The Six Billion Dollar Scam?

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.