FLOGGER OF EXPENSIVE PRINTER INK HP seems to have figured out a novel way of extracting the maximum amount of money from punters who have been unfortunate enough to buy one of its printers.
Not content with overcharging for ink, the printer manufacturer apparently regionalises its print cartridges, as one user found out. The unfortunate soul in question, Michelle Sullivan, bought an HP Photosmart C7180 printer Down Under but found that when she moved to Malta she was unable to purchase compatible print cartridges.
The problem wasn’t due to anything as innocent as regional unavailability, but rather it was down to HP’s decision to create specific cartridges for different regions for the same printer.
The surprised and shocked Ms Sullivan went to great lengths to find out whether this apparent HP policy was actually true. After questioning the main dealer for HP in Malta, who told her that ink cartridges were regionalised, Sullivan then had a chat with a HP online support agent.
Unsurprisingly the response she received was less than helpful, with the agent suggesting that Sullivan try Bestbuy or Walmart, not realising that neither of these retailers has stores in Malta.
HP has in the past put some rather money-grubbing restrictions on its printing products. A number of its toner cartridges had page count chips that would stop the printer after a certain number of pages had been printed, regardless of whether there was still toner left in the cartridge. For the benefit of punters’ wallets and the environment, a cottage industry flogging ‘blank’ page counting chips successfully grew out of HP’s corporate greed.
This sorry saga has left Ms Sullivan with a six-month old printer that is effectively useless simply because she decided to move. If you’ve had similar issues with HP’s cartridge restrictions we’d love to hear them.At press time HP has yet to respond to our questions on this matter.
Tired of hearing customers whine that printer ink is too expensive–and facing competition from ink-cartridge refillers–executives at Hewlett-Packard’s printing division would like to buff up the print giant’s reputation with consumers. So the company recently sent Thom Brown, who specializes in “competitive media intelligence,” on a media tour with a presentation called “Why Does Ink Cost So Much?” Opening a bag of props including a trio of shot glasses, squares of foam and some disassembled print heads, Mr. Brown earlier this week explained the complex workings of H-P print heads, and the billions of dollars the company has spent over the years developing them.He talked about the challenges in shooting drops of ink at moving pages of paper, and the perils of refilling ink cartridges rather than buying new ones from H-P. Refilling involves poking a hole in an H-P cartridge and filling it with a god-knows-what mixture of non-H-P ink–a process that can lead to smudging and other poor performance, Mr. Brown said. H-P, he added, has heard from plenty of customers who tried refilling. “A lot of them don’t have good experiences,” he said.
In addition to research-and-development, the expense of ink cartridges comes from H-P’s high-tech testing of cartridges that break. The company uses electron microscopes, Mr. Brown said, to figure out what made a printhead malfunction. H-P has started what it calls an “Ink Amnesty Program” to bring back customers who have left H-P for refillers. In exchange for sharing your bad-ink story, the program will give consumers a 20% discount coupon for H-P ink.Of course it’s not just R&D that makes H-P’s ink costs so much. With more than 40% of the worldwide printer market last year, according to research firm IDC, H-P doesn’t face serious competitive pressure that would force it to drop prices.
Mr. Brown said his area of knowledge is printing technology, not profits.
But in the company’s last quarterly earnings report, H-P’s printing division booked more than $6 billion in sales and more than $1 billion in operating profit. Its operating profit margin was 17%, but Shaw Wu, an analyst with Kaufman Brothers, said that includes sales of low-profit printers. On ink alone, he estimates that H-P’s margin is somewhere between 20% and 30%.
We’ve been all over the ins and outs of HP’s planned acquisition of Palm—the tablets, the phones, the bright promise of a cloud services company buying a cloud client, the grim prospect of one failed smartphone maker buying another—but for all that Palm will supposedly do for HP, the one thing I haven’t seen mentioned is the idea that webOS will go into a printer. At least, not until HP’s quarterly earnings call, where HP’s Mark Hurd said:
I think in this case of Palm, and our planned acquisition of Palm, it really has more to do with the intellectual property and the fact that when you look across the HP ecosystem of interconnected devices, it is a large family of devices. When we think of printers, you’ve now got a whole series of web-connected printers that, as they connect to the web, need an OS. We prefer to have that OS in our case to be our IP, where we can control the customer experience as we always have in the printing business, and that’s a big deal to us.
In other words, webOS gives HP its own lightweight, Web-savvy client operating system for all of its consumer-facing gadgetry up through netbooks. For anything that cries out for a touch-based OS—as opposed to a stylus- or mouse-based OS—HP now has webOS as an in-house option. One wonders what’s next: Calculators? Digital cameras? (Actually, a digital camera would certainly be a candidate for the webOS treatment.)
Hurd also reiterated the obvious point that HP is indeed planning a webOS-based tablet. Of course it is—the only question is whether said tablet will be based on ARM, x86, or both. And if it’s based on x86, will it dual-boot Windows?
When discussing tablets, Hurd went out of his way to emphasize that HP isn’t necessarily abandoning a Windows tablet. “Microsoft is probably one of the best relationships we’ve got in our company, and they’re still extremely important,” Hurd said.
A 2004 Harris Interactive poll found that 55.6 percent of American consumers throw out their empty printer cartridges rather than returning or recycling them so they can be refilled and reused!
Those 270 million cartridges add more than 40 million pounds of unnecessary waste to the trash stream every year. The cartridges take more than 1,000 years to decompose.
Around 1990, rising retail prices motivated companies to start cleaning, refitting and refilling empty cartridges to be sold as a less expensive remanufactured product. A 2004 study by the Rochester Institute of Technology found remanufactured printer cartridges provide the same quality and page output as new cartridges.
Goals:
To reduce pollution by keeping cartridges out of the trash stream
To save energy by remanufacturing cartridges
To raise money to support UConn-SWCS activities
Project Status:
On February 7, 2005 the UConn Soil and Water Conservation Society (SWCS) initiated a program to collect and recycle student owned printer cartridges. Flyers were distributed to advertise the location of drop-off bins for cartridge collection in the following locations:
McMahon Hall Lounge
Branford Hall Lounge
Alsop B Lounge
Room 225 Beach Hall
The UConn-SWCS partnered with the Missouri based eCycle Group to implement the recycling program. The eCycle Group pays the UConn-SWCS between $0.50 to $14 per cartridge depending on brand and type. Funds raised by the recycling program will go to support UConn-SWCS activities like river clean-ups, maintenance of the UConn forest trails and student outreach events.
The UConn-SWCS is encouraging students to recycle used printer cartridges and purchase remanufactured cartridges which are available at most retailers that carry printer cartridges.
The UConn-SWCS is a student club open to both undergraduate and graduate students. The chapter began in 1979 and continues to draw much interest today. The UConn-SWCS promotes the wise use of soil, water and related natural resources in Connecticut through advocacy, professional development, and public education. The UConn-SWCS is a part of an international network of society chapters which foster the science and art of soil, water, and related natural resource management to achieve sustainability.
Via: ecohusky.uconn.edu
On Wednesday, Epson introduced the latest member of its NX line of multifunction printers, the Stylus NX420. Targeted at home users and students, the new print/scan/copy device costs $100 and features 802.11n WiFi, as well as USB 2.0 connectivity.
The printer uses Epson’s smudge, fade, and water-resistant DuraBrite Ultra pigment inks in four individual cartridges–one each for cyan, magenta, yellow and black–claiming print longevity of up to 118 years. Using ISO speed tests, the company claims print speeds of up to 6.4 pages per minute in black and 3.3 pages per minute color.
To print photos without a Mac, the NX420 offers a built-in memory card slot that supports multiple flavors of SD, xD-Picture Card, and Memory Stick formats and a 1.5-inch preview LCD. Editing features include sepia, black and white and red-eye removal.
The Stylus NX420 has a 1200-dpi optical resolution and flatbed scanner with 24-bit output. The multifunction device is now shipping, Epson says.