Greg's Corner

Printers start rejecting low budget ink alternatives

We’ve all heard the joke when it comes to computer printers. It’s cheaper to buy a new printer than it is to buy the ink. Even though we all joke about it, but this is the printer companies business model. They sell the printers at a loss and make up the difference on the expensive ink. Even though you can buy a decent printer from places such as your local drug store for around $20 bucks, most people would not just throw out their printer when it runs out of ink.

Printer ink is so expensive that there is a cottage industry of services that either teach you how to refill your own cartridges or will refill them for you for only a fraction of the cost of regular printer ink, much to the chagrin if printer companies. One printer company, possibly the most famous one, has allegedly decided to put a stop to that.

Many users of Hewlett-Packard (HP) printers, have recently complained that an aftermarket brand of printer ink cartridges have stopped working in their printers. HP hasn’t commented on this specific issue but it’s believed that HP allegedly stopped the non-HP cartridges from working after a firmware upgrade.

So what’s a consumer to do? You can either sell a kidney and buy your printer’s brand of ink, just kidding sort of, or you can wait for the aftermarket brands to circumvent the firmware upgrade. Neither situation is ideal, unfortunately, and could potentially make or break a business that’s dependent on printing. Unless you’re a design or printing company, maybe it’s time to start going paper free. With the expense of ink and the fact that reams of paper are environmentally unfriendly, maybe it’s time that we start kicking our printers to the curb.