HP hopes ink refills give it a licence to print money

Have you ever gone to a specialist retailer to buy a printer? Maybe you're only looking to print a few documents every week, but thanks to your inexperience and the sales staff's ineptitude, you walk out with a hybrid beast that can print, scan, copy, photoprint, fax and make a cup of tea.

Such all-in-ones are good value for money and their prices continue to plummet. Unfortunately, when you run out of ink and return to the store, the price of replacing the ink cartridges will burn a hole in your pocket.

The market for alternative supplies of ink cartridges for printers is enormous. They usually fall into two categories - big brand-compatible cartridges that retailers supply and those sold by refill companies.

Alex McDwyer, financial controller of refill company Cartridge World, claims that non-vendor ink supplies make up about 40 per cent of the market and can offer up to a 60 per cent saving on the original manufacturer's price.

It is no wonder that companies like HP, Epson and Canon are scratching their heads as they see a substantial part of their income ebbing away to companies that they can't really match on price.

The printers make very little money for manufacturers, but the disposable parts, like ink cartridges, keep them rolling in cash.

Such is the threat to this income stream that HP, one of the biggest names in printing, recently changed its consumables business model in an effort to curtail the mass defection to refill stations and rebranded products.

It also wanted to make its packaging easier to identify with colour coding (blue, green and red) and by reclassifying them as "standard", "value" and "speciality".

With this new rebranding comes a different price structure - "standard" inks come in at €10-€15 and will print about 200 pages, "value" costs around €30 and can print up to 1,000 pages, with "speciality" costing more.

Dexter Harris, HP's consumer supplies marketing manager for Ireland and Britain, said HP had not really tackled this issue and that the company's new shift will see it match supplies with the type of printing people are doing.

Harris said people are entitled to buy refills or compatible products, but said that the printing quality is inferior and they can possibly damage the machine and that more ink in a refill does not necessarily mean more pages printed.

In fact it could mean less, as the pressure in the cartridge would not be balanced properly. To defend its cartridges, HP commissioned and paid for comparative studies to be carried out by European research firm Innovationstechnik.

Innovationstechnik tested more than 1,000 ink-jet cartridges from 16 well-known European store/refill brands and refill stations and compared them to HP products. The results demonstrated that original HP ink-jet cartridges printed 34 per cent more pages than compatible alternatives and 69 per cent more pages that ones that were refilled.

Innovationstechnik also tested reliability. It found that on average, more than one in five (24 per cent) of compatible alternatives were "dead on arrival" or failed prematurely.

Furthermore, it found that on average, one in three (33.6 per cent) ink-jet cartridges refilled at shops or kiosks were dead on arrival or, again, failed prematurely.