Printer ink how much

Delivered within stipulated time. Delivered in Good condition. I am satisfied with this product. Flipkart Customer Certified Buyer 10months ago. Keshav Tripathi Certified Buyer 4days ago. Excellent service — fast and reasonable quotation, delivery boy turned up promptly and delivered the goods quickly as promised.

Will use again and would de Divyesh Suryawanshi Certified Buyer 20days ago. Madhavan Anandan Certified Buyer 8days ago. Because of this, they would fade after a few months, so companies had to develop a dye that gave permanent photographic quality. But a lot has changed since then. But there's a catch. When the ink runs out in one of these printers, you need to buy specific cartridges, and these cartridges are expensive. So why are the cartridges so pricey?

Narrator: This is David Connett. He's the former editor of The Recycler and has been lobbying for change in the printer-ink industry for years. Connett: They sell the printers cheap. They sell the consumables at a very expensive price. And basically it's a formula: The cheaper the printer, the more expensive the consumables.

Narrator: Once you've bought a printer that uses cartridges you're trapped in a cycle. You have no choice but to buy them, or throw away your printer. As a printer is typically a one-time purchase, companies don't mind selling them at a loss and making the money back through cartridge sales. The loss they make on printers means that companies need to sell ink cartridges to make a profit, and this model has led to a battleground between printer manufacturers and third-party ink suppliers.

The companies do everything they can to keep you buying official ink cartridges. Manufacturers install microchips into their cartridges and frequently issue firmware updates to prevent the use of third-party ink, which can be more affordable. Connett: Last year, almost firmware upgrades were issued by just nine printer manufacturers, so that's almost three a day. I mean, that's just, like, either absolute incompetence, 'cause you've got to do it so much, or it is a definite stealth tactic to control the market.

Narrator: Printer companies attribute the high costs to the research and development that goes into perfecting printer ink. Why is it that, whenever a vendor opposes disclosure of information on a product or service it always claims to be doing so to protect the consumer?

I don't think marketing gives consumers enough credit. Customers are smart enough to draw their own conclusions when presented with all of the facts - and should be trusted to do so. Perhaps the real reason why fluid volume isn't disclosed is because there's so little in a cartridge. By my research a cartridge holds somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to 20 milliliters.

The Heinz ketchup packet? About But that's for the new, larger, dipping style packets. The original foil package held 9 milliliters. HP's marketing team probably worries that the disclosure of such tiny volumes will make it look miserly, no matter how many pages users actually get from the product.

Which brings me to my next point: Page yields as an alternative to volume measurements. Brown says HP is the only company to include a generic maximum page yield right on its ink cartridges. But based on what? He admits that industry methods for measuring page yield are confusing to consumers, and claims that some vendors but not HP, he says fudge those test numbers.

Furthermore, there are no photo page yield standards at all. All the more reason to fully disclose the unit volume of ink cartridges. Assuming the average number of picoliters per drop for a given ink jet print head, the cost per page should be relatively easy to figure from there.

More information is always better. By not disclosing ink volumes on cartridges it looks like HP -- and other vendors -- have something to hide. Robert L. Mitchell writes on a wide range of topics, including analytics, emerging technologies, green IT and data centers.