Ink Cartridges Are A Scam

[Music] okay there's a story flashback almost a decade ago I'm working at an unnamed telemarketing Center as a technical support assistant for an unnamed computer companies laptop division you know when you call customer support in nine times out of ten the person you're connected to is from a different country and you can't understand them and they can't understand you I was that one time in ten where you'd reach somebody from the states and actually get the help you needed much faster now you might have noticed if you've ever had the misfortune of calling in to technical support that they spent about twenty percent of the time actually fixing your problem and about eighty percent of the time trying to sell you stuff that's because they're trained to the tech company you purchased that laptop from also needs to sell other products to stay afloat often times overpriced Mouse's backup drives antivirus software is a big one because it's easy to get computer illiterate folks to buy into anything to make an extra buck while trying to fix the broken thing that you've already shelled out money for sound a bit jaded that might influence our story a bit so anyway one day I'm sitting at my desk getting yelled at by an irate customer from Georgia and a note comes across my computer's alert system every few weeks the manufacturer has to liquidate old products because they're about to get replaced with new models and it was our job to try and sell these old products at full retail price to customers unaware they were about to go on sale a bit shady but par for the course the Georgia dude eventually hung up on me and a second later I was connected to a woman in Nevada who had a really simple question she had just purchased her laptop and she didn't know how to install her word processor I quickly walk her through the process chatting her up to see if I can sell her something and I learned that she's about to head to her freshman year of college college you say well dear madam have you a printer to produce hard copies of all the English essays you'll be writing I didn't actually ask her like that oh I hadn't thought about getting my own printer well then I can order a model this morning and have it delivered right to your dorm on the morrow so I pulled up our internal store page and access to the printer section so a quick little ditty about that page when I the tech agent pulled up a product I was presented with two prices one in red and one in black the black number was the retail price this is how much you would sell the product for over the phone the red number was the manufacturing price in other words how much it cost the company to make that product now why did it tell us this figure I have no idea I think it had something to do with the fact that the bookkeeping folks used the same internal system as the retail folks I don't know it sorry I get distracted a lot so I'm scrolling through the different printer models and talking to the girl about all the various features that each one of them offers and at the bottom of my screen I catch a glimpse of replacement ink cartridges and my jaw drops we were selling packages of standard capacity multicolor ink cartridges for fifty nine ninety five and the cost of manufacturing twenty three cents I was stunned I mean so stunned I put the Nevada girl on hold and called my supervisor over I pointed at the screen and asked him in fact really the cost of manufacturing he took a glance the screen laughed then nodded I looked at him in disbelief that's a total scam and he said which leads us to today today I am doing something about it so this is an ink cartridge and inside of it is printer ink the most expensive liquid in the world right behind king cobra venom scorpion venom Chanel number five insulin and mercury so first some disclosure I'm only gonna be hating on inkjet printers like this one laser printers get a pass this is my mom's printer this is about the fifth one that I bought this week it excels in two areas number one the ink cartridges always need to be replaced and number two it's always broken seriously this thing worked for like a hot minute and then I started getting the good old white lines everybody and their cousins probably experienced I called up technical support myself and the first question they asked me was have you replaced the ink cartridges recently so let's talk about the wonderful scam of ink cartridges here's the inside of one of these babies pretty easy to manufacture just some plastic bits the heat goes here but they market for about 50 bucks now the line that were fed is simple the cartridges are expensive because ink technology is expensive HP reportedly spends 1 billion dollars annually to develop printing technology but what really has changed about these fellows in that time actually not much like I said plastic shell filled with ink turns out all that technology is housed in here never noticed that these usually cost the same amount as this doesn't that seem insane well what if I told you that that was all in the design you might not know it but most printers are sold at a loss and the money is made back from the cost of printer ink this is a marketing ploy known as the razor and blades model where one item is sold at a low price in order to increase sales of the complimentary good which is often a consumable that must continually be resupplied in a nutshell give'em the razor selim the blades deploy here is give'em the printer selim the ink markup the price of the consumable and before too long the printer itself is paid for but turns out the methods used to recoup those costs haven't always been so noble right so tons of ink cartridges are manufactured with this little chip on them printer companies like to tell us that this little things purpose is to monitor the quality of the ink the chip lets you know when your printer is running low on a particular color the chip can facilitate firmware updates to improve performance all of this is baloney the chip is designed to get you to spend more money for example say you're running low on cyan ink the chip will tell the printer to stop operating even if every other color type is full until that single color is replaced but here's the rub a lot of the time the chip says you've got low ink you actually don't false low ink notifications are really really common in fact the next time you get one you might find that if you take the cartridge and perform a little Technovore to reset the chip you'll actually have plenty of ink still inside what gives imagine if your car's gas tank had a chip inside of it that forced the vehicle to stop operating completely once you hit half a tank there would be rioting in the streets because as a consumer you should have the right to drive that sucker til it's bone dry and then refill it at your convenience right well what if like cars I could refill my ink cartridges after they're empty oh ho ho the chip is designed to prevent that as well many printing companies designed their chips to detect when the consumer was attempting to refill a used cartridge and it responded by you guessed it disabling the printer completely in fact just the last year a major court case over that very issue between impression products and Lexmark went all the way to the top and the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the little guy reaffirming a consumers right to repair and modify products after they've been purchased it makes no sense that something like that had to go to the highest court in the land but in the printing world exploitation of consumers is the rule of the day like for example did you know that many printers purposely mix a little cyan ink into every black and white document you print that's right while you're thinking hey I'll just print black and white to save my color cartridges printers are designed to use a bit of color without telling you and as we've mentioned before if even one of those cartridges registers as low ink the entire machine is disabled oh but the companies say this extra little bit of color gives it a pure black that's not how it works oh and whatever you do don't try and circumvent any of these things or if your printer breaks attempt to make any repairs because most chores will void your warranty the second you start tinkering around in the internal components and believe you me they'll break again and again and again printer heads will be misaligned dirty damaged dead on arrival and for every diagnostic you run every test page you print you'll be using up those lovely ink cartridges more and more and more and more you literally get to pay to make sure the thing you've already bought still works on a regular basis isn't that great yes no matter what company you go with all printers suffer from the same I gouge the eat costs too much it always needs to be replaced the printers always have driver issues Wireless never works the interface on every model is impossible to figure out personally I think it's time we said enough enough with paying a ridiculous amount of money for a product that costs next to nothing to manufacture a product that doesn't work half the time and the other half that it does work it's restricted by the manufacturer to make sure you can't get full use out of it a product that changes yearly a product that is designed to stop working and force customers to purchase another product even if there's nothing broken about the product in question take this thing for instance this is my mom's printer she uses it to print letters it wasn't printing them right so she went out and spent 60 bucks on new ink cartridges thinking that would fix the problem and after struggling for a day figuring out how to install the bloody thing she tried printing the letter again but the problem still wasn't fixed I got to hear about it over the phone so then I Drive about half an hour to get the printer and take it home where I waste the rest of the new cartridges ink running a bunch of inconclusive Diagnostics to try and figure out why it's not printing correctly by the time I determine that the printer has a common yet for some reason unrepairable Hardware issue I discover the cheapest option is to just order a replacement but I can't order a replacement because they update their printer models each year so now I have to go buy the new and improved model and I can't use the old ink cartridges in this new and improved model because the new and improved model uses a whole different ink cartridge type so I have to spend another $50 on these new and improved ink cartridges which it turns out just have a slightly longer piece of plastic on the inside and by the time I get this new and improved printer ready I discover the new and improved printers drivers aren't compatible with my mom's computer so I've got to go on the printing companies obtuse website and use their auto detect tool which doesn't work to try and find a driver that is compatible and in order to locate the compatible driver by hand I have to determine if she's using a computer that runs on a 32-bit operating system or a 64-bit operating system which many of you at this point may realize is not the kind of information that moms usually know the answer to so by the time we figure that all out and get the printer working properly we're left with an obvious question why is this still a problem in the 21st century we shot a car into space we can do this people together share this video today and start a revolution tell these companies that enough is enough we want affordable ink we want printers that work and we want printers that last I can Nick my cheek thanks to these patreon backers for their continued support do you want to find more content like this then look harder I don't know you [Music]

Channel: austinmcconnell

Views: 5,606,688

Rating: 4.9222941 out of 5

Keywords: ink cartridges, scam, printer ink, printers, ink, cmyk, ink cartridge, epson, brother, canon, hp, call center, austinmcconnell, austin mcconnell, video essay

Id: AHX6tHdQGiQ

Length: 12min 16sec (736 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 15 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/CorgiCyborgi]

I learned this lesson about a decade ago. Went to laser printers and never looked back. Haven't had a single issue. The toner lasts over a year, too. If I want a really nice color photo of something, I'll sent it to a photo shop or even Walgreens.

[u/spongeBond]

Solution:

1. Buy LASER printer (brother brand is good I have it)

2. Print thousands of crisp pages on one cartridge. Printing speed is 1 page per second. Cartridges are not brand-locked.

3. Smash your HP printer with a baseball bat.

[u/gnarlin]

What we actually need is an open hardware printer. A printer who's designs, firmwares and drivers are released under a copyleft license. A printer that you can easily refill with ink.
Begging corporations to not scam you won't work.

[u/William_Buxton]

We need some company to come in and revolutionize the printer industry.

[u/higgs8]

The solution is simple. Buy a black and white laser printer. The toner lasts for years and can be refilled any way you like. The cartridges have no chips and cost pretty much nothing to operate after you've bought them. The quality and resolution is better, too. Printing is much faster and the machine won't break as often. The printers themselves cost a bit more but it's worth it.

If you need to print a nice photo then you'd go to a print shop and do it there. Their machines are better than any shitty inkjet you could own anyway.

[u/SNTLY]

I'm an office manager at a university and I was shocked when I saw how quickly our ink was "used up." I then found a "supply override" feature on our printer that lets us continue to use the ink, well after the printer thinks it's empty.

I'm talking weeks / months after the printer thinks it's gone.

[u/jakebot96]

A small criticism of an otherwise well done video.

'Rich black' is a darker black color acheived by mixing black with a small amount of one of the 3 colored inks, often cyan. Thats a real printing technique, not necessarily a scummy way for big print companies to bleed money out of their customers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_black

[u/silasbrock]

12 minutes for 60 seconds of content.

[u/VeryBigTrouble]

There is another solution that I have used for years that works great. If you do a lot of printing in color, check out a continuous ink system (CIS). This works so well that Epson has basically built it into their new Super Tank printers.

It is basically an external ink tank that you can add the ink to, with tubes that go to refillable cartridges in the printer. Then you can buy the ink in bulk and don't have to buy another cartridge, new or refilled.

I have used this for years. In general, the printer will wear out before you need to buy a new system. In fact, the system I am using now is on the second printer. Of course I am printing 55,000+ pages per year.

On a related note, an Epson wf7680 wears out and the printhead starts leaking around 50-55 thousand pages.