Unfortunately, when buy a Inkjet HP, you pretty much sign into buying a new printer with each new cartridge. If you buy a black and white, and color cartridges, you almost pay for a new printer.



Exactly. That's why it pays to buy remans and refill kits. They work best with the HP's simply because of the printhead attached. It's easier for us to make refills and refill kits for Epson and Canon, but those printers STILL have more problems.

With the HP, 90% of the time, we have to clean the cart very well, redo the seals and it's good to go. The Average HP cart can be refilled more than 10 times (and considering they have more ink than the epsons or canon, that's alot of printing) before noticable degradation occurs.

We do a good business ($250 mil a year according to the last reports when we were public... Privately owned now, so I can't comment on the current business).

There is always going to be a cost associated with printing... You are using a consumable. Personally, I've found it cheaper to buy the HP than the others (even when I'm not 'helping' QA by testing.. ). And while I am biased (I'm not in sales/marketing, thank god, tho.), Our refills and reman carts are on the same quality level as the OEMs. Admittedly, there are quite a few fly by night refill companies.... Notably, they are the ONE ink fills all. They also tend to do a significant amount of TV and spam advertising... I've always enjoyed getting the spam for lower cost inkjets... It's not quite as much fun as the phone call's however.

We've got a pretty big staff of chemists just working on the formulations of the different inks. Each Cart is different, and to get the right color match is often a very difficult job. In fact, one of our larger problems is getting current cartridges out there because of the changing formulations. It can take quite a while to work an new ink through production and QA.



[censored].... That got side tracked in a hurry. Sorry.