Inkjet prints have been successfully de-inked in a procedure designed to replicate a typical European mixed-grade waste paper recycling system.According to the Digital Print De-inking Alliance (DPDA), a study conducted in France revealed that nearly all of the samples were de-inked in test conditions.Matthias Fromm, R&D manager for Océ Printing Systems, said the tests had been carried out using conditions that simulated the total paper recycling process for mixed grades of paper in a bid to understand the impact of inkjet printed papers in commercial recycling systems.
He added: “This research was conducted using 100% inkjet paper. We estimate that production inkjet’s market share of total graphic printing is less than 1% today.”Based on the projected growth rates of inkjet printing, we anticipate the de-inking industry is capable at current volumes and that we have a few more years to jointly develop the appropriate technologies of paper, ink and de-inking methods to ensure good de-inking performance if and when the need arises.”
On Friday 28th May Cartridge World Sudbury will showcase a shiny new road going replica British Touring Car Championship (BTCC) car.Racing fans and passers by are invited to come and see the car at Sudbury Town Hall, Sudbury town centre, at a special launch event from 10am – 3pm where the staff will be handing out balloons, sweets, and free ink refills.James Peck, manager said “This year we have gone one further and are offering a free ink refill with our voucher redeemable at Cartridge World Sudbury to celebrate. And what’s more, visitors will be offered a chance of winning their very own one-off Honda Civic Type R MUGEN Concept car through the Honda (UK) promotion and even have their photo taken by the car with our mascot Daemon Fill!!”For the second season running Cartridge World is continuing its involvement with BTCC motor sport and has teamed up with Honda (UK) and Team Dynamics to sponsor The Honda Racing Team for the new season, which snatched a top spot at Brands Hatch earlier this month.
James Peck, manager of Cartridge World Sudbury commented on the sponsorship: “We are excited about teaming up with Honda UK. This awesome partnership highlights the connection between two well-known brands. Both Cartridge World and Honda represent quality manufacturing, reliability and amazing value for money. We are proving ourselves both on the track and off with our products every time.”Celebrity racing driver Gordon “Flash” Shedden is representing Cartridge World once again. He is partnering with two-times BTCC champion Matt Neal – a reunion of the drivers who last competed together for Honda in 2007.Commenting on Cartridge World’s sponsorship, Gordon Shedden said, “Honda’s brand values of sustainability, reliability and quality match perfectly with Cartridge World, so even before the car has turned a wheel there’s a great common goal with both organisations.”
Both The Honda Racing Team and Team Dynamics look forward to meeting motor racing fans throughout the ten-event BTCC season, which runs through to 10th October. Fans can see the next round at Oulton Park, Cheshire on 6th June.For those who don’t yet know, Cartridge World is the leader in remanufacturing ink jet and laser ink cartridges using quality toner and inks. Why not come along to our special event, collect your voucher and try one of our refills for yourself?
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.