Ink More Expensive Than Champagne 587
laing writes "According to this story, ink for home printers is now seven times more expensive than vintage champagne.Ink in a typical replacement cartridge costs about £1.70 per millilitre, compared with 1985 Dom Perignon at 23p per millilitre." Explains why I get daily spam about toner, but none at all for booze!
Ink is too expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
Stupidity makes sense at last (Score:5, Insightful)
So...in the end, they produce crap and try to make up profits elsewhere. In the printer business, that's either paper or ink. And not a lot of printer manufacturers are selling much expensive paper. And, they're not liekly to beat the paper industry at inexpensive paper either.
Me, I cut printer costs by saving everything on $0.50/GB hard drives instead of printing, always cheaper in the end.
Well which lasts longer? (Score:5, Insightful)
You print out your term paper...and behold! It's still there! Way to go ink manufacturers!
Of course, you could always try your luck with pissing on a piece of paper...but I don't think your instructor would like to read your essay that you printed that way....
What is all the fuss about? (Score:1, Insightful)
1. Buy mint condition Epson Stylus Photo EX @ Goodwill for $8.
2. Buy (6) color and (6) black ink tanks from 'inkinablink' on eBay for ~ $45 delivered
3. Connect to Linux box and configure CUPS
4. Print. A lot. $53 per year, plus paper.
5. Printer breaks? Printhead clogs? Repeat step #1 as necessary. I 'upgraded' from a $20 Stylus Color 800 to the $8 Photo EX.
Come on people, use tha brain a bit, you don't have to go to CrapUSA to buy this stuff...............
Re:Reassignment of terms. (Score:5, Insightful)
He said "Bottled Water", not water from refilling stations where you can get a gallon for 25c.
To explain the water>gas phenomenon, you just have to look closely in urban areas. In California, bottled water such as evian, dasani, arrowhead in tiny or medium tall bottles are more of an accessory than something which serves a specific purpose - thirst quenching; rehydration.
It is psychological behaviour and water-distributing mafia knows this. Historically homo-sapiens always had the need to carry around something. Whether it was a rock, a spear, sword, etc; later became smoking and morphed into the idiotic bottled water trend. It is the ideal successor to smoking, because it repeats the 2 basic patterns cigarettes serve - hold it in hand, intake into the body through the mouth. And thus we have companies exploiting it with inflated prices and we get bombarded with constant advertisements on TV, billboards, etc.
I'm no psychologist, but I think I've narrowed it down to why the bottled water costs more than gas.
Re:Fortunatelly, is just the ink (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Reassignment of terms. (Score:2, Insightful)
(Compare Coke and Dasani -- both produced by the same company, but the "flavored" water is more expensive than plain!)
In fact, bottled water seems to be the most expensive soft drink
Market Forces (Score:5, Insightful)
What this fact tells us is that people will buy just about anything. We've gotten so condition to the $1.00-$1.25 bottle of soda (talk about a pure profit market!) that we willingly accept a $1.00 bottle of water. Add in the snob appeal of certain brands of bottled water and you've got yourself a massive money-maker.
One thing you have to remember is that price is NOT a function of cost. Price is a function of market forces. It is whatever people are willing to pay.
Consider: I used to wirk for a computer store eight years ago. A regular six-connector 50-pin SCSI1 internal ribbon cable was priced at $60.00. You know how much it cost the store to buy it? $5.00. Yep. $55.00 markup. Why? People beleived that SCSI was more expensive.
Re:Price of bottling (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at it this way, there is 2c worth of wheat and yeast and water in a loaf of bread. They charge $2 for it. Where did the other $1.98 go? Into the cost of preparing and cooking and packaging and marketting and transporting and storage and the sales clerks salary. So what if there is 0.01c worth of water in a $1 bottle? You've still gotta pay for all the other costs including a much more expensive storage cost (refrigerated).
PS: I don't buy bottled water, I prefer juice
Re:On the other hand... (Score:2, Insightful)
However the only reason they go so low in pricing is because they have managed to trick the public into almost exclusively buying HP-ink. Ink is a substance that's *pretty* generic. And still people still buy HP cartridges even if they could get ink elsewhere at 1/3 of the HP price-tag. That's beyond me.
They tell people, "buy original or your printer'll blow or something".
It's the same BS they tell about pirated CDs, at least here in Brazil.
and the funny thing is (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Stupidity makes sense at last (Score:3, Insightful)
You could save a lot of money by saving everything on $0.10/GB DVD-Rs instead.
Besides, it's not the same. Nobody has yet made a monitor that is as easy to read as a piece of paper (though they could, but that's another rant). Also, computers are notorious for being noisy, large, and requiring electricity no matter where you want to take them, or what you want to do on them.