We never agreed to only buy HP ink, say printer owners
theregister.com
theregister.com
HP’s salespeople will try to point out to commercial customers that aftermarket ink has a high VoC content and will contaminate your office.
What I know is that people are often complaining on forums about inksplosions they have when they try to do borderless printing, the lowest common denominator is that they were using third party ink. Ink has to do a lot of things, and cooperating with the system that cleans up overspray is one of them.
I had a low end Epson tank printer and found six months later that the ink faded horribly, it would have been possible in theory to find a third party ink that was more lightfast but impossible in practice as that kind of information is not documented and most people just don’t care. I upgraded to the next step up of tank printer which has much more persistent ink, at least I could point to results where people made prints and tried accelerated aging them.
http://www.wilhelm-research.com/pdf/PCWorld_Cheap_Inks_2003_...
Roughly there is no mechanism by which third-party ink vendors can prove the quality of their products so it is a "market for lemons".
As someone who has a habit printing photographs, art reproduction, and anime art I'm amazed at the high quality output that I can get if I use quality materials. You'd better believe that photo and quality matte paper are not a scam and get better results than you're going to get on cheap paper. The same is true about the ink except there isn't any mechanism to enforce the quality of ink.
As much as I think third-party ink is suicide, I will grant that HP and their ilk seem to be trying as hard as they can to piss people off, have a lawsuit, congressional hearing and all that.
Maybe that's true, maybe it's not, but I certainly wouldn't assume it is because a salesman said it.
I could see if I was printing super high-quality photos on special paper I might want a dedicated photo inkjet; but given that I'm buying it specifically because I care about getting the highest quality over a cheap color laser printer... I don't think I'd be persuaded to save money on off-brand ink for something that's bought specifically for making the highest-quality photos at home.
Which use cases are best served with an inkjet using off-brand ink (assuming the off-brand ink still works properly, of course)?
not everybody agrees with their methodology but they're pretty much the only game in town. Their testing is expensive so it only happens if a big player is paying for it.
My experience is that the vast majority of people who post reviews on sites like Amazon of this kind of project are not qualified to have an opinion. I remember Best Buy having a prominent review of a printer about what a piece of crap it was that had a picture of a print they made that came out terrible, it looked just like what you get when you print on photo paper and put it with the wrong side up. (I've made that mistake too but I blamed myself and not the printer)
The one thing I did learn from reviews about ink for my old printer was that people will fill it with "transfer ink" and are happy with the results they get printing coffee mugs, T-Shirts and such. Overall though I'd be a lot more inclined to trust third-party inks if there were reviews I trusted.
They will keep doing this as long as it's profitable. They lure you in with a cheap printer and they're trying to make their money after the initial purchase.
you can't stop HP being a pack of cunts, but you can at least not make it your problem.
it's quite literally on "you" if you're still buying HP printers at this point. You have absolutely no one to blame but yourself. This is what they do. This is how they operate. So stop giving them money. There are so many great alternatives. go get a Brother laser printer.