Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Think Ink


After feeling raked over the coals for years whenever I've had to buy ink for my HP Photosmart printer, I finally found an alternative with ink prices that are not completely insane.

I bought a Kodak Printer/Copier for $120 that uses an ink cartridge that is only $15, instead of having to buy 2 cartridges that total close to $70 to print photo color.

But, you say, I don't care about the cartridge cost, tell me about price per page!
OK. Here it is based on this Quality Logic report:
You may notice on the right-most column that the Kodak are the only ones with 0 directly to the right of the decimal.

My Photosmart cartridges aren't even in this study, but I feel certain that their results would be equal or greater than the costliest of the HP cartridges that were reviewed.

I don't claim that the photo-quality is better than the HP Photosmart that I've had for years, but for the price of the ink, I'd rather send out for prints when I need them than continue to operate my Photosmart printer.

One other interesting thing I read about the Kodak is they are the best manufacturer for keeping their cartridge form-factor consistent. Most other brands have a plethora of ink-cartridges to choose from, whereas Kodak has reused its 10C in almost every printer. I expect this is one of the ways they are keeping costs down.

So, three cheers for competition. I'm glad someone finally entered the market with some reasonable prices for ink.




2 comments :

Great Grumpy Z. said...

You are right about the standardization of a product, enabling mass production of one design, rather than having a custom design for every printer in a manufacturer's offering, is a tremendous (not trivial!!) benefit in enabling Kodak to sell their cartridges -- AT A PROFIT!! -- for much, much less than a competitive quality cartridge for the "other" brands.

Congratulations for ferreting out this bargain, and for figuring out how they can do it.

Momsie said...

Got a nice little "Brother laser jet' after suffering the same fate as you with ink prices. Much better function, got rid of the color since I never use it for text and all is well in the kingdom again.