HP Must Defend Half-Empty "Economy" Ink Cartridges

An Anonymous Coward excerpts this short Detroit News story, which begins "PALO ALTO, Calif. -- Hewlett-Packard Co. must defend the sale of half-full ink cartridges with its printers after a Minnesota appellate court reinstated a lawsuit against the world's largest maker of printers. Three Minnesota women claim that the company doesn't reveal that the 'economy cartridges' installed on new printers are only half full of ink." The cost of refills is why I've given up on inkjet printers entirely (for now) -- guess which division of HP made more money than the other four combined?

Why do people bother with inkjets?

[ringbarer]

99% of the stuff you're printing is going to be black and white anyway, so why not fork out the extra $100 or so and get a budget laserprinter? Considering ink cartridges cost, what, about $50 these days anyway, you'll find the laser option more affordable in the long run.

The content is on the package

[BagOBones]

If you look at the cart. it lists the amount of ink.. in Canada it is marked in ml. If you have one of the Office class printers the black cartrige costs about $50 and contain about 40ml of ink If you hav one of the cheap sub $100 printers it still costs about $50 for the cart but it only contains about 20ml of ink.. Its clearly marked on the cart and on the box.. I ALWAYS check how much ink is in the cart before deciding on wich printer I get. By the way the Canon BCI-21 Black contains only about 5 - 10 ml of ink.

Women & Ink Jets are a bad combo...

[toupsie]

Every month I end up having to head over to Staples and plop down nearly 100 bucks for a black & white and color cartridges. My fiancé goes through them fast on our HP 970cse ($299 when I bought it) making stupid cards for her friends. Of course she has to use high quality mode so the ink is thick on the paper. We have had our ink jet now for about two years and in that time, I probably could have bought one of HP's nice Color LaserJet printer for the price of those cartridges.

The whole ink jet printer industry reminds me of the razor/blade industry. They sell you the printer cheap, then screw you hard for the inks making sure you run out fast on the first set of cartridges just like the razor folks only give you one or two "starter" blades. But then again, Carly didn't put a gun to my head and forced me to buy the printer. It works well but is expensive to operate in the long run.

Re:Why do people bother with inkjets?

[eyeball]

99% of the stuff you're printing is going to be black and white anyway, so why not...

Wow, how did you know exactly how much I print on black and white and how much I print in color? Wait, are you spying on me? Oh, I know, you must be Bill Gates, since Windows must be monitoring how much color data gets sent to my printer port so they can sell that marketing data to vendors like HP.

Seriously, I always said "Oh, I'll never print anything out in color," then I actually got an inkjet printer, and now at least 50% of the pages I print are in color. They aren't just pages with color I could turn off and do without, either. I print things like maps, signs, photos (granted not archival quality, but good enough to send pics of my cats to family members), etc..

Re:Why do people bother with inkjets?

[NineNine]

In addition, the quality fo a laserprinter, even a cheap one, is much better than even a good inkjet. The wet ink thing just doesn't look professional at all. After it dries, ti can smear, bunch up the paper, etc. And the resolution still isn't nearly as good as a laser. I got an Okidata 400e LED printer (similar technology to laser printers) years ago, and I love it. Toner also goes a hell of a lot further than ink for the same price.

Re:Inkjets have a hold on the consumer market

[p-k4]

If you have plugged your printer into a UPS, you have larger issues.

The load generated by a small laser printer is smaller than your run of the mill hairdryer. So it may be safer, but I'm not sure that laser printers are unsafe.

Also, the documents produced by injets are unsafe and are easily destroyed by moisture. This is my biggest problem with injets.

As an aside, I have used laser printers that could draw 12 amps since it did multi-stage color laser printing. And the first time we printed with it, BAM the lights went out.

use remanufactured cartridges

[mikem6677]

They key is to use remanufactured toner and inkjet cartridges from a reputable, low-volume company. High-volume companies do a lousy job. Refilled cartridges are also not the same thing as remanufactured cartridges.

A good remanufacturer takes apart the entire cartridge by hand and replaces worn parts. They then fill the cartridge completely full with toner that is often better than what HP/Lexmark/etc use.

I buy toner cartridges from this place [lptnow.com] in my city. They have a 100% guarantee on their cartridges. However, every cartridge I've gotten from them has been fantastic. I'm not sure of any decent Internet shops, but I believe this small-town shop can ship cartridges also.

I think it's common practice...

[Eric Damron]

...to sell half-full ink cartridges with new printers. I just bought an Epson C80 and I'm sure that the ink cartridges that came with it are of the 'economy' class.

What bothers me more than that is that Epson puts microchips into their cartridges so that "the user can get more information about the state of the cartridges." I'm sure that the side-effect of not allowing me to refill the cartridges was an oversight. Yeah, right.