New York, NY – In a blog post from the Computer World website by Robert Mitchell, Thom Brown of HP makes an attempt at clarifying why ink is so expensive (via a series of PowerPoint slides).
The first and main reason cited by Brown was that printer ink was not inexpensive to develop. To those concerned about the cost per page with ink, Brown suggested the purchase of HP’s XL cartridges which have higher yields and will bring your cost per page down.
Brown next spoke about the competition HP faces in the printer ink market and why refilled products are not reliable. Basing his assertions on a study conducted by Quality Logic which was published in 2009, Brown went on to talk about how much longer HP cartridges last when compared to refilled ink cartridges. To be fair, the Quality Logic study was sponsored by HP, and the conversation did not make any mention of cost per page. Brown also spoke of HP focus group, however the sample size was small enough to be considered statistically irrelevant.
When the conversation moved to the other major vendors in printers and ink, Canon, Lexmark, and Epson were not mentioned but the majority of the venom was directed at Kodak. No surprise there, as anyone who follows printing knows the history of HP reporting Kodak going to the FTC to get a ruling on Kodak’s ink claims of lower cost per page printing. Part of the problem, Brown pointed to, was that Kodak does not offer any printers with individual ink cartridges and also he asserted they were less reliable. He further took Kodak to task on their cost per page specs because of the lack of a standard with regards to photographic images.
How does HP begin the justification on its own prices then? According to Brown, HP spends $1 billion each year on printer ink research and development. The total revenue for HP’s printer division was $24 billion in 2009.
When it first began with printer inkjets in 1985, their state of the art (at the time) print head contained 12 nozzles, and released droplets at the rate of 10,000 per second. Today’s HP print head has 3,900 nozzles and delivers 122 million drops per second.
So the real question in all of this then is why do HP and other ink manufacturers not provide the total volume of the liquid which is contained in each cartridge? Brown asserts that providing such information would only muddy the waters even more. Different manufacturers will use ink in its own way and also the size of the droplets produced will vary.
While page yield numbers can be fudged, Brown insists (though not HP according to him) that those are also confusing to the user. At least it is an estimate, which is better than nothing at all. If one looks closely at any cartridge or printer website, it will tell you that page yields will vary with use.
