The claim about Instant Ink DRM is narrowly accurate but disingenuously presented.
The printer won't take Instant Ink cartridges if it's not enrolled in the program, that's true. But there aren't supposed to be Instant Ink carts floating around the aftermarket in the first place - when you sign up for that program, part of the deal is agreeing to ship the spent cartridges back to HP, in postage-paid packaging they provide along with each re-up.
I think that's because of the print heads, which are oddly absent from every discussion of printer economics I've ever encountered.
In my gallery-quality photo printer, the print head is a discrete component costing $350 to replace - 3.5x the price of a full OEM set of eight ink tanks. HP cartridges have integral heads, but I see no reason to think they cost meaningfully less per cm^2 to manufacture than the Canon head does.
I think that's why the Instant Ink program prices purely on page count, and not at all by ink usage, which after all would seem to make more sense for an ink subscription. Shipping back the spent cartridges means, excepting wear and damage, HP can turn most of them around for reuse without having to manufacture new carts with expensive new heads.
I think that's what they care about much more than the cost of the ink per se, and even the cost of the printer. The pricing model doesn't entirely make sense otherwise - if you print photos on an Instant Ink-subscribed device, you'll never hit the 100-page threshold for a price bump before you exhaust the carts and get a re-up.
Their BAs have to know this is the case, and they could easily enough address it with a surcharge for relatively frequent re-ups, or just by charging for ink usage past a certain threshold. That all could happen on their end, driven by printer-reported usage data, but they don't, so I can print photos to my heart's content for the cost of paper and $3 a month for all the ink I can eat. (And have! Went through 3 cart sets in a month once, back before I got my Pixma.)
If the subscription fee really is going to pay for the actual ink, that's an absurd amount of money to leave on the table, so I have to figure HP's upside is elsewhere, and the print heads seem like the likeliest place given how much they seem to cost to make.
How come nobody in the "printers suck and printer ink is a scam" discourse ever seems to think about this? I'm just a yahoo with a camera, I can't possibly be the first to have thought about it...
The printer won't take Instant Ink cartridges if it's not enrolled in the program, that's true. But there aren't supposed to be Instant Ink carts floating around the aftermarket in the first place - when you sign up for that program, part of the deal is agreeing to ship the spent cartridges back to HP, in postage-paid packaging they provide along with each re-up.
I think that's because of the print heads, which are oddly absent from every discussion of printer economics I've ever encountered.
In my gallery-quality photo printer, the print head is a discrete component costing $350 to replace - 3.5x the price of a full OEM set of eight ink tanks. HP cartridges have integral heads, but I see no reason to think they cost meaningfully less per cm^2 to manufacture than the Canon head does.
I think that's why the Instant Ink program prices purely on page count, and not at all by ink usage, which after all would seem to make more sense for an ink subscription. Shipping back the spent cartridges means, excepting wear and damage, HP can turn most of them around for reuse without having to manufacture new carts with expensive new heads.
I think that's what they care about much more than the cost of the ink per se, and even the cost of the printer. The pricing model doesn't entirely make sense otherwise - if you print photos on an Instant Ink-subscribed device, you'll never hit the 100-page threshold for a price bump before you exhaust the carts and get a re-up.
Their BAs have to know this is the case, and they could easily enough address it with a surcharge for relatively frequent re-ups, or just by charging for ink usage past a certain threshold. That all could happen on their end, driven by printer-reported usage data, but they don't, so I can print photos to my heart's content for the cost of paper and $3 a month for all the ink I can eat. (And have! Went through 3 cart sets in a month once, back before I got my Pixma.)
If the subscription fee really is going to pay for the actual ink, that's an absurd amount of money to leave on the table, so I have to figure HP's upside is elsewhere, and the print heads seem like the likeliest place given how much they seem to cost to make.
How come nobody in the "printers suck and printer ink is a scam" discourse ever seems to think about this? I'm just a yahoo with a camera, I can't possibly be the first to have thought about it...