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Is it possible that manufacturers can make ink cartridges last longer?

There are a lot of computer geeks and geniuses that live for the computer. These people are so smart, with all of this modern technology and yet nobody has yet figured out a way (compute a way I should say) to make or convince the companies to make their cartridges bigger and last longer. When you buy ink, you are actually buying a fancy cartrdge with high-tech electronics, and oh.... ...yeah, it comes with some ink too. Convincing the public to boycott is not a realistic answer. This is the computer age, so there must be another logical way. Refilling works to a degree (a few refills or so), but a bigger cartridge will eliminate that. --- I must conclude that 20 - 40 ml of ink is a bargain to the general public. Especially at $50.00 when buying a color and B/W cartridge.

Public Comments

1. of coarse they can-but never will they make more money with smaller ones
2. yes, but if they did, demand would go down and supply would go up.
3. Of course, the printer manufactures could make ink cartridges with huge storage amounts that are easily refillable, and run for a very long time before needing to be refilled or replaced. And if they did, they would go out of business, they don't make a ton of money on the printer, but they absolutely clean up on the ink when you have to replace it all the time.
4. It's called planned obsolescence. Products are designed to last a set period of time and then die so that you are required to replace it. Companies know how many copies per month the average buyer of a particular printer makes and they also know how many copies a particular ink cartridge will print. With these two pieces of information they can fine tune how much ink to put in the cartridge in order to maximize profits. It's pretty much just businiess 101.
5. There are several reasons why larger ink catridges are not possible for home/office use kind of environment. First of all look at the number of printed pages for a home printing environment. It is like 100 to 200 pages per month utmost. When we speak about ink, it is a fluid (or semi-fluid) that undergoes changes during its life-time from filling to printing. (Also consider that a small amount of ink will be wasted for cleaning the nozzles if any blockage occurs.) The colour changes and there is a possibilty of change in the viscosity of the ink. These things will affect print quality, create nozzle block, damage print-head etc. So ultimately more ink will be wasted in maintenance than used for printing. If you closely observe, office printers have bigger ink catridges and option to choose what size of catridge the user buys. The end user should get the value for money. Printer companies claim a price per page and that should be seen by the user as reference. FYI, there are large format printers that have inks supplied in polythene bags. The amount lost in evaporation and other mechanisms will be less because these printers will print several thousand pages in a day.