Slashdot Log In
HP & Staples Collude On $8,000/Gallon Ink?
Posted by
kdawson
on Wed Dec 19, 2007 08:08 AM
from the that's-no-razor-blade dept.
from the that's-no-razor-blade dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "HP and Staples are facing an anti-trust lawsuit over replacement printer cartridges. According to the lawsuit, HP paid Staples $100 million to refuse to stock competing ink cartridges. HP could make that back in short order when you consider that printer ink can cost $8,000 per gallon and certain printers deceive users to waste as much as 64% of their ink."
Related Stories
Submission: HP & Staples Face Anti-Trust for $8,000/Gallon by Anonymous Coward
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
This picture puts all in perspective (Score:5, Informative)
http://eatliver.com/i.php?n=2648 [eatliver.com]
As Jeremy Clarkson noted in Top Gear: the fact that oil companies extract oil, refine it, distribute it all for a few cents a liter is actually amazing. Gasoline is extremely cheap!
Re:This picture puts all in perspective (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe that's why it's taxed as much as it is... Oil companies continue without paying the true cost [wikipedia.org].
Parent
Re:This picture puts all in perspective (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Mod parent up! (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
More than just ink... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:More than just ink... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:More than just ink... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes the price of the cables themselves can be extortionate, but it's a one-off. USB connectors are very resilient by design, and if you get a decent cable from a proper parts retailer (I can get a 5m A-B for £1.49, around $3.00) it's not a problem given you're already spending 10 times that on the printer.
Parent
Re:More than just ink... (Score:4, Informative)
Inkjets do indeed tend to break easily, especially cheap ones. (Some of HP's expensive ones have a rather strong proclivity to die early as well.)
Old Laser printers, on the other hand, tend to last forever. I've had the same HP Laserjet 5P since 1995, and even with heavy daily use, it's showing no signs of breaking or becoming obsolete. As an added bonus, the toner cartridges can last for years on end depending upon how much you print.
It was a rather expensive printer in its day, but it's undoubtedly paid for itself many times over.
Parent
Re:More than just ink... (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:More than just ink... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:More than just ink... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:More than just ink... (Score:5, Interesting)
Who the hell buys ANY cable from a retailer like Best Buy or Circuit City? Want something worse then USB? Consider Cat5. I love seeing a 25 foot patch cord thats going for anywhere from $25-$40. $1/foot to $1.6/foot. WTF is that? I can buy a thousand feet of the shit for around $80 ($0.08/foot). Yeah, they should get some mark-up for them, but that much?
Wanna "make friends" at a place like Best Buy or Circuit City? Wait till you see Grandma about to buy one of those cables and is being pounced on by the salesguy -- then tell her about the twenty other options for getting that cable for next to nothing. It's worth it just to see the look on the sales persons face. Wonder if they get commissions for ripping people of^W^W^Wselling those cables?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:More than just ink... (Score:5, Insightful)
That being said, personally, yes I bought my TV from Best Buy, was a good deal, and on sale, no I did not buy anything else from them relating to my TV as I knew I could get those things elsewhere, thats just me trying to get the best deal for myself, but I cannot get pissed off at a entity trying to remain viable and in business.
Parent
Re:More than just ink... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:More than just ink... (Score:5, Funny)
I guess guys like Best Buy figure there's a handful of lazy people like myself who eventually get tired of digging around in boxes for hours hunting down an old cable you swore you had at one point in time, getting distracted even further as you scrounge up and discover old 5-1/4 floppies and a Hayes baud modem with rubber ear muffles in mystery box number 23. I don't know why I cling on to this crap, but Best Buy knows me better than myself I guess.
By the way, as I left store last night, some guy in tattered clothing with a grizzled beard was lurking in the parking lot and approached me, "Pssst. Hey, buddy. could you spare a DB9 to DB25 connector for a friend?"
Parent
Re:More than just ink... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:More than just ink... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
$100 million, eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Cheap Ink (Score:5, Insightful)
It is only a matter of time before someone offered inexpensive ink. It was obvious that HP was taking extreme measures to prevent someone from competing in that space.
This shows how important regulation of businesses we need to have. Too many people don't want to get involved in anything (government or otherwise). It is sad that the people who run these businesses feel they don't have to be accountable at all to anyone about how they run their business.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not saying you're entirely wrong -- but you do have think about the position these businesses are in.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
My Deskjet 550C is still running (Score:4, Insightful)
Wish they still made printers like that. I'd like something as robust but faster and higher resolution.
Re:My Deskjet 550C is still running (Score:4, Insightful)
Wish they still made printers like that. I'd like something as robust but faster and higher resolution.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know why the laser printer manufacturers haven't started playing the same games as the inkjet people. Is it a historic fluke, or is there some technical or legal reason why toner isn't
Just get your cartridges refilled! (Score:4, Informative)
Starter Cartridges still a bigger evil (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Starter Cartridges still a bigger evil (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
What really chaps my hide... (Score:5, Insightful)
...is printers that refuse to print a document when the level of one color of ink is low even if the document being printed doesn't use that color at all. I have an Epson that I like pretty much. It has individual cartridges for each color of ink but if, say, the cyan cartridge is empty, I can't print even if the page is nothing but black text. There's no real reason for it, it's strictly a software (or firmware) limitation put in by the manufacturer.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I have several printers that behave that way on windows and mac with the official drivers, but running unofficial drivers or using them on linux it will print increasingly light shades of grey until it runs out completely... Some will actually print with no ink, and just feed out blank sheets.
Just for the record... (Score:5, Informative)
Full disclosure : I work for Staples (albeit an overseas division, not the USA/Corperate). Hence the reason I'm not logged in - I don't want this causing me problems at work. That said, I'm probably not high enough level for that anyway.
Inkjet printers (mostly) stop working when a cartridge is empty or near empty to stop air getting into the lines and heads. If air gets into them, remnants can dry up inside, effectively blocking the machine on that colour stream. The problem is more likely to occur on newer machines - the reason bieng that the higher resolutions available today require narrower heads that are easier to block.
The problem from the manufacturers point of view is that a customer won't care _why_ their printer has 'broken', they'll just care that it has. Result? Manufacturers rely on technological measures to try and prevent the end-user from damaging the machine in the first place.
This is also the reason that a machine will run a cleaning cycle every two or three days of it's own accord. People complain that it wastes ink - but it's the machine trying to protect itself.
Best advice I can give you if you're looking at printers is to consider your needs. Unless you're printing photos, or onto specialist papers regularly enough to an warrant an inkjet, a laser is almost always a better alternative in the long term. A laser based machine cannot print to textured paper (it will scar the imaging drums and leave marks/lines in subsequent prints), and you need to be careful when buying photo paper - inkjet papers normally aren't heat treated, and will collapse when they go through a laser printers fuser.
That said, laser printers are cheaper to run, lower maintenance (paper dust doesn't screw them up as badly), quieter, faster, and dont give bleedthrough on the cheap papers (ie, better prints).
If you have to stick with an inkjet, don't buy cheap because the cheap ones are always subsidised on the inks. Certain manufacturers don't chip the cartridges (allowing you to use refills without having to modify the firmware or software environment), and Brother go so far as to tell you how to refill their cartridges in the manual.
Integrated heads (Epson, Brother, Canon, and some newer HP printers) won't require recalibration when you change cartridges, and are less likely to give banding artifacts, but normally require a techician to replace if they go bad or reach the end of their service life.
Replaceable heads (Most Hp printers, Lexmark, and Canon (they have integrated heads that can be user-replaced when they wear out)) require calibration on change, and are generally less suited to high-quality photo prints and the likes, but if you're printing to very rough papers, or in high dust environments, or very infrequently, will be a lot less hassle than the integrated solutions.
Basically, use your head and you'll be fine.
Wow that was long.
Parent
Re:What really chaps my hide... (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Collusion is slowly ending... (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone can go online and buy cheap refilled cartridges that tend to work. If they're buying locally, it might be that they don't trust the Internet (stupid reason), or that they waited too long to stock up on ink (probably true). I yell at my folks constantly for paying $40 for one cartridge when I can get them a replacement for $3, but usually its due to the dreaded "Out of ink" message. Convenience can often times mean MONEY.
The manufacturers screwed up, big time. They didn't listen to the market, and they decided to give away the printer and hope to make it up on the ink. That's not how most markets work, not even the razor market now. Every item has to have a profit, or someone will find a way to sell your high markup goods cheaper. Many more people now are learning that the $49 inkjet has $49 cartridges OEM, or $12 cartridges aftermarket. The days of the $49 loss-leader are over (although I think you can probably make a profitable inkjet that sells at $35, with reduced features and a generic print driver).
I honestly don't think collusion is a big deal. I know it supposedly hurts consumers, but in the long run, competition DOES begin due to what seems like obvious price fixing. I recall the early days of computer RAM when you honestly had few resources for brands. Now we have dozens. When a few companies collude on RAM pricing, the competition generally fixes it. It may take a few years, but it happens, and the worst thing to happen to those colluding is that they lose market share or go out of business when consumers discover that they've gouged people.
Legal action is unnecessary. Let the market work. More laws and regulations will make it HARDER for new companies to enter the market.
Re:Collusion is slowly ending... (Score:5, Interesting)
I see the market from an electrical engineering perspective. Overall, it's a complicated feedback system that is very nonlinear. To a certain extent, it can be modeled as a first-order linear system, and this is what the rabid free-marketeers see when they look at it. Any change in the input basically causes the market to immediately adjust its outputs to account for that. However, this perspective is simply wrong. At the very most, it's a rough approximation. First of all, the system has higher order components, by virtue of the fact that each entity in the marketplace roughly forms a first-order system in and of itself, and so the overall system has an order given by the number of entities in the market (about 6 billion). It's also very non-linear, and is subject to the whims of chaos (i.e., sensitive dependence on initial conditions). If, for example, a group of RAM manufacturers wanted to gouge the public and doubled all RAM prices, the demand for RAM wouldn't simply halve: it would decrease in some strange way.
It should also be stated that if Ron Paul had his way, collusion such as this would be perfectly legal.
Parent
Re:Collusion is slowly ending... (Score:5, Insightful)
What are you talking about? Fines stopped the price fixing scheme?
Let's look at what happened in RAM price fixing history:
2001, Elpida, Infineon, Hynix, Micron, and Samsung collude to fix prices on RDRAM.
2003, RDRAM is dead, Intel gives up hope. Reason? Price was too high.
2004, Discovery is made regarding price fixing.
2005, Found that companies colluded, were fined.
So let's see -- they stopped price fixing in 2003 because in 2005 they were fined?
What sort of malarkey are you trying to pass off in order to be seen as correct? You didn't provide one source of information, you didn't properly compose an answer that could be reviewed easily.
It should also be stated that if Ron Paul had his way, collusion such as this would be perfectly legal.
Thank God! I have competitors who have colluded together on numerous occasions to land contracts. It's called a boat race. "You win this one at a major profit, we'll win the next." Guess why my company has sustained steady, 10%-20% growth annually, for 15 years? Because we decided against colluding. Seven of our largest suppliers offer us kickbacks, which we said no to. We're more competitive without them.
I _love_ collusion. It opens a huge market for those of us who want to compete. It's VERY easy to raise money to start a business in a competitive market, even if you need 9 figures. The biggest reason we've seen fund-raisers fail is when venture capitalists ask: "How are the government regulations in that sector?"
When government introduces new laws (supposedly to prevent monopolization), the smaller venture capitalists exit the market. The bigger ones stay, of course, because they're powerful enough to subvert, or even write, the government laws.
Ron Paul, on the other hand, understands that the Federal government has absolutely no Constitutional power to declare regulations on businesses this way. They're anti-consumer, anti-competition, and anti-liberty. Collude away! I say. The competition will love you for it.
Parent
Don't like reading on an LCD? (Score:3, Funny)
Old news (Score:5, Informative)
The amount of time you need colour is pitiful, and for home use (business should not be using inkjet, no excuse) it's virtually all for photos - that's the only real time a laser can't cut it, when you want a small glossy. Then, taking your photos on a card down to the local supermarket works out much, much, much cheaper. My brother bought a load of second-hand HP Laserjet 4MV's on eBay - all ex-business, all done about 100,000 pages minimum, all still going strong five years later and toner is dirt cheap and easy to come by. This is a person who prints out 50 copies of 100-page brochures every week.
Laser Printer (Score:5, Insightful)
Buy a laser printer. For pictures, have them developed at wal-mart for like $0.10 each.
BTW...HTH do I tag an article on
So How Long (Score:5, Insightful)
There's definitely a market for such a machine. I've been using a HP Business Inkjet, which is certainly semi-industrial and although not PS, uses a common driver; but it still takes ink cartridges (double-sized black cartridge, though) and a new set adds up to a hefty amount. A bulk-fed, metal-built printer would easily outlast the number of cartridges you could have bought for the same price.
Re:So How Long (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
HP, oh how you've changed. . . (Score:5, Interesting)
But then something happened at HP. A number of years later, I remember one of the top dogs in management declaring that they were taking the company in a new direction; that their old methods were being updated to reflect better business models. --This spin-doctored response came as when they were asked why their printers had begun to suck shit.
I today own an HP Laserjet 5L. It is a piece of crud. --It's output looks sharp, but it's a flimsy piece of junk which stopped working properly about a year after I'd bought it. It jams constantly and the toner cartridge seems to run out far more frequently. I'd tell HP to go to hell, but I think they may already be there.
-FL
Re:HP, oh how you've changed. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as what happened to HP... Two words: Carly Fiorina.
Parent
"low on ink" == "out of ink"? (Score:3, Interesting)
The second article seems pretty stupid. It's about a study that makes two points:
Okay, the first point is reasonable, if obvious. But the second? Here's how the story is introduced (emphasis mine):
But, two paragraphs later, a clarification (again, emphasis mine):
Yes, I want my printer to warn me that it's low on ink before it runs dry. That way, I can check if I have a refill and if not, I have some time to go to the store and buy one. Are they really claiming that people throw away ink as soon as the printer reports it's running low?
From the summary, you might think that they actually ran printers until they stopped printing and then measured how much ink was left in the cartridge. But it seems they did no such thing. They simply measured how much warning the printers give you before running out of ink and then tried to confuse people by using "low on ink" and "out of ink" interchangeably.
A tip that works: do not share it on Windows (Score:3, Interesting)
For a completely different reason I got an NSLU2 (cheap NAS storage box from Linksys), then put Linux on it, because I needed a low powered always on Asterisk. But hey, you can attach a USB hub to it (if you run Linux), and so I did, and started trying connecting devices.
I was also annoyed, that even though my windows machine was always on, from time to time my wife's printings failed from her MAC. Not really windows' problem, but naturally she always wants to print when I overload the machine, reboot it, or play a game that eats all the resources up.
So I started using the NSLU2 as a print server, after discovering, that there was a print server package for it (actually there is Samba, Cups and p910d ).
Yesterday my printer refused to print, and the ink button/light went on, (of course it occurs when I want to print something before leaving quickly). So I just went to Office depot and bought 1 of each cartridge ($60 for the 4, DAMN
Now when I came back I started checking which cartridge could be empty. Since I use a remote port, the ink monitoring software does not work. But also because of this, you can just ignore the lights, restart the printer, and keep printing.
Before, the epson software prohibited printing, now it cannot monitor the ink, so there is no restriction. Downside: no ink monitor, but remembering, that it is the tool that makes you throw out cartridges half full, I do not want it.
Also I only print B&W, so I really do not care if the Yellow is out.
Just my 2c.
Note: of course only tested this on the NSLU, but should be the same on any Linux, or maybe macs. Just try it with a print server first, maybe it is the same.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Why not just make the printer tell the truth about how much is left, put in half as much ink to each cartridge, and sell cartridges for the same amount you are now? They could be making so much more money that way than through shady business deals like this one.
Contrary to popular belief, this isn't done necessarily to make the most money for the manufacturer. What's really happening here is that inkjet printers a while back got a bad reputation for bad for banding problems and other issues caused by clogged print heads and ink carts. What the printer manufacturer is attempting to do by using cartridge 'expiration' features is to avoid the problem by making the ink cart expire at a specific time and/or after a specific number of pages printed.
Mostly this is bec