November 25, 2003
MSNBC: Ink wars: H-P vs. the recyclers
As two franchise chains enter the Bay Area with stores for refilling empty printer cartridges, Hewlett-Packard Co. is stepping up its efforts to convince consumers to purchase its new ones instead.
(full story)
My spin: Hmmm, what an interesting issue. I buy laser printer cartridges from Office Depot and save a lot of money. Why buy brand name, at a huge cost, when alternatives work just fine?
However the article does read as follows, which gives on something more to consider:
H-P hired QualityLogic Inc., of Moorpark, to test new black and color H-P laser and inkjet cartridges against comparable remanufactured ones. It found that used black cartridges failed nine times as often as H-P's new cartridges, and used color cartridges failed 50 times as often than the new ones. Remanufactured cartridges were more likely than new to run out of ink prematurely or produce a high rate of prints that had to be thrown away. In other words, you may save money on ink but lose it on paper, Miller says.
Gary James, cofounder of Quality Logic, anticipates questions about the apparent conflict of interest in doing a study favorable to the printer company that paid for the study.
"There's always that question... but QualityLogic stakes its reputation on that independent third-party testing," James says.
Only 1 percent of H-P black ink cartridges failed out of the box and only 1 percent of its color cartridges failed in use or produced bad copies. In other tests, its laser toner cartridges were defect-free.
PC World magazine in September published its own test. While it also reported new cartridges are better, used ones may be sufficient for many print jobs.
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