"davy" wrote in message
...

Anyone seen the article in the Daily Mail UK Newspaper today (Tuesday
20th Nov).

http://img853.imageshack.us/img853/298/image2uis.jpg

Not a bad business, thought I'd share with you.

davy


The printer companies go out of their way to make a greedy profit from their
ink. There's nothing rare about the ingredients that go into the ink and so
they go out of their way to make the cartridge design often difficult to
replicate and adorn it with a chip to make it further tamper proof. That
includes making it infeasible for the average printer user to refill their
cartridges that would avoid throwing the empty cartrdges into landfills, and
even putting time stamp chips on the cartridges that allow them to not be
used in the printer after a couple of years to protect the printer from
'stale ink' and head clogs. It would seem sufficient to put a label on the
cartridge to tell the user when the cartridge expires just as labels are put
on drug prescriptions to tell the user when not to use the medicine.
. About 10 years ago one paid these companies a premium price for the
printer and a semi-reasonable prices for ink cartridges. The cartridges
weren't chipped and folks could refill at least the Epson brand with
reasonable efficiency. That's been turned around unfortunately because the
companies have learned they can make more profit selling ink rather than the
other way around.
I think the only way printer companies are going to start becoming more
efficient to the consumer and thinking of the environment is through
legislation by an outcry from the public. And the probability of that
happening is about the same as no one shopping on Black Friday.
--
Jan Alter