Recent study show customers have no basis for comparison when buying printers, which results in $6 billion overpay on ink every year.

The American Consumer Institute released a new white paper entitled “Inkjet Prices, Printing Costs and Consumer Welfare” disclosing pricing strategies adopted within the inkjet industry. This is the first document made by public organization (we don’t consider numerous articles on the topic in magazines and sites by independent authors).

Inkjet printers are usually under-priced or even sell in the red to make them more appealing for purchase. However, the manufacturers make up the profit on overpriced ink, and consumers are left with no choice and spend hundreds of extra dollars to operate the printers. The printer ink is currently one of the most expensive liquids in the world. The price of it can be compared with that of the world’s finest champagne, gasoline and most luxury fragrances.

Currently, there’s no standardized printer ink unit pricing, such as cents per printed page. In this situation, customers at the shop have no information about real printing costs. They buy cartridges without knowing how much ink is in them or how many pages one cartridge will print. The lowest price cannot serve as the rule of thumb, because very often the lowest priced cartridges have much less ink.

The paper also suggests that adoption of a form of truth-in-labeling would allow customers to compare each printer’s cost-of-ink per printed page. The paper concludes that competition in the inkjet printer and ink sectors would be much more intense if consumers were made aware of the cost implications of their printer choices. Better information means lower costs for consumers.

I believe this is a good start. If more public organizations begin informing consumers on the issues and thus affecting the manufacturers, the situation with overpriced printer ink may really change for the better.

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In February, 2006, Epson filed a complaint against 24 US, Korean, German, and Chinese companies that were importing and selling ink cartridges violating Epson’s patents.

In March, 2007, The U.S. International Trade Commission issued the Initial Determination that found all 11 patents belonging to Seiko Epson Corporation to be valid and all ink cartridges at issue to violate one or more of the patents.

The other day, the ITC issued what they call a Final Determination to support, with slight moderations that don’t change the outcome, the Initial Determination. The ITC also prohibited import of all guilty cartridges into the US, as well as sale and distribution of those cartridges in the U.S. by certain domestic companies.

The Final Determination is now to be review by the President within 60 days, to decide if there are any reasons to disapprove the Final Determination. During the review period, importers may continue to import infringing cartridges into the US only if they post a bond of $13.60 per cartridge.

If the President does not disapprove the Final Determination, then all importers must cease importing infringing products entirely. I wonder what this “does not disapprove” is. Does it mean that EXPRESSED agreement of the President is NOT required or something, and if the Determination simply lies on the President table (or wherever such documents are kept) for 60 days, it will automatically come into effect?

Either way, it doesn’t look good for both ink cartridge importers and ink cartridge buyers – no profit for the ones, no cheap inks for the others.

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American scientists please us with another achievement in printing technology. They found a new method printing finely-detailed microscopic images with an enzyme instead of ink.

The new method known as microcontact printing and reported to have a wide application for rapidly transferring high-resolution images onto large surfaces. However, current nanoscale printing technology depends on the diffusion of ink, and cannot reproduce details finer than one hundred nanometers in diameter.

In the new technology, “biocatalytic microcontact printing”, a nano-print is coated with an enzyme - a protein that fastens chemical reactions.

The enzyme then digests away a layer on the surface, leaving behind an imprint almost like an old-fashioned rubber stamp. Because the process does not require diffusion of ink, the resolution of microcontact printed images is about 100 times greater than conventional technology allows for.

The technique creates potential for faster, less expensive methods of nanolithography, which could be used to create complex structures for micromachines, biosensors, and other nanoscale devices, says Science Daily.

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This post may be interesting to you if you own a Canon or Epson inkjet printer and still can’t decide whether to use genuine of compatible inks to print your photos. This post will, probably, make you feel disappointed if own a Canon or Epson inkjet printer and chose compatible inks to capture the moments of your life into paper with compatible inks. This post will make you feel proud of using genuine inks for your Canon or Epson printer.

Let’s get to the point. Allion Test Labs, Inc. a Taiwan-based company that verifies product quality and interoperability of PCs and PC peripherals, has tested color fading of inkjet-printed photos using OEM inks and third-party manufacturer’s inks. Allion was hired to do the test as independent tester and didn’t reveal the relations between test results and the ink manufacturers names. It’s only known that the evaluation was done using two printers: one by Seiko Epson Corp, the other by Canon Inc.

The color fading test was made of three parts:

• how well a photo framed under glass resists to an in-door light
• how fast a photo degrades in the dark (to simulate album conservation)
• how well a photo resistance to gas

In the accelerated gas resistance test a mixture of gases is used to simulate aging of a photo, so that one year of real life can be tested in 72 hours (if you are interested in the actual gas formulations, visit the original news page).

The punchline of the evaluation is this: no remarkable color fading was discovered in print using original printer manufacturers’ genuine ink and paper after an acceleration test that results in aging equivalent to five years. On the opposite, color visibly started to fade in photos printed with refill ink and genuine paper, even in tests resulting in aging equivalent to one year. See that for yourself on the figure below for one brand (the original inscriptions were in Japanese):

As we see, picture printed with geniune inks even in five years is not as faded as the one printed with third-party inks. Almost the same figure for the other:

Once again, it’s clear that original inks are more fade-resistant than compatible ones.

So, folks, if you are keen on printing out Japanese girls on your Canon or Epson inkjet and want them to last the longest, you’d better stick with geniune inks Otherwise, watch for photos fade out over time.

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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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