The Secret that Oem Printer Companies Are Keeping From You

[Anonymous]

The Secret that Oem Printer Companies Are Keeping From You

Just follow the ink trail to the money.
People with inkjet printers have all considered, if not tried, clone inks from third-party vendors. It’s way cheaper, often by as much as 90 percent.

I will say—and printer companies do not like hearing this— that I have been playing with various brands of clone inks for 20 years and I’ve never experienced any of the problems that you commonly read about in forums, like clogged heads or ruined warranties. "Only use the brand name meant for the printer!"

Until recently, you could buy a new printer for the cost of replacement ink. It’s obvious that the printers were the loss leaders for the ink business. In reality, these are not printer companies, these are ink companies.

Now, to prevent people from buying a new printer for the price of a refill kit, companies have replaced the full cartridge sets with a sort of starter kit. The user needs to buy a second set of ink almost immediately.

Printer ink companies are also monopolizing ink cartridges for as long as they can. This means there are all sorts of different sizes and shapes of the cartridges themselves. I challenge anyone with an inkjet printer to find their ink at an Office Depot. The ink aisle is a mile long and there are hundreds of cartridges to choose from, each one compatible with a very narrow line of printers.

The vendors of clone ink have to put in production the exact same cartridge, often with an embedded chip that tells the printer who made the cartridge. With some Epson printers, you get a message when you load a foreign ink cartridge that asks you if you are sure you want to take this dreaded risk. You can click "yes" and the printer treats the cartridge like an Epson cartridge. This is great and commendable, but whether the company was forced to be this amenable, I do not know.

Once in a while, especially with the large pro models of printers, I have dropped in clone ink that was recognized as genuine Epson ink even though it didn’t say Epson. How could it be Epson? Well, the little chip can be programmed to trick the printer, I suppose.

The question on my mind is whether it is possible that the major clone ink maker for Epson printers actually is Epson. This would, of course, have to remain a dark secret because who needs that aggravation?

The model for this sort of activity is rampant in many industries. The gasoline business, for example, services a huge number of cut-rate operations, none of which have refining capability. So, they fill their tanks with gasoline from the big boys.

I’ve known about this practice ever since I worked for a refiner myself. It was a known fact that Union Oil furnished all sorts of unbranded gas stations with its gasoline. I specifically asked the manager at a Costco gas station and he told me it was Union gas, delivered in unmarked tanker trucks.

I should mention that the French Vodka sold under the Kirkland label is Grey Goose too, but costs half the price.

Now, I know from my days at the oil refinery that the exact blend of gas was not the same for the OEM customers. It did not have the full contingent of high-end organic detergents blended in. This made it a slightly inferior product. Since California now requires all gasoline to include those detergents, I have no idea if the gas in identical or not. All I know is that it is cheaper and the car runs fine.

But back to ink. Why wouldn’t this exact same practice be going on? How many companies actually can manufacture fancy ink for inkjets, and why wouldn’t they pull a similar stunt? Well, I think they do because it just makes sense.

No printer or ink company would want the public to know this, so here is another assertion: I am convinced that many of the rumors about head-clogging attributed to clone ink are planted in the forums to confuse people trying to do research on the Internet. You simply cannot find an honest forum.

And when you consider the fact that the big print shops buy special feeding mechanisms that feed huge bottles of bulk clone ink into their printers, you have to wonder how much accurate information we can even find about this. These "professionals" have zero problem using this stuff by the gallons.

I may just be a lucky guy for never having run into the head-clogging clone cartridge that ruined the printer forever, but for some reason, I don’t think that’s the case.

Still, I won’t recommend that you take your brand new printer and start feeding it weird ink. But that old clunker you are going to throw away? Test out these inks on that unit. See what happens. Then, do your own research.

[Author]

September 11, 2012 at 8:43 AM