Geekfoolery

I think my experience with home inkjet printers is pretty typical. I print a couple of pages every other week or so-maybe some directions or a map, sometimes one of the kids has a school assignment. If I have more than a couple pages, I try to print it on someone else’s printer, if it all possible.

One of the driving reasons behind this frugality is the exorbitant cost of inkjet printer inks. Each cartridge is around $25 a pop, with tax, around $80 to replace the whole set. Expensive enough that I’m not inclined to keep a stash of spares lying around in the storeroom, or more prudently, in the family vault. Also expensive enough that half the time I am at the store to get replacements, it seems like I can just buy whole new printer for about the same price as replacing the ink.

There are refill kits. There are cheap ink websites. These, however, are messy half-measures that perpetuate the absurd stranglehold that the printer manufacturers have on the market. What we need is a revolution.

The printer industry realized a long time ago that the classic Gillette razor business model-give away the razor and they’ll buy blades for life-is the way to go. Then they dreamed up a few twists that Gillette would envy. Lexmark tried putting chips in the ink cartridges that detect when they’ve been emptied so that even if you refill them, your computer still thinks they’re empty. When the cartridge refillers figured out how to refill them anyway, Lexmark sued, claiming copyright infringement under the DMCA. Hewlett-Packard designed their ink cartridges with digital “expiration dates” that made the cartidges read as empty even if they still had ink in them, or even worse, the cartridges could become useless before they were even used.

Why do we even have a bazillion different sizes and shapes of printer cartridges anyway? There are standard-sized consumables in other product lines that industries have no problem working with-35mm film, AA, AAA, C and D batteries, 60 watt light bulbs. Is there a fundamental design issue that forces printer engineers to make each new model of printer require ink cartridges that are incompatible with every other printer they make? I had a printer from a company that was model number 4600. After about six months, it had problems, and the company, to its credit, sent me a new replacement printer, but by then, the 4600 was out and the 4800 was in. The spare cartridges I had for my old printer would not fit in the new one that was for all intents and purposes the exact same machine.

There needs to be revolution here. Maybe this is an open source thing, maybe this an opportunity for a start-up. Maybe the United Nations can step in. There should be an internationally recognized standard for printer ink sizes. Black, Cyan, Yellow, Magenta, sizes A, B, and C. Any company’s ink should fit in any other company’s printer, like AA batteries. Printers should be sold on the basis of reliability and durability.

Oh, and one other thing… they should do something about that last page that always prints with like one character on it that you don’t need. I hate that.

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Postscript: After I had drafted this post, I was Googling to find references for my hyperlinks. I was looking for a reasonable Inkjet Refilling outfit to link to, so I Googled “Inkjet Refill”. At the top of the hit list, in the Sponsored Links section, was the heading Inket Refills and link to hp.com. You might think that such a result would lead to an HP page selling their own branded refills? Hardly. It’s a link to their branded HP replacement cartridges, with some propaganda at the top that HP Brand replacement cartridges are 35 times more reliable than refilled cartridges. Uh, sure. And 4 out 5 dentists recommend it, too.

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