HP: the 800lb gorilla screws the consumer again!!

[athalus]

ok let me give you some background. i have an old hp722c printer that does 3ppm black and 1.5ppm color. the xp drivers make it even more slow so you can imagine that i'm looking at new printers.

this week hp anounced its new line and so while i was out today i was looking for them. i saw a nice one, the 5650, 21ppm black and 17ppm color for $150, which was half what i paid for my 722c when i bought it.

ok the background is over and here is the
"SCREW THE CONSUMER PART!!!"
i went over to look at the ink cartridges to see what they cost and frankly they weren't bad: $20 for the black & $35 for the tri-color. however i checked and realised that the cartridges are alot smaller that the ones i use now. the black only had 18 mil of ink and the color 17 mil which is **HALF** of the ones i use now. hp is charging the same amount for half the ink!

enough is enough! 1st they try to put only sample sizes in the boxes w/the printers a few years ago, fortunatley that has stopped and then they put 'smart chips' in the printers/ink cartridges to prevent people fron using 'non hp products' and now this. when will it end!!!

everyone knows the ink is where the money is and not in the hardware which is why d!@# now has their own line of printers (which are made by lexmark) so they can clean up on the ink.

what's next???????? is the 800lb gorilla triing to make us pay for it's stupid financial mistakes ex: merging w/compac, crapy computers that no one wants?

will i buy another hp printer, honeslty i don't know, i'm still mad but now my 722c is looking better and better no matter how slow it is.

 

[M39shadow]

Actually HP doesn't put smart chips in the ink cartridges, Lexmark (and its Dell clones) do that in theirs. I'm not sure about Epson or Cannon. As far as the less ink is concerned, the newer printers use a bit less since they have finer control of the dots. At least they seem to based on the PSC 2210 I use. I still get around 450 pages between cartridges and only use about 4 or 5 cartridges a year (I print a lot in my profession). What you have observed seems to be a common theme though of all printer manufacturers. Check out how much ink is in any companies ink cartridges. Some have even less ink in them than those HPs.

I'll admit that I haven't tried a DJ 720 in XP (I gave my DJ 720 to my son after getting the PSC 2210) but the printing speed should not be noticably slower in XP.
What mode are you using in the printer preferences? Normal and Best are fairly slow.

Do you have your printer port set to ECP mode in the BIOS? If you don't it will be slow. ECP mode transmits data at about 12 Mbps while a normal parallel port mode is only at .5Mbps (same as serial).

You also need to check the printer port properties (after setting the port to ECP)and change the settings to allow the port to use any interupts assigned and to allow legacy devices. You may also wanna check to see if printer spooling is enabled and what the priority is set to for the printer port. It may be printing in direct mode without spooling which is slow. Printers will print data faster than it can be sent to them unless the port is set to a higher speed mode.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by m39shadow on 08/18/03 10:13 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[athalus]

thanks for the info on the printer settings. i check and mine are set at the normal and ecp. i go through about 2 sets a year so making the size smaller almost doubles my ink costs.

fyi: hp did try to add smart chips in the cartridges (it was on cnn) but there was such an outcry they stoped it very quickly. they also stopped the "trial cartidges" for the same reason.

ok, my main reason for the post was to make people aware of the smaller cartridges and even if these printers use less ink there is no way they use only HALF of what the older ones do. so bottom line: you are still paying the same amount for 1/2 the ink, or at best a 1/3 less ink.

 

[M39shadow]

Actually you are not paying the same amount for less ink. Case in point:

#78DN 38ml ~$54
#57 tri-color 17 ml ~$35

#15 black 25 ml ~$29
#56 black 19 ml ~$20

Your old 720 sprays ink drops that contain approximately 10 picoliters of ink in each drop. The newer printers spray drops that contain just 4 - 5 pl of ink. ergo about 1/2 the ink.

Also I might point out that what you have observed is fairly true of any printer manufacturer. Go look how much ink is in Canons, Epsons, or Lexmarks cartridges and of these only Lexmark integrates the print head (as HP does) so these are additional costs that are incurred later down the line.

Having owned several printers including a 720 I can tell you that my ink budget hasn't changed all that much with the newer printers and I print about a ream a paper a month.

Basically what it comes down to is that now you pay a lot less for a printer than you used to. That printer will blow away the older printers in terms of print quality and speed yet will be quite a bit less money. Yet you want to quibble about paying maybe at the very most $10 - $15 more a year for ink (and thats assuming you print a lot) in a day and age where most everything else but electronics has increased significantly in price. Go try to buy a car today with the same amount of money you woulda spent when you purchased that 720 and see how much car you get.

Personlly I like being able to print photos that look as good or better than store processed. I got real tired of paying ~$6 a roll to develop rolls of photos that I may only want 3 or 4 pictures printed from. I got the new printer first and was so impressed with its print quality that I bought a Canon digital camera. Now I only print what pictures I need and keep the rest on rewritable CD-ROM.