When it comes to printer ink and toner, high prices for OEM cartridges are like taxes – we complain, but we pay them anyway. So it’s interesting to read the Wall Street Journal blog post about HP’s Thom Brown giving a media presentation to explain why HP OEM ink costs so much. According to Brown, the main factor is the high cost of R&D.
Using a “bag of props including a trio of shot glasses, squares of foam and some disassembled print heads,” he explains that the print mechanism is complex, and therefore expensive to develop. Apparently HP also puts a lot of money into examining broken ink cartridges to find out what went wrong. The “challenges in shooting drops of ink at moving pages of paper” can add to costs, and the “perils of refilling ink cartridges” are cited as a reason to buy new HP cartridges despite the higher prices.
So should we believe the reasoning? It’s interesting to note that when consumer advocates recently protested that ink cartridge packaging fails to report the amount of ink in each cartridge, Lexmark gave a similar “it’s complicated” explanation, referring to ink cartridges as “micro-machines.” Maybe it’s a coincidence, maybe it’s a copout. Either way, as a consumer, I don’t really care how much it costs for OEMs to develop their ink and toner cartridges. All I know is that compatible and refilled ink cartridges are more affordable than OEM cartridges, and they work just fine for what I print. So in this case, I’ll go with the free market over a bag of props.
(Photo via Morguefile)
