Printable View
I usually order ink cartridges for my HP printer through Costco or Amazon.
But neither source had all four cartridges for my printer.
So I ordered direct from HP.
Even through I ordered all four cartridges at the same time, each one ships, via FedEx separately. I just received the yellow cartridge today.
How insane is that?
in the uk at least printer ink is a very competitive market and the suppliers set score by mostly offering free next day delivery, in fact if you do not offer this for anything other than the rubbish end of the market I doubt you would be competitive; suppliers can source from more than one warehouse and so deliveries can be split to avoid delay; in fact amazon are as likely to do this as anyone in my experience
and lets face it the profit margin on the printer makers genuine ink is high... for my brother a set of brother cartridges is around 90 GBP - I would not buy cheap, but I can buy very good compatible for 49 GBP -perfectly ok unless you need to be scrupulous about colour fidelity and long term lightfast
I do bookeeping for a mates business. However during lockdown all his clients were lockeddown too so no need for invoices or printed copies of email etc. After 10 weeks of not printing, of course when I did go to print, ziltch.
Ended up dumping a decent half full cartridge, buying a new one and a print head cleaning set (which worked wonders). Very expensive exercise. I have Thunderbird calendar remind me every Monday to print a test print now.
With printer manufacturers the profit is in the ink. King Gillette who came up with the flat disposable razor blade had a marketing concept, Give them the razor, sell them the blades. Printer ink is very similar and you can buy a decent desktop printer for not a lot of money.
I found this article that actually compares Gillette and HP http://mikeschubert.com/2011/10/05/g...em-the-blades/
Yes, I've read that one before. What I find even more confusing is the auto resupply and x number of prints limit. Far to confusing for my tired old brain. Not going down that road.
..and here am I buying ten cartridges for about $16, post included. LOL
My daughter uses the HP auto cartridge ordering and is very happy with it.
Don't worry, we don't have high fidelity printers or the need for high-quality prints - just mediocre consumer stuff.
What I don't like about automatic ink is your printer communicates with your computer and theoretically, HP can see more than just when your ink is running low. The concept is a good one, especially from a marketing and sales point of view, but not good in terms of privacy. All these "smart" apps are collecting way too much personal information. And they all do it. Not that anything about my personal habits is all that interesting.
@egg - my printer wakes itself up and cleans heads itself once a week - I empathise, have been there, one of the reasons I don't use really cheap ink as I have been caught out twice [once too often :)]
@paul - glad this works for you, I don't advocate spending money if you don't need to, a risk-assessment thing
incidently, if my printer locks not only will it not print, it will not scan; printing can nearly always wait but without a scanner I am in trouble
I have an older HP printer and order cartridges through Ebay. Most come from the UK but even with postage prices can be very competitive.
The cost of the ink was a reason I went away from HP for my work printer. I went with the Epson EcoTank series and really like it. With 4517 prints I am still on my first bottles of inks in the printer. Black and Cyan are still 1/4 tank and the other Magenta and yellow are still 1/2 full. This is after a year. The printer even came with an extra set of ink bottles that I have waiting on the shelf.
Ray
It's all down to peoples use-case.Quote:
Originally Posted by RKissane
Your setup would be very uneconomical for me, but it's great for you.
Ray - Looks interesting but this looks like the opposite of give the the razor, sell them the blades. It's sell them the razor at full price and give them the ink. My HP is new but when the time comes to replace I'll consider the eco tank option. Cartridges are also a hassle to recycle.
I did think of ecotank last year when my first brother went B.E.R. but word was the A3 model was to be discontinued [has now been] and I had some reservations about possible ink contamination
[...plus I'd have needed seperate A3 scanner]
Received my second of three cartridges last night via FedEx. The third should be coming any day now. :rolleyes:
its hard when you don't have any inkling of when to expect it ....
.....inkling =D>Quote:
Originally Posted by handrawn
classic, Steve, thanks for making me chuckle!
bob - i have this vision of a depot somewhere in the new mexico desert where fedex are trying desperately to herd a shed full of recalcitrant inklings into vans for delivery... I'm a cartoonist, what more can I say :p
Hat trick. The third cartridge arrived today in the third FedEx separate shipment. All I can say is I am glad I am not invested in HP.
being serious for a moment gary - is this normal or just a one off, because from a logistics point of view multiple deliveries are sometimes more efficient than spending time collecting into one.. and if HP have the right sort of contract with fedex, which they have the clout to get, it may not actually cost them any more, on the bottom line
Steve - I think this is SOP with HP. Obviously it works for them. When I got this new printer, I had some left over ink from the last printer. I contacted HP and they said they would swap my old ink for new. And they sent it the same way.
When we had our business in San Francisco in the 80s-90s, after the big earthquake that damaged the Bay Bridge to Oakland, we had to get materials to our clients on the other side of the bay.
Same idea. We used FedEx. FedEx would pick up at our office, take the package to San Francisco Airport, fly it to their hub in Tennessee, then fly it back to Oakland. It would get there (there being under 10 miles from our office) first thing the next morning. Crazy. But somehow this worked for them.
mail works this way - if I were to post a letter to the town four miles to the east, it would go via the city which is 17/20 miles to the west, maybe even the next one which is 70 odd miles away
these are long distances round here, although in New Mexico I dare say its just down the road... :)
Since the EcoTank version was mentioned, I have an Epson ET-4550. It works well, however, there is something important that owners should know. Epson uses an "inkpad" to clear its printer (jets?) before printing. Eventually the amount of ink deposited in this blotter-type system fills and must be replaced. Unfortunately it seems as if replacing the inkpad is very messy, difficult and costly if Epson does it. This happened to me at about 2.5 years, with more than 10k sheets printed. I couldn't believe that there was a limit on an expensive machine like this and complained to Epson.
Epson said that it was still under warranty (strange) and that they would send me a reconditioned unit but I would have to send them the old one. I did this and they included new ink bottles as well. The automatic document feeder on the old machine was no longer working, so that was fixed too.
So the warning is that there is a lifespan of the machine and that it is dependent on usage. It seems that they get you one way or another either with an inexpensive machine and expensive ink cartridges or an expensive machine with inexpensive ink bottles and a limited life. Overall, I'm happy to just have to add ink once in a while, no cartridges.
John - So it seems they still get you one way or the other.
Before I went with the Epson I did investigate this inkpad what Epson calls a maintenance box. I have seen some video's showing how to replace it yourself and it appears fairly easy to do.Quote:
Originally Posted by browj2
Ray