The Ink Racket
The Age
Thursday February 21, 2002
HAVING spent several months surveying the complex economics of inkjet printing, Bleeding Edge has developed a new respect for the inventor of the science of ink-squirting - the squid.
Long hours of profound research into this creature - several plates of calamari fritti and a few bottles of Richmond Grove riesling - indicate to us not just the fact that your common squid is not only far more tasty than your average inkjet printing executive, but also a good deal quicker on the uptake.
From the outset, the 10-legged cephalopod was aware of the fact that the real point of ink-squirting wasn't dots per inch on a page, but a matter of saving one's skin. It has taken years for the inkjet printing industry to come to the same conclusion.
What other conclusion can be drawn from the high-tech developments emerging from inkjet laboratories these days? Most of them seem to be centred on protecting what are almost certainly the highest margins and most lucrative returns in the computer industry, rather than advancing the standards of the business letter, the student assignment and the Web page print-out.
Does the customer really benefit from such initiatives as Epson's insertion of intelligent chips into its ink cartridges and Hewlett-Packard and Lexmark's exploration of time-stamped cartridges, pressurised cartridges, ID-numbered cartridges etc?
Whatever spin the company publicists apply to these so-called innovations, they all serve to make it harder to refill inkjet cartridges. And, if the printer industry is to continue to fund its own plates of calamari fritti and Richmond Grove riesling, it clearly believes it has to make life very hard for the inkjet refilling industry.
The matter of refilling inkjet cartridges has been weighing just as heavily on Bleeding Edge's mind of late. We're convinced that the health of our national balance of payments depends heavily on refilling inkjet cartridges or buying so-called compatible cartridges.
The nation is already heavily committed to the International Treaty for Making Bill Gates Even More Wealthy. We simply can't afford, as well, to prop up the bottom line of Epson and Lexmark and Hewlett-Packard, et al.
Our view, in a nutshell, is this: It's not a good idea to select an inkjet printer on the basis of purchase price or dots per inch. The economics of the industry are increasingly based on selling the hardware for little, if any, profit, and instead making a fat return on replacement ink cartridges. A few years ago you could expect to pay $1000 for a consumer-level inkjet printer. These days, if you buy one or two sets of cartridges for some models, you end up paying more than the cost of the printer.
If you insist on buying an inkjet - and, in our view most small businesses and any home user who prints more than a ream of paper a month should, instead, buy a cheap laser printer - you should be making your purchase decision solely on ease of cartridge refilling.
The number of pages the manufacturers estimate you will get from a cartridge is wildly optimistic. It is based on only 5 per cent ink coverage, and the average letter covers roughly 15 to 20 per cent of an A4 page. Worse, those estimates don't take into account the amount of ink that is wasted in the routine head-cleaning passes that are required to keep the ink flowing. That same factor tends to make the estimates of supposedly independent reviewers unreliable.
The Australian Consumers' Association Choice magazine probably got closest to the real cost in a recent issue in which it looked at 17 current-model inkjets. It found the ink costs over a year varied from $159.13 for a Canon S800 to a staggering $420.18 for a Lexmark Z12 - and that for printing a mere 11 pages (seven black and four colour) per week or slightly more than a ream of paper per year. Many users would print many more pages than that.
On those figures, which we estimate are still slightly better than real-world user experience, you can expect to pay between 26 and 73 cents per page for ink alone for that supposedly cheap inkjet. If you print a lot of colour, you'll be paying more - probably a lot more.
Factor in the need for replacement printheads - and the fact that many of the colour jobs will require special paper, either coated paper for presentations or heavy matt or glossy paper for photographic prints - and you realise that, before very long, you will have spent much more than you would have been up for if you'd bought a laser printer. You'll pay a few hundred dollars more for a low-end laser printer, but it will be quieter, will print your pages more clearly and much more quickly and cost you a mere 1 to 3 cents per page. And laser printers have a much longer lifespan, which makes the total cost of ownership radically cheaper than any inkjet.
If you simply must buy an inkjet printer - and the only rational reason for doing so has to be that you absolutely must print colour - Bleeding Edge suggests that you investigate two Canon printers: the S800 and its cheaper little brother, the Canon S400-SP. If you are a photographic freak, there's the Epson 1290, with the proviso that you equip it with a continuous inking system.
Next week, we'll explain why. We'll also bring you some salutary lessons from inkjet-user land, explore continuous inking systems and give you some pointers to inkjet refilling. Right now, however, we've got an urgent appointment with a plate of fried cephalapod.
Charles Wright's The Edge column appears in Tuesday's Next computer section.
cw@bleedingedge.com.au
© 2002 The Age
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