It was really cool to pull up our taxpayer's receipt from the White House's website this year. We got to see exactly where each dollar we paid to Uncle Sam will be spent. Since that's settled, here's what's next on our agenda: Figuring out exactly what we're paying for with each cent spent on our $25 ink cartridge. Good thing Wired's already done the work.
What's inside your expensive ink cartridge? Well, dye. But that's just a teeny, tiny fraction of what's inside those cartridges.
Wired does the hard work and breaks it down for all of us, so we can see what we're really paying for when we shell out big bucks for printer cartridges.
Besides dye, the rest of your "ink" is a complicated cocktail of chemicals designed to orchestrate inkjet magic. There's solvents inside that control the viscosity of the ink, keep the solution from evaporating and try to prevent your printed paper from doing that curl-up thing.
But mostly? It's just water:
The ink in inkjet cartridges can be as much as 95 percent superpure deionized water. Yet at more than $3 per milliliter, it would be cheaper to print your vacation pics with Dom Perignon.
Consider that next time you're handing over two $20 bills to the cashier at Office Max.
Oh, and remember: Your printer throws away 40 percent of the ink in each cartridge anyway. Happy printing!
(Images: MaverickLabelBlog.com, Flickr member bcostin licensed for use under Creative Commons)
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The fact is when you are buying that ink you are really buying the printer. The whole reason printers cost so little is the companies know you are, more or less, locked into their ink empire. They sell the printers cheap for the same reason Sony and Microsoft sell hardware at a loss during each generations start, because they make up for it in accessories and games.
It is always been about the ink. That is why manufacturers have been caught with chips and other features to track pages printed or age, so they can make sure you are buying more ink regardless of if you need to.
damn!
This is why I threw away my printer. I got too pissed off at the fact that there was still plenty of ink but a little chip inside the cartridge made it impossible to print anything. Can't print black only when cyan runs out . . . it gets old. Can't refill the cartridge myself because that doesn't reset the chip. Can't find anywhere online where I could hack my printer to just print no matter what, even though this is a universal problem.
Anyone remember when we knew it was time to replace the ink cartridge because our computer told us so AND our prints started to look bad?