TONER & INK MORE EXPENSIVE THAN GOLD

[Anonymous]

Toner & ink is more expensive than gold
I got a used HP LaserJet 4000 off ebay last May $115 came with a 10,000 page toner. The toner cartridge is cheap also like $17 or so on ebay for a reman cartridge or OEM. I figure if it last a year it paid for itself. HP retail cartridge is $175+ I don’t care about color so laser is fine with me. I brought a really nice HP all in one a month before I got the laser but took it back to Wal-Mart after I found out the cartridges was only rated for 137 pages at 5%. That is just plan nuts. At least a ink cartridge should do a ream of paper which is 500 sheets. Actually if you make the comparrison with HP’s average black cartridge- #98 (11ml) @ 19.99 it’s $1.82 a ML. However, what none of the press tells the readers is that ALLLLLLL printer companies’ ink is priced this way. What you don’t tell us is that over the last 5 years, ALLLLL printer companies have improved the effiency of printing by being able to print as many pages using less ink. You do a disservice to your readers when you don’t say which cartridge you are commenting on. All of the major ink-jet printer companies now have “economy” ink based printers as well as “medium use” and “heavy use” printers. You can’t always go by the amount of ink in the cartridge- Epson and Canon both put more ink in the cartridge because priming wasts so much when you turn the units on and off. You in the press are always concentrating on HP’s high prices… when you do your tests you don’t do them based on how home users would use a printer, turning the unit off and on..you do a straight through non stop multi page test and users don’t print that way.If you really want to give your readers something to read, do some investigation on how the major 3 printer companies compare to real world tests (not lab test). Explain to your readers what the company’s rated page yields are and what you got out of them. If a printer can use a larger cartridge- use that one instead of the lower capacity one and telling the readers how expensive that lower capacity one is.I’m not saying ink isn’t expensive, but you would think that at some point you guys would mention how expensive Lexmark (the number 2 printer company) is on ink and how much ink Canon and Epson wasts in their priming of their individual tanks during real world use such as turning the units on and off and installing replacement tanks. They’re better than in the past but still wasts more than HP or Lexmark. To sum it up… be real to your readers.

[Author]

November 13, 2006 at 11:41 AM