexpensive Konica/Minolta color laser printer 4 years ago, and even with printing on a fairly regular basis, I still haven’t exhausted the original cartridges (though black is starting to get a bit low now).
The printer was $250 (refurbished) and I’ve printed many full-page photos with the printer. Let’s say I printed 2500 pages over the last 4 years. That means $0.10 per page including the printer… and I still have plenty of toner left to go, probably for another 4 years!
Averad on Thu, 8th Oct 2009 11:51 am
It’s cheaper to buy a new printer and get a new black and color cartridge than to buy the refills. So every few months go out and spend $30 on a completly new printer and get your ink too (Yes, I know the cartridges are usually light on ink).
RF Johns on Thu, 8th Oct 2009 4:50 pm
Also if not mentioned an ink or color laser cartridge will stop when it reaches a certain percentage from 5 to 10% remaining as a result you have to put a new cartridge in losing what is left in old one.
The printing industry rates yields at only 5% of the page so if cartridge is 2,000 pages if you go above this percentage it will get less pages per cartridge.At 10% coverage that is very easy to do you get 2000 divided by 2=1,000 pages but how about 20% 2,000 divided by 4 =500 pages.
The cheapest printers to operate are the largest because smart companies buy them and they like to pay the least to operate their printers.Buying a used larger printer that hardly ever breaks down that can run millions of pages is the best way to cut your printing costs.
dwindels on Mon, 26th Oct 2009 11:40 pm
So, to recap. Laser printers are your best long run buy – even color (bring your credit card to the store). Hit the pharmacies to print your (not naughty) photos, and inkjets are a rip off, but cheap and easily replaced. Were it not for the profits of the ink, the printers wouldn’t be so cheap. I paid $200 in ’87 for a dot matrix that printed a max of three pages per minute – of text. I could kill half the life of an $8 ribbon printing a single directory… Their little extortion is a necessary evil.