Comments on: What a Racket

What a Racket

brookish — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 14:10:23 -0800

The average PC printer's ink costs more than 16 times as much as an equivalent amount of vintage 1985 Dom Perignon champagne.

By: bz

bz — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 14:12:29 -0800

Perhaps, but it tastes much worse.

By: tomplus2

tomplus2 — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 14:20:19 -0800

and both become useless if left in sunlight too long. I don't understand why there hasn't been an uproar about how sensitive inkjet ink is to UV rays. I understand that you can buy UV resistant ink, but you'd think it would be standard. Most ink even fades regardless of if it was in sunlight or not.

By: troutfishing

troutfishing — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 14:27:35 -0800

"Dear Sir, I am deeply disappointed by your product review. You completely neglected the point - how does printer ink, compared to a 1985 Dom Perignon taste? Bouquet ? Legs ? Residual sugar ?

You, sir, are a fool.
Signed, A. Gourmet"

By: dmt

dmt — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 14:32:29 -0800

I fear that we're not exactly comparing like with like, are we?

By: plexiwatt

plexiwatt — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 14:37:18 -0800

dmt: along those lines, your namesake is also quite pricey! or so i hear.

By: Space Coyote

Space Coyote — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 14:37:30 -0800

I fear that we're not exactly comparing like with like, are we? No, we're not. We're comparing some of the very best of a product, made with extreme care and the finest ingredients, to common-gutter ink.

By: xmutex

xmutex — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 14:40:17 -0800

I thought for a minute this was a dfowler post.

By: fenriq

fenriq — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 14:59:57 -0800

Is it really news that printer makers sell the machines cheap because they can gouge the hell out of consumers for the refills? I'm surprised it hasn't gotten to the point where they just give away the printers as long as a refill contract has been signed. I've given up and now just draw everything I need "printed" out with my crayons.

By: crank

crank — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 15:00:22 -0800

No, we're not. We're comparing some of the very best of a product, made with extreme care and the finest ingredients, to common-gutter ink. I never liked Dom Perignon either

By: ChasFile

ChasFile — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 15:19:22 -0800

But think of it like this: that ink is at its best right now, and will only depreciate. In 20 more years, the ink will be worthless but the Dom will be near priceless. Its important to consider the longview when making a major investment like buying printer cartridges

By: mr_roboto

mr_roboto — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 15:19:43 -0800

Hold on; this comparison isn't based on ink at all: it's based on ink cartridges. I bet that the champagne would be much more expensive if it were distributed in 1 ounce packages, each outfitted with a precision microfabricated dispensing system.

By: ChasFile

ChasFile — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 15:24:06 -0800

mr_roboto: You mean like how it was done at my cousin's wedding?

By: milovoo

milovoo — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 15:32:59 -0800

or these guys. (anyone every actually try it? I got it for someone as a gift once.) And re: the topic - I love my printer and yet I curse it every time I have to buy another overpriced cart. there is even a whole business of electronic cart resetters, something is not right in their business model)

By: jacquilynne

jacquilynne — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 15:36:25 -0800

The thing that continues to surprise me, given that printer cartridges can obviously be made to be refillable, is that it's not something the environmentalists are all over. Printer cartridges are a big brick o'plastic that ends up in a landfill. Why the companies that make them are permitted to actively block consumers from reducing, reusing and recycling them is beyond my comprehension.

By: i_cola

i_cola — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 15:41:36 -0800

You should have been at the wedding I was at last Saturday ChasFile. Couldn't get halfway down a glass before some flunkey appeared bearing gifts.

By: smackfu

smackfu — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 15:47:46 -0800

Yeah, but a family will only throw out one of those bricks every 6 months or so. Nothing compared to the other crap that's thrown out.

By: bashos_frog

bashos_frog — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 15:48:56 -0800

My wife has an Epson printer we bought in the U.S, and brought with us to Japan. When it ran out of ink, I looked up the compatible Japanese model number and what cartridges it used. When I bought the cartridges, I found I could not use them in the machine, and I would have to use cartridges made for the U.S. model, which just happened to cost 3 times more than the domestic ones. (About $12 vs. $36) Fuck that. It took me about 30 minutes of google-fu to find a free app to reset the chip on the cartridge, and another 3 minutes to swap the chip to the cheaper cartridge - which now works perfectly. Swapping means basically prying it up and sticking it on the new cartridge - very technical. Now I just have to keep doing this chip swap thing everytime I refill, but for $24 it is worth the hassle.

By: birdherder

birdherder — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 16:03:53 -0800

HP and Canon offer pre-paid mailers for recycling inkjet and toner cartridges [at least in the US/Canada]. Not sure if the other brands do that.

By: fuzz

fuzz — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 16:14:04 -0800

The EFF has been fighting the way that printer companies abuse intellectual property law to prevent competition in the ink cartridge business. Detailed briefs here and here. (last link is PDF).

By: geoff.

geoff. — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 16:16:05 -0800

I'm pretty sure LSD is the most expensive thing sold. If one hit costs $20, and most hits contain 50 micrograms, or 50/1000 of a milligram. If you had a printer cartridge of LSD, you could get half of North America high.

By: mr_roboto

mr_roboto — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 16:36:00 -0800

We could get pretty esoteric about this.... I work with a lot of biomedical research chemicals that go for hundreds of dollars for microgram quantities.

By: pemulis

pemulis — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 17:04:28 -0800

At present, antimatter costs $62.5 trillion per gram.

By: Dark Messiah

Dark Messiah — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 17:47:43 -0800

geoff: if one hit costs you $20 then you're talking to the wrong people. Gimme 15 minutes and I could find it for $3. But then, I know a lot of seedy people.

By: ChasFile

ChasFile — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 18:22:01 -0800

At present, antimatter costs $62.5 trillion per gram. At present, a flux capacitor costs $18 kagillion each.

By: ChasFile

ChasFile — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 19:00:21 -0800

obviously, I meant to say: "At present, a flux capacitor costs 1.21 jigadollars each."

By: scarabic

scarabic — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 19:24:59 -0800

Uh-huh. (Sun-Times link no longer works).

By: kaefer

kaefer — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 19:56:48 -0800

I'm surprised it hasn't gotten to the point where they just give away the printers as long as a refill contract has been signed. You mean like this?

By: Down10

Down10 — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 21:07:33 -0800

I thought we were paying for the computer chips inside the ink cartridge more than than the ink itself. Don't get me wrong, I do truly believe that the manufacturers are guilty of price fixing, à la the oil industry.

By: five fresh fish

five fresh fish — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 23:47:14 -0800

Er... doesn't the manufacturer get to fix the price of their product at whatevertheheck they want it to be? They charge $30 a crack wholesale, you're gonna pay at least $30 a crack retail plus the markup. It's not like the manufacturer is selling the cartridges for a buck and then insisting Staples sell it for fifty bucks.

By: fuzz

fuzz — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 01:19:50 -0800

fff, the manufacturers have managed to make it illegal for anyone else to make ink cartidges that work with their printers. And they put code in the chips that makes the cartridges impossible to refill with anyone else's ink. Tampering with that code (like bashos_frog did) is a violation of the DMCA. No competition means that they can fix the price.

By: web-goddess

web-goddess — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 03:00:51 -0800

This is why I put in my resignation at Epson last week... *sigh*

By: caution live frogs

caution live frogs — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 08:56:41 -0800

kaefer - xerox phaser uses solid ink sticks, not liquid like an inkjet. although who knows if the sticks are cheaper than the liquid - at least they don't have computer chips on them. we looked into these for my lab but bought an hp inkjet instead. (we were replacing an old dye-sub phaser, made before xerox bought the company and no longer supported.) web_goddess - sorry the job didn't work out for you, hope in this economy you know where you're going next. personally, i never used an epson product that didn't infuriate me. if it wasn't the hardware, it was the software - from interminable warm-up times (10 minute warm-up cycle to print two lines of text) to horrible interface design (had to use 3rd party software to force the scanner to keep the backlight on even though there was no slide film tray in place - and autoradiography films do not fit in that tray!) i never had one that worked right. canon on the other hand hasn't ever let me down... last printer i bought (lexmark) was indeed cheaper than the replacement cartridge for my older printer (canon). which is strange, given that the lexmark came with one black and one color cartridge - so logically shouldn't it have cost twice as much as the single replacement cartridge? ahh, that's the rub, folks. the first hit is always free...

By: djwudi

djwudi — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 10:10:17 -0800

I ran into this a few weeks ago when I had to buy ink for my printer and realized that it's practically cheaper to buy a new printer than to buy ink refills. Obnoxious. Even more obnoxious was that after I got the ink installed, I found out that the printer was dead, and it really would have been far cheaper to just get a new one.

By: zoogleplex

zoogleplex — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 11:27:31 -0800

This sort of thing makes me look at that new 24 ppm Xerox color laser printer for $995, and say, "hey that's a pretty darn good deal." The Epson inkjets make spectacular art photo prints for limited edition digital paintings tho. They're worthwhile for that - because you pay about $3 per print, and sell them for $50 each. Nice profit margin. :)

By: speedo

speedo — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 11:54:24 -0800

That first hit is likely a bit smaller than the rest, by the way. The bundled ink cartridges frequently contain 50% of what comes in the retail carts, if not less.

By: Zurishaddai

Zurishaddai — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 12:53:13 -0800

Amusing: Comparative Price of Liquids. (as mentioned in our earlier thread about the price of gasoline)