Long time ago printer makers armed with Gillette business model, charging small upfront price for an inkjet printer, but making up the money on selling that printer cartridges. In some cases, a set of cartridges could cost as much as the printer itself. So printer makers would live happily ever after, if it were not for third-party cartridge manufacturers.

Some of the third-party manufacturers are fair business that refill cartridges and resell them, offering many consumers and businesses cheaper alternatives. Others, however, are involved in illegal practices, such as

• refilling used cartridges and selling them as “new” - instead of as remanufactured
• illegally replicating cartridges through reverse engineering
• hacking printers so they can use any type of ink

In an effort to create a pirate protection, a California based company Cryptography Research Inc. is developing a chip to be integrated into inkjet printers that would prevent from used of side inks cartridges. The chip, called CryptoFirewall, is designed for use in standard manufacturing processes to avoid additional costs.

Cryptography’s vice president of business development Kit Rodgers told News.com:

“You can see 95 percent of the grid and you still don’t know how it works,”

The chip uses already known technology of private key encryption to prevent the use of illegal ink cartridges. One crucial flaw of such encryption protecting, say DVDs, was that once hacked, it was hacked forever and the discs could be copied over and over again. The CryptoFirewall chip uses different protection scheme: it generates a separate, random code for each ink cartridge, so hacker would have to crack the code of each following ink cartridge.

Of course, that will not stop all hackers from evil doings, but creates a hard-to-pass obstacle for most of them. HP already showed interest in this new chip, however it holds back until the chip is actually available.

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Laser printing technology has long been a choice for medium and enterprise sized businesses, and that has been reasonable choice. Printing machines utilizing laser delivered high quality output at, which is crucial for larger businesses, high speed. Enter any corporate or government office to see those buzzing cubes of plastic cover and electronic inside – laser printers, copiers, and multifunction machines.

Laser has been absolutely dominating office premises, limiting inkjet printer use to home and small offices. One of the reasons of laser printers dominations was incredibly low price of black and white, printouts compared to those produced by inkjet printer. Yes, inkjet were perfect for accurate reproduction of colors, so important in a field of, say, professional photography.

However, with recent inkjet technology advancements, inkjet printers are easy to enter medium and large business sector and even dominate it.

Couple of years ago HP introduced Scalable Print Technology that changed the way HP designed and assembled inkjet printheads. The new technology allows varying the printhead width, as well as the number of nozzles and inks depending on desired performance and cost required. That means single scaling platform can be equally used for consumer to enterprise market range. Recent extension of Scalable Print, Edgeline technology utilizes fixed printheads that span the width of the paper, and provides more accurate ink-drop application and improved reliability, as well as much faster speeds.

Another player to enter and compete on high-speed inkjet printer market is Silverbrook Research, an Australia-based company headed by several former HP executives. The company has developed an inkjet technology called Memjet. Just like HP’s Edgeline, Silverbrook’s technology uses fixed page-wide printhead and already has over 1,400 patents. In March Silverbrook introduced a prototype that was estimated to cost from $200 to $300 and delivered incredible 60 full color pages per minute.

Though the technology looks promising in prototype, experts are being skeptical about Memjet’s future and all agree that it has a long way to go. Technology itself is one thing, and effective marketing with the total package and supply-chain logistics behind it is another.

Apart from HP, other major brands are promoting ink-based solution into the business space. Xerox first introduced solid-ink technology in 1990s, and since then the company has been enjoying the comstant growth of the business. Ricoh is also trying to deliver own ink-based technology to businesses. It’s has developed the GelSprinter technology, designed for entry-level black-and-white and color printing.

Inkjet technology has a bright future, as people are looking for alternatives to laser. The introduction of Memjet and Edgeline is another proof of that. It is just going to take time for page-width inkjets to become integral part of our life.

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Canon Pixma MP530 is another ‘omnipotent’ device combining functions of printer, copier, scanner and fax. Just like most printers of this class, Pixma MP530 is designed to satisfy the need of home users or small office.

However, there are, or I’d rather say, there are not, a couple of things that an office user might find useful. Media card slots and a color LCD are missing from this model, but that may not be a problem if you used PC before printing photos.

Canon Pixma MP530 faxing abilities include 40 programmable speed-dial numbers, 33.6 kbps of faxing speed and 150-page memory. The paper capacities are modest, but enough for target users: cassette and paper feeder for 150 sheets each and a 30 sheets automatic document feeder.

The printer employs five cartridges system – 3 cartridges for main color and two cartridges for dye-based and pigment-based black inks. Canon Pixma MP530 supports maximum resolution of 9600dpi x 2400dpi and can print as fast as 29 monochrome and 19 color pages per minute.

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Studies, researches and surveys… how little we would knew without them. Another test of ink cartridges efficiency was commissioned by TÜV Rheinland for Epson. The idea of the test was to find out how much ink is actually wasted every time a cartridge is thrown away.

The thing is, many inkjet printer and multifunctions use multi-ink cartridges, e.g. cartridges containing three or more color. When you print photos or graphics, one color inevitably runs out faster than others, and printer says, “Oops, you’re out of ink”. However, cartridge usually does contain some amount of other than depleted colors. Despites, you need to go shopping for another cartridge to print further.

Not only wasted cartridges with ink do cost you more in terms of upfront cash and cost-per-page effectiveness, they are also environmentally more hazardous than just empty cartridge. With single-color cartridges there’s no such problem, the ink is used completely (well, actually not completely, I won’t be a nerd on this point). And the single-color cartridge might be one praised and promoted in this test, since Epson uses such cartridges widely in its printers.

Anyway, the results of the research are terrible: up to 50% per cent of ink is wasted when printing business documents. Making photos is a bit more ink-use effective – “only” 40% is thrown away. It’s worth mentioning that cartridges tested (both single and multi-ink) presented multiple brands, including Epson, Lexmark, Canon, HP, Kodak, and Brother. By the way, the first prize went to… Epson, who else did you think?

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