Printers and Ink

The petition is entitled Force printer manufactures or enable competitors to price replacement ink cartriges at cost + small profit margins and the explanatory notes say

"At present manufacturers of domestic computer printers price their printers artifically low in order to recoup profits on replacement cartridges. These cartridges are now chipped to show ink levels and thereby cause copyright issues if copied( Epson 600 and Canon 4200 for example and others did not require chips to show ink levels ). This stops genuine competition and legal action is now pending against ink providers stifling competition. Prices of a single set of replacement inks can cost the price of a new printer including a full set of inks. Given the goverments targets on greenhouse gas emissions are strict surely it must be a gross missuse of resources for it to be cheeper to buy a printer complete with full set of cartridges than to replace the cartridges."

The petitioner is quite correct that printer manufacturers make their money on consumables rather than the initial unit, which is sold at a loss or very low profit in order to make demand for the consumables.

The situation is not, by any stretch of the imagination, limited to printers. The other high-tech example I'm aware of are game consoles, where manufacturers make their profits from the games, not the consoles themselves. But the practice goes back a lot further - Gillette is the company most often cited (am I sad? Why yes. But this is a topic which comes up among the techies more often than you might think.), and I believe it goes right back to Gillette - King Camp Gillette, or whatever his silly American name was.

So I think it would probably be a mistake to legislate purely on printer cartridges. I suppose they might be said to have a much larger environmental impact than other such consumables, and consequently might justify the specific legislation. But in most respects I'd rather see some way of stopping this bloody practice in its tracks - it's annoying both in terms of cash (the money I spend on both razor blades and printer cartridges make it highly personal!) and of sheer waste. Only I can't quite see a logical way of doing it.

One point that the petitioner may not have noticed is that a printer rarely comes with a "full" set of ink - "in-box" cartridges sold with printers are usually only about a third full.

I wish I could think of a good way of legislating against this practice. But I suspect it would be all-too-easy to either unjustifiably penalise manufacturers of other consumables, or else create loopholes that would let them get away with things. Pity.