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Feeling ripped off?

An interesting study was published this week which indicated more than half the ink you buy in one of those expensive printer cartridges never makes it to paper.

The best of a bad bunch (Epson) still only used around 80% of the ink in its cartridges before reporting that it was "out of ink" and requiring the user to go out and spend big bucks to buy more.

Another problem uncovered was that relating to multi-colour cartridges that require an entire set to be replaced when in fact only one of the colours was low.

I know for a fact that some brands will refuse to print at all (even black) if one of the coloured components is reporting empty. One of these units also doubles as a fax which will almost never need to print anything but black when in receive mode. But, run out of yellow (for instance) and you're not allowed to print a plain text fax in black.

When you look at the price of these ink cartridges and then discover that you're not even able to use all the ink that comes in them -- don't you feel just a little ripped off?

Time was when inkjet printers were expensive beasts but their consumables were not too badly priced.

Manufacturers made a good profit on the printer and a reasonable profit on the consumables.

Unfortunately, in a highly competitive marketplace where the average user only looks at the initial purchase price, the printer manufacturers found it was a much better idea to almost give away the printer but charge like a wounded bull for the ink.

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Note that I use the word 'special" because pretty soon, a myriad of new businesses sprung up offering refill kits or even 3rd-party replacement cartridges for these ultra-cheap printers.

This really pee'd off the printer makers, since the little upstarts were muscling into their "money for jam" ink market.

Thus began the claims that their ink was in some way very different and unique to them. "If you use 3rd-party ink you will damage your printer" was the claim made by most of the major manufacturers.

Of course this didn't work -- because everyone knew that if the printer did explode in a hail of plastic fragments, they could just go out and pick up a new one for a song. That was the flaw in the printer-makers' plan. They were selling the printers as a loss-leader to drum up consumable sales.

When it became clear that threats and warnings weren't working (and that 3rd party inks/consumables did work just fine), some manufacturers switched to a technology-based response.

Instead of being just a simple little plastic tub filled with ink, cartridges were fitted with chips that kept track of how many pages had been printed and made calculated assumptions about the amount of ink left. When the printer decided that a cartridge was empty that was it. It would not print any more and even if you refilled that cartridge, the printer steadfastly said it was still empty.

And that's the cause of many of the rip-off problems we're seeing now.

There's no way the printer and ascertain the amount of ink left in the cartridge with absolute accuracy. It has to "estimate" this amount based on the number of characters printed and the average ink-use each character represents. Of course when you throw in some graphics, this task gets even harder (and the results less accurate).

Preferring to err on the side of caution, it seems that virtually all modern printers over-estimate the amount of ink used and thus (even when genuine manufacturer's cartridges are used) leave as much as 40% of the ink unusable.

If consumables were cheaper you might not care -- but with the price of "genuine" ink exceeding that of gold (on a weight for weight basis), this is a real consumer rip-off.

So how do you deal with feeding your ink-jet printers?

Do you use original manufacturer's consumables? Do you refill? Do you use 3rd-party cartridges?

Or have you ditched inkjets as being too expensive to run and gone to some alternative printer technology such as laser (colour or otherwise)?

Here's a link to the ArsTechnica coverage of this report. Have your say on this...

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