Still pricey after all these years
I still use HP 45s at home, so I consider this graph highly pertinent:
Besides, it gives me a chance to bring up this post from five years ago:
The common comparison, of course, is with Dom Perignon, but since not even The Donald buys Dom in 42-gallon barrels, we decided to do the math one more time. An HP 56 cartridge (black) for the DeskJet I use at work runs $35 and contains 19 ml; one liter of the stuff — 52.6 cartridges full — comes to $1842. Multiply by 159.05 liters per barrel, and you’re looking at $292,900 for a barrel of ink.
The HP 45 cartridge contains 21 ml, so the comparison is off, but not by much.
The 3M fluid, incidentally, is a refrigerant.
(From ReflectionOf.Me via the Consumerist.)
Adam »
30 December 2009 · 2:53 pm
It’s funny because a friend of mine was just explaining to me how the business model of these things works.
According to him, companies like HP have patents on the actual mechanism by which an ink cartridge can be attached to their printers. They sell their printer on the cheap relative to its quality, and then sell expensive, proprietary cartridges that no other company can compete with.
He said that Gillette does the same thing with its razors; the way the blade gets attached is proprietary so no one else can offer blades on the same stick.
CGHill »
30 December 2009 · 5:38 pm
This was King C. Gillette’s business model all along: let the razors go for cheap, and make it up on the blades. It works rather well, all things considered. And it also explains why there’s a thriving market in cartridge refills, messy and problematic as they’re alleged (by the printer makers, anyway) to be.
Except Kodak. I’ve never seen anyone offer to refill a Kodak print cartridge. Then again, they’re dirt cheap from the manufacturer: $10 black, $15 color. This is partly due to the technology, or lack thereof — Kodak uses a fixed (but replaceable) printhead and the cartridges are just ink vessels — and partly, I suspect, due to the “We want to do things differently around here” motivation. Certainly I’d rather deal with Kodak’s tech support than HP’s: the Kodak printer I bought was a discontinued model that used an older (and crummier) version of the printhead. When I asked them about that, they asked me only for a purchase date and a street address, and they immediately (okay, next morning) FedExed out the new-style printhead. Worked fine ever since.
scooby214 »
30 December 2009 · 7:15 pm
I once had a Canon printer that had separate replaceable ink vessels. You could either replace the entire cartridge, which was very costly, or you could replace the ink vessels alone. The problem with that printer was that the printhead would prematurely fail. That printer ended up costing me more per page than my dependable HP printer.
Adam »
5 January 2010 · 11:03 am
Yeah, my friend loves Kodak for attempting to buck the trend. According to him though their printers are a bit more expensive; the idea being you pay more up front but save on the ink. So I’m not sure you’d actually end up ahead in the end either way.
CGHill »
7 January 2010 · 7:38 pm
Actually, I’d never intended to use it as a printer; I bought it for scanner/copier use. But the output was at least as good as I was getting from the old HP, maybe better on actual photos.