Toner Cartridge Depot Starts Blog

Greetings!

I got a terrific news to tell: Toner Cartridge Depot launches its official blog covering printing industry news, articles and announces. Since I'm going to take part in creating content for the official blog, my own blog will update now as often as it used to.

Toshiba Recycles Your Toner Right on the Spot

If you own a laser printer and ever did an online shopping for printer toner cartridges, you, probably, noticed here and there a waste bottles being sold along with consumables. These very bottles are where unused tone is utilized when not applied to form image. That happens because of mechanism of laser printing is not perfect and yet to be optimized.

Toshiba intends to eliminate this embarrassing flaw. The company is implementing its recyclable toner technology into more MFP machines. The technology allows collecting waste toner that is not applied to the page and feeding it back into printer cartridge, so it can be used over again.

The technology is supposed to solve environmental problems caused by disposing of waste toner. On the other hand, it would increase cost-effectiveness of toner cartridge, since more pages per cartridge could be printed.

For now, the system works only with mono printers, however “it will take a bit longer to introduce it to colour machines as it needs a different mechanical approach, but ultimately we aim to introduce it there too,” says Jamie Mackenzie, Product Manager at Toshiba.

Are Printer Companies Chasing the Wrong Target?

Lets us add a bit of financial analysis to our blog. It kind of stand of from what I usually port, but since it’s about printers and I studied economics at college, found it interesting. I promise I’ll try to keep it simple :)

When it comes to printer makers, it’s a well-known fact that most of them use ‘blade-razor’ marketing strategy to generate profit. That means they sell printer unit at the cheapest, even in the red, but make up the money by selling expensive consumables, i.e. ink and toner. So, at first look it may seem like the more printers you sell, the more profit you gain. Amount of printer sold defines the market share of a company.

However, Ed Crowley, a stock market analyst for SeekingAlpha, makes a point in his article that situation is a bit different. Actually, it’s completely different.

Each printer sold generates different income. Imagine a home printer making 50-100 pages a month, and a high-volume workgroup printer that can print up to 200,000 pages per month. The latter can be as much as hundred times more profitable than the former. Since every printer has a user, so there are more profitable users and less profitable ones.

For example, HP having the largest market share (selling more printers then any one else) of 45%, receives only 28% of income. At the same time, Ricoh with its 1% of market share generate 10% of income. Yes, if you see the absolute figure, HP get more, but Ricoh is more effective in terms of dollars per user.

QualityLogic's Tests Prove Reliability And Higher Yield of HP Inks

Hewlett Packard is reported to announce results of a research study to compare how original HP ink cartridges rate against 13 most common ink cartridges refillers. The results of the test showed that

“original HP inkjet cartridges printed 57.5 percent more pages, on average, than the refill brands tested.”

Besides, HP cartridges proved to be more reliable:

“None of the Original HP inkjet cartridges failed during the test, whereas an average of one in five refilled brands was either dead-on-arrival or failed prematurely.”

All in all, HP cartridges 'won' refilled cartridges in every test.

The study was conducted by QualityLogic, one of the world largest and respected independent quality organizations. The funny thing is, HP recently argued results of a test conducted by that very independent quality organization, when QualityLogic tested Kodak inks. Can't wait for Kodak to strike back and question the results of HP ink cartridges study :)

Another 1,000 Pages In 1 Minute

Recently, we have seen two similar technologies revolutionizing the speed of inkjet printing — HP’s Steamline and Silverbrook Memjet. The innovation factor was in creating a fixed printhead spanning the whole width of the page.

Two Israeli researchers The College of Judea and Samaria — Moshe and Nissim Einat — have developed a revolutionary printing technique called Jetrix. This technique take printing speeds even higher – up to 1,000 pages per minute — since it enables simultaneous high-speed printing of an entire page of text.

Jetrix is a mixture of Inkjet Technology and Liquid Crystal Technology. Inspired by LCDs that could instantly create an image with a screen-sized array of diodes, Moshe Einat started to wonder if the same idea could be applied to printing the whole page. Inspiration led to creation of a page-size matrix of printheads with multiple ink chambers.

These chambers are the key to the new technology. Each chamber is a tiny tank of ink connected to just a few nozzles and supplying only those nozzles. The chambers are not connected with one another, so the matrix of printheads can be created as large as the paper, without limit.

The built prototype can only print black and white, but Einat is sure the idea can be realized in full color too.

Yes, there are printer that can print as fast as 1,000 ppm, but they are room-sized. This new printing technology allows making printer more compact. We shall wait for the first full-working printer to appear.