Fighting the ink wars

The worst thing about having a home photo printer is forking out for the seemingly exorbitant costs of replacement ink cartridges and paper.

In a media briefing this week in Sydney, HP showed how it is trying to combat our natural urge to go cheap on the consumables with an education campaign that likens printers to the car industry, and touted research by an independent testing lab that shows HP printers can produce as much as twice as many pages per cartridge, thus making them more "fuel efficient."

	HP Vivera ink cartridges.

Much greater quantities of ink are consumed with intermittent printing, as all inkjet printers are designed to periodically clean and maintain themselves. In doing this, most use ink to prime or "flush" the system to keep the nozzles from clogging and to push air bubbles out of the system. Ink is also wasted during the initial set-up and whenever a companion cartridge is changed.

New HP vice president, general manager, Imaging & Printing and Consumer Group South Pacific, Christoph Schell (who must use a fair amount of ink just printing out his job title) drew a couple of analogies with the car industry for the gathered journos.

	Advanced HP photo paper.

Schell also compared some printers to gas-guzzling V8 engines that require litres of fuel just to turn the car on. HP printers, he claims, are more akin to Toyota Corollas, in that they can initialise without burning lots of ink.

The test results presented by David Spencer of the US-based SpencerLab Digital Colour Laboratory show HP printers outperforming competitors in ink efficiency in most scenarios, and particularly better for colored inks.

HP claims to have achieved this edge through a combination of recirculating ink systems that flush air out of the print head, wiper blade technology that keeps print nozzles from crusting and unique ink formulas that keep the ink from clogging.