That's why you don't see more printers like the eco-tank. Ink is less than 1/10th the price of my previous printer.
Demand for HP printer supplies in free-fall – and Intel CPU shortages aren't helping either
Forget Intel's chip drought: an unforeseen collapse in demand for print supplies in EMEA is the bigger issue keeping HP Inc's management on their toes. The US biz last night outlined financials for its fiscal 2019 Q1, aka the three months to 31 January: group revenue was up just 1 per cent to $14.71bn, a marked downturn on the …
COMMENTS
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Friday 1st March 2019 02:30 GMT alisonken1
Laser cartridges end up being cheaper for me
With what little printing I do at home, I would end up only using about 1/2 the ink before the ink dries and the cartridge becomes useless.
For me, the laser cartridges end up being cheaper since the toner doesn't dry up over time and little use, so I end up using the whole laser toner.
For example, the last toner cartridge I bought was at least 6 months ago, with an expected use of another 12-24 months before I need to look for another one.
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Friday 1st March 2019 05:25 GMT Schultz
Ink sucks? No,
it blows out of the printer nozzle. Look it up.
I slowly go through the 1/3 liter ink bottles I purchased 4 years ago. Unsurprisingly, black is going fastest with already some 50-100 mL gone. Works perfectly with the cheap non-HP ink cartridges that I hold as backup option.
Seriously, who is buying the branded ink and toner? There is a factor 10 markup for both, my home HP ink and my office Samsung (now HP) toner. But then, I am a poor academic and maybe we just talk about irrelevant change for the average Corporate Man.
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Friday 1st March 2019 17:18 GMT usbac
At home I made the transition many years ago. Here in our climate where the humidity runs around 10-15% a lot of the year, ink cartridges last about 3-6 months whether you use them or not.
At one point I went to the local store to buy a set of ink cartridges, and found that the black/color combo was $59. That was the end for me with inkjet.
I ordered a Dell color laser printer for $210 shipping included. It's been at least five years now, and I'm still on the original toners. And, since the printer is now five years old, I can get aftermarket toners for about $15 each.
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Saturday 2nd March 2019 04:06 GMT tcmonkey
This. A thousand, nay, a million times this.
I use a second hand HP business-class laser (a 4350). It cost me about A$150 from an office refurb place. The generic cartridge costs about $60 shipped and lasts for 25k pages. I've had the machine for years and am only on the first replacement.
Sure it doesn't do colour, but for the 2 times a year when I need to do so I just go to the local library and print there.
Just say no to inkjets.
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Thursday 28th February 2019 22:28 GMT bombastic bob
Re: Instant Ink?
I don't print things often enough to justify a subscription for supplies. Once or twice a year I spend less than $40 on another HP branded ink cartridge. And I can get them at Target which is about a mile away (or Walmart, if I happen to go there). But the printer is starting to show its age, envelopes are getting stuck and not printing properly (misaligned), the color cartridge is rarely used and I have to take it out and clean it with alcohol all of the time [because it gets clogged up], and so forth. It's always been kinda 'marginal', an all-in-one scanner/fax/copier type. Worked ok at first, then started being finicky within a year after I bought it.
HP should consider looking at their QUALITY first, if they're concerned about lower sales trends.
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Friday 1st March 2019 00:31 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: Instant Ink?
Our small company uses Instant Ink. It's great... For us anyway. £4 a month for 150 sheets is about a third of our previous ink/toner needs. If you're doing serious amounts of printing, I don't know if it adds up.
Of course since they buggered up our billing, our 3 months free got turned into £200 credit. So I've not bought any ink in nearly 2 years. Not sure that's enough on its own to take 1% off their sales though.
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Friday 1st March 2019 03:03 GMT eldakka
If you are printing in a situation where colour accuracy actually matters, you'll be using $10k+ printers anyway, because you are earning revenue from the printing, in which case it'd make sense to use the vendor-supplied or approved colour-accurate toner.
If you are adding a bit of colour to a printed power-point presentation for intra-office use, does it really matter if the accuracy is off?
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Monday 4th March 2019 02:46 GMT Alan Brown
Re: Finally....
You may jest, but....
Printing in our organisation was increasing by about 10% per year, every year.
About 6 years ago it levelled out for a couple of years and then started falling rapidly.
We're now down to 2004 levels
And this is _despite_ some groups increasing their print output due to legal requirements for hardcopy they didn't previously have.
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Thursday 28th February 2019 18:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
Get stuffed HP, I bought a Brother colour laser and have never looked back thanks to cheap alternative suppliers of toner rather than your ink which is even more expensive that botulism toxin*
As for intel CPU shortages, we've heard enough of that nonsense from Apple over the years and besides there's a good supply of competitive AMD cpu's available at attractive prices now.
*For those that don't know I believe botulism toxin to be the most expensive thing on Earth by weight, after HP ink.
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Thursday 28th February 2019 21:38 GMT Norman Nescio
Most expensive thing on earth, by weight?
*For those that don't know I believe botulism toxin to be the most expensive thing on Earth by weight, after HP ink.
Botox is supplied in 100 unit vials, but the unit is defined by biological activity, so somebody had to go off an measure by other means just how much of the botulinum toxin there is in a vial of Botox.
The answer is here: Content of Botulinum Neurotoxin in Botox®/Vistabel®, Dysport®/Azzalure®, and Xeomin®/Bocouture® - Drugs R D. 2010 Jul; 10(2): 67–73.
Results: Overall, the mean concentration of BoNT/A neurotoxin in Botox® was 0.73 ng per 100 unit vial (coefficient of variation [CV] = 3.5%)
Cost price of Botox is about 550 USD per 100 units, so if there is 0.73 nanograms per 100 units, that's about 550 USD per 0.73 nanograms, or roughly 750,000 million USD per gram.
Fairly high up on the scoreboard for the most expensive stuff by weight would be the Technetium isotope Technetium-99m used in medical imaging, which has a very short half-life of about 6 hours. As a result, it is produced on site from generators from a slightly more stable radioactive element, Molybdenum-99 (half-life of about 66 hours). These generators are sometimes called 'moly-cows' because they are 'milked' for Technetium-99m.
The molybdenum-99 used in the generators is priced at (only) about $46 million per gram - or roughly 4.6 US cents per nanogram.
At the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) conference in Sydney in December 2007, a representative of ANSTO informed the participants that a gram of Mo-99 was “worth” (i.e., could be sold for) about $46 million. Assuming a specific activity for Mo-99 of 4.8 × 105 Ci/g, a curie of Mo-99 is worth about $96 and a 6-day curie is worth about $470. This selling price is just over twice the average cost of production that was estimated by the committee.
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Thursday 28th February 2019 21:39 GMT John 104
Re: Two years ago...
I played the same game with a previous HP laser. Eventually the drums got so dirty that it stopped printing anything legible.
I do still use HP and have a nice desktop color laser. Slightly more expensive to buy than the near give away toner printers, but the cost per page is less than a penny. And, yes, if HP would lower their prices for their toner, they'd do a lot better. I use the Green branded stuff off of Amazon and can get a full load out for slightly more than a single cartridge cost from HP. SO glad lexmark lost that lawsuit!
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Thursday 28th February 2019 21:26 GMT martinusher
You can't keep selling ink at such ridiculous prices and expect people to keep paying
Quite apart from people not printing as much as they used to, there's just no need for hard copy, HP ink prices are so high that it was only a matter of time before people found alternatives. I've given up on ink-jet printers because the miserly amount of ink you get in a cartridge dries out if you don't print regularly. I'll just use a laser for the occasional print jobs and leave it at that.
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Friday 1st March 2019 02:30 GMT PaulCharlton
Did Jessie Smollet program your printer?
I have an HP Inkyjet. An OfficeJet Pro 8740. And the three color cartridges rather mysteriously "ran out of ink" and refused to print any more pages until they were replaced, all on the same day. What are the odds? The same day? All three?
Here's a hint to the boffins at HP Inc: if you want to program peoples' printers to force them to buy more ink even when there is ink still in the cartridge, then you should be far more subtle with your programing. Make them become "empty" with at least one day after the other. And do it in the last month of the quarter.
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Friday 1st March 2019 11:43 GMT Funkymunky
Printing? Whats that?
I use a Kyocera B&W wifi enabled laser I bought from Amazon for under £30 new 2 years ago - not needed a cartridge yet. I'd probably be as well chucking the printer away and buying another cheapo one when it finally runs out (might be in a pine box by then). Wife prints a load more than me as she is a teacher and produces stuff for classes. So her old Brother all-in-1 laser gets 3rd party toner cheap from Amazon, usually 2-3 cartridges a year.
My work decided to move to "Multifunction Devices" aka photocopiers for all printing 5 years ago, to do away with the 600+ printers on site. They spoke of forcibly removing all printers in one day. I managed to get them to agree to leave the printers but ban toner sales, that way we would use up the already purchased small toner mountain. It was just a coincidence, of course, that I had laid in apocalypse level supplies for my desktop HP CP2025. It is still merrily printing away, must be 10 yrs old now. Only 3 full sets of toner left now...yikes...
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Monday 4th March 2019 02:34 GMT Alan Brown
Intel CPU shortages?
But that doesn't explain why they've been shoving seriously SLOW M.2 nvme drives in their desktop systems at premium pricing - as in _significantly_ slower than claimed and slower than an old Samsung 840Pro - which would be OK if it wasn't at a 100% higher cost than the _retail_ cost of gumsticks with similar performance stats.
Funny how they run and hide when called on it though - and how they refuse point blank to tell you what drive they ship with systems (there's just a murky spec on the website, which means they can ship anything - and they do)
This earnings call might explain why they've been playing artful dodger, but they've lost a few hundred thousand pounds of sales as a result. (with any luck others will take note and stay away too)