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By Peter Piazza, About.com Guide to Printers / Scanners

The Six Billion Dollar Scam?

Friday December 26, 2008
Many inkjet printers are absurdly cheap. Or are they? A new study from the American Consumer Institute Center for Citizen Research, What is the Real Cost of Owning a Printer?, claims that those who purchase a low-price printer are being swindled because ink is exempt from the Fair Trade and Packaging Act. "This means that printer manufacturers can "slack fill" their products and profit from them; and evidence suggests that this is happening today, as some ink jet cartridges contain only one-tenth of the volume that some cartridges contained in 1999," the report states. But since there's nothing on a printer's label like an automobile's estimated miles per gallon, consumers have little choice but to make a decision about a printer without knowing its real long-term costs.

So, how much do those costs diverge among printers? A lot. The study estimates that a Kodak ESP 5 costs $0.22 per monochrome page; Canon's MP 160 is three times higher per page, and the HP C 4280 is over $0.90 per monochrome page. That means that the lifetime cost of the Kodak printer is about $367, while that of the HP printer is a whopping $830.24, many times what the printer itself cost.

The solution is in better labeling, the report says, since "better information on the cost of printing would save consumers $6 billion per year in lower printing costs." It proposes a label for printers that would show their real three-year costs right on the package, enabling consumers to make better decisions. That sounds like a great idea, since it would force manufacturers to become more transparent as well as more competitive in the long run. And that would be good news for us.

Comments

December 31, 2008 at 4:48 pm
(1) starrpoint says:

This is a good idea. Also, how much ink in actually in these ink cartages. How do you tell if they are indeed full?

February 2, 2009 at 10:44 am
(2) steve says:

Off the top of my head, the costs per page are 2.2 and 9 cents per page … which is one-tenth of what you reported — “Kodak ESP 5 costs $0.22 per monochrome page; Canon’s MP 160 is three times higher per page, and the HP C 4280 is over $0.90 per monochrome page.”

You probably should correct this error.

A consumer calculator for finding printers with lower print costs can be found at http://www.consumercalculator.org/printer_calculator.php

Steve

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