The Value Of Ink: Printers And The Politics Of The Cartridge

The recent encoding of a major printer company's printers to use only 'regional'

ink has sparked off a discussion about industry tactics that has led to Wall Street Journal interrogations, practical displays, and a fair amount of internet coverage. The idea of regionally encoding products being usually a thing we find related to DVDs, it was bound to strike many as an odd move.

The step is indicative of the difficulty nowadays about the survival of businesses selling 'oil for the lamps of China', so to speak. The relatively low price of printers in comparison with the running costs have seen consumers going outside to refill suppliers for their ink. The impetus, despite proclamations about print quality and malfunctioning frequency in refilled cartridges, is simply not enough to make many consumers think twice. Now we have to face the strange pseudo-Catholic situation of being rewarded with ink tokens for confessing our refill sins before the forgiving arms of these frightened companies.

The panic has been around for quite some time, one cause being the need for recycling heavy packaging such as cartridges has been taken with a degree of seriousness. This of course changes the business model; if consumers are reluctant to throw away the blades of the 'razor and blades' product package, for ecological or other reasons, then you have to cover fall-out elsewhere with seemingly odd decisions, hence encoding.

But for the consumer, what are the choices for staying unburdened of the costs of realignment in some of the major suppliers? Well, first, there's ecofont.com, a thought-through alternative to the logical but quite impractical method of printing documents with type this size for the remainder of your relationship with a printer. Ecofont names itself 'the green font with holes' referring to the carefully designed and perfectly legible font modifications that print with perforations that minimize the volume of ink used per page. Scale this up to office output levels and you're looking at a huge saving on ink, and, as the green part suggests, you're sparing on environmental impact through your thriftiness.

Other viable suggestions have been of a more low-hardware, more 'knowing your way around the Print menu of a word processor' school of thought. Apart from for presentational documents, most of us would have to admit that printing on the highest quality is something we generally take for granted; using the advanced settings to lower and raise quality as we require it is something not practised by most people in the office or at home our complaints about the price of printer ink generally come after our prodigal 'high quality' usage.

Essentially it may take some time before the politics of printer cartridge recycling, refilling and brand isolation can be brought into some workable scheme. Until then, it looks like there is no straight answer on the rise of cartridge refilling.

by: katie

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