We found a story that has taken the printer industry to a whole new level — PRINTING FOOD!

In the past we have talked about being able to print organs, the use of Epson printers at the Oscars, and even computers being used to make life and death decisions. Now we can add restaurant quality food to the list. Organ printing is still #1 in my book, but this is pretty cool, and probably a very close second.

Chicago’s Moto Restaurant prints meals on edible paper, freezes them in liquid nitrogen, and then bakes them in polymer ovens. The restaurant and chef, Homaro Cantu, used to use a Canon ip560 inkjet printer to print their edible menus and edible pictures of sushi (pictures of sushi on starch paper). The Canon printer has since been replaced by Cantu’s self built food transmogrifier, which utilizes the edible paper and organic, edible ink.

No word on the taste of such food, but we read that customers are willing to pay $165 (including wine) for the paper meal.

Ah, we’ve seen our first big response to Kodak’s announcement of less expensive printer cartridges, and HP is the respondent.

On April 25 HP announced their plan to save consumers money on inkjet cartridges. Their plan: The more ink you buy, the more you will save. It is a bulk purchase plan that will reward purchasers with price breaks based on the amount of ink they buy. How does it work?

HP says they will color code their cartridges to match the needs of three different types of users. We assume they did some research to determine who the three different types of users are, but as it is their logic breaks down like this.

Standard cartridges will come in a blue package and will be priced at $14.99. The standard designation is for the bulk of printer users who don’t really do a lot of printing.

The “Value” or “XL” cartridges will come in a green package and are designed for the heavy printer users. These cartridges will cost around $30.00. These cartridges are supposed to be bigger and hold more ink.

Finally, the red packaging is for those needing specialty print outs that are high in quality and give the appearance of professional prints.

My response . . . huh? Hasn’t HP already tried a strategy very similar to this?

Think back a little.

Before HP made the switch to their “short numbers” cartridges used to have, well, long numbers. For example HP’s C6578 cartridge became know as the hp 78 when short numbers became fashionable. Before it was know as the hp 78 you had a variety of choices for this one cartridge. You had the C6578G cartridge that came with the printer. You had the C6578D cartridge that you could buy at a mid range price. And, you had the C6578A cartridge which had the highest price point. In many cases you would find another letter after the G, D, or A.

What did these letters stand for? Well, they simply designed now much ink was in the cartridge. The G was an entry level cartridge that contained a small amount of ink. It’s goal was to get you quickly started printing, but to very soon run out and create a need for more ink. The G cartridges were not available for sale, so the only choice was to move up to the D or A cartridge. The D cartridge was a half filled cartridge, while the A was a completely filled cartridge. Of course, with more ink came a higher cost. This same letter strategy and ink amount was also employed in all other HP cartridges.

So now we see the Standard (blue), Value/XL (green), and Specialty (red) designations. Seems like G, D, and A all over again. Also, HP has produced a new generation of cartridges that holds less ink than the cartridges before them.

For instance, the hp 78 D used to be the most popular color print cartridge. It held 19ml of ink and cost $34.99. Now the most popular cartridge is the hp 57. It holds 17ml of ink and costs $34.99. What difference does 2ml make, well according to the HP website, about 50 pages.

Bottom line is we are now back to more decisions for the consumer. Which color box to buy? Of course the color box you choose will impact how much you spend. We’ll reserve final judgment on this plan until we see it in action.

What do you think?

(Photo Courtesy of Yahoo!)

We’ve taken a few days off since our last blog post, but we do have a good excuse. The time has been used to prep and launch the new Pacific Ink.com web site. When you have a few minutes you should head on over to Pacific Ink and check it out. We think you will like it.

We starting building the new site about a year go with some designs and what we thought were some solid e-commerce upgrades to our existing site. In a few months the entire site was built but we decided not to launch it. We can’t really say why, but something just didn’t seem right about it. At that point we shelved the project. Now that we look back, it was a good thing to do. The designs sat for 6 months.

One day we decided it was time to take a look at the site again. So we pulled it “off the shelves” and looked at the entire site with some fresh sets of eyes. Long story short, we had some great elements, but there were also some areas that were really lacking, so back to work we went.

The site you now see is one we are excited by and proud of. We viewed and tested many web sites, both within and outside of the printer cartridge industry. Many inspired features you now see at Pacific Ink. Many showed us things that should not be included in an e-commerce web site. You would be surprised at some of the things being done.

It probably doesn’t happen to often that a company explains some of the logic behind their web site, but we’d like to take a minute to share some of the thoughts that went in to designing the new Pacific Ink.com.

First, we realized that many web sites, ours included, have begun the trend of complicating the ordering and checkout process. Everyone talks about making the process easier, but take a look at the web sites you are shopping. It seems every day that more and more is being added to pages where you are simply supposed to purchase a product (upsell items, advertising links, reviews, commentaries, etc). While some of this is very useful and helps the customer with the purchasing decision it can also be distracting and sometimes frustrating. Perhaps some of the worst offenders are in the printer cartridge industry. They are filling their web site pages with extraneous text for reasons other than helping the customer buy the product they want.

Our goal was to strip the whole process down. Show you exactly what you want and then get out of your way. When you find the cartridge you need, or your printer model you will be able to view all other relevant products. We even removed the upsell screen (Do You Need Anything Else?) screen from the checkout process. It was simply too much. In time we will be adding aids to help customers make purchasing decisions, but be assured they will be added in a way that keeps the distraction to a minimum.

Second, provide subtle aids throughout the site to help the customer find what they need and then let them know they are in the right place. It sounds quite simple, but bigger images are better (and don’t have to slow down page loading speed). Customer research taught us that simply seeing the manufacturer brand box instantly let the customer know they were in the right place to buy the cartridges they needed. Same went for an image of their printer. By supplying queues such as these we can put customers in an assured state of mind and ease their purchasing process.

Third, we looked to improve our search feature. Some customers have already conducted a web search (Google, Yahoo!, etc.) to find us, so to make them go through another search process where they have to review a list of results just didn’t seem right. We spend the last 6 months working on our site’s search function with the goal of you providing 1 or 2 pieces of important data and then our system doing the rest. Our “little red box” may be similar in appearance to other search boxes out there, but believe that the technology behind it is very different. We’ll continue to work to refine the search formula to make it as easy as possible for the customer to find exactly what they need within a few seconds of arriving at our site.

Fourth, we simplified the checkout process. You’ve found what you need and now all you want to do it buy it. Our goal was to use this logic and clean up the checkout process. As we said earlier, we eliminated the product upsell screen during the checkout. It was just an extra click that was not necessary (customers already had all they wanted). We think you will find our checkout is right up there with some of the fastest and easiest on the web.

We could go on and on with more about how we designed this web site, but the bottom line is that we think it is good, and our test groups felt the same. We were so happy to see the high ease of use scores. So, enjoy the shopping experience and always make sure to let us know what you are thinking. We want to hear your ideas and suggestions.

Thank you so much for shopping with us!

On Tuesday Lexmark introduced a new line of wireless inkjet printers. They plan to release these printers during April, May, and June of 2007.

Eight of Lexmark’s 12 new printer models will have wireless capabilities. These new models also include the new four-in-one, three-in-one, and single function printers. The wireless printers will be compatible with 802.11b/g wireless protocols and will also feature Lexmark’s exclusive Protection Guarantee (next-business day replacement for up to 1 year). Here is a quick run down of what they are releasing.

Lexmark X4550 Wireless All-in-One:
A compact printer featuring integrated wireless printing, USB 2.0 connectivity, printing speeds at up to 26 ppm (black) and 18 ppm (color), and 4800×1200 dpi resolution. In addition it prints borderless photos with or without your printer from memory card slots, USB flash drives, or from PictBridge compatible digital cameras. The X4550 also offers one touch color copying at speeds up to 17 ppm (black) and 11 ppm (color). It also has a 48-bit color flatbed scanner. Cost is expected to be around $130.

Lexmark Z1420:
Features a small footprint for easy placement in your home or office the Z1420 is a single function six color printer that prints up to 24 ppm (black) and 18 ppm (color). Users can print borderless photos up to 8.5×11 inches. It is expected to cost around $80.

Lexmark X3550 Color All-in-One:
The X3550 also offers wireless functions and fast print speeds (24 ppm black and 17 ppm color). It also features one touch copy/scan and photo printing options. The 48 bit flatbed scanner allows users to scan black photo proof sheets for quick and easy photo prints. It, as the X4550, can print borderless photos with our without a computer. It is expected to cost around $80.

Lexmark will also be offering some “Budget” printers in the fall. These entry level printers are designed for students and other cost conscious printer users. The Lexmark X2500 Color All-in-One and the Lexmark Z1300 Single-Function Inkjet Printer will both offer advanced printhead technology and Lexmark’s vibrant evercolor inks. The X2500 will cost $60 while the Z1300 will cost $25.

There has been no word yet as to what printer cartridges these printers will use.

You can save on ink and paper when you use this handy little software tool.

We came across this in PC World online. It is printer driver software called FinePrint 5.71, which gives you better control over what you print. We’ll paraphrase a little from the review, but you should check it out for yourself.

You can print up to 8 pages on a single sheet of paper without losing any print quality. We guess this is like a contact sheet you get with photographs. We have not tested out this feature yet, but it seems that it would make for some interesting, magnifying glass, reading. Pages can also be printed double sided to further conserve paper. Remember, you will need to manually turn the paper over and reinsert in to your printer unless you have a duplexer on your printer.

FinePrint works well with web pages, allowing you to print preview the web page you wish to print and make adjustments. You can scale the page to fit on a single page and remove any banner ads and other advertising images on the page. This is a pretty important feature as a follow up to a post we made the other day.

Finally, its makes say FinePrint will work with any printer, any standard Windows application, and any type of document. We’re still testing it out. If you’ve used it, let us know what you think.

By now most have heard about Staples no longer offering Staples brand remanufactured cartridges. They struck a deal with Hewlett Packard that would prevent them from carrying anything but HP brand cartridges in their stores.

We’ll provide more opinion on this later, but for now let’s address an issue we brought up in a previous post. We had previously discussed HP giving the consumer a chance to decided which types of printer cartridges they would like to use. One could say that a move like this severely inhibits the consumers ability to fairly decide between the HP brand and an alternative.

So, we must continue to do what we always do. Remind consumers that there are alternatives. The alternatives are often less expensive and more environmentally friendly than the HP branded product. At Pacific Ink we want to offer consumers a choice. If you want the HP brand cartridge, you can get it here. But, it will come with a postage paid plastic recycling bag you should use to recycle your empty cartridge — don’t throw it in the trash. The empty cartridges you send back in the bag are then remanufactured and sold as a remanufactured cartridge. Another alternative we offer. Are you a Do-it-Yourselfer? Then you would probably prefer one of our cartridge refill kits. We send you the ink and all the tolls. You refill the cartridge. Best of all, using remanufactured/recycled cartridges or refill kits will cost you less then using the HP brand product.

The remanufactured cartridge industry poses a threat to the printer manufacturers and the ink cartridges they sell. They have provided inexpensive printers to create a need for their expensive printer cartridges. The Staples - HP agreement means that when you go to a Staples to buy an HP printer, the only printer cartridges you will see there are HP brand cartridges. NO ALTERNATIVES!

Now maybe some folks don’t mind, but we hear from many each day that do. Staples is making it a little harder, but make sure you do your research on alternative sources for printer cartridges when making the decision as to which printer you will buy.

Give us your thoughts on Staples decision. We’ll follow up on this topic later.

The HP Color LaserJet 3600n is considered to be smaller in size, as far as laser printers go, but don’t let that deceive you. This machine is capable of doing a lot of work, yielding very fast print times, quality black and white documents, and vibrant full color documents.

The $549 to $700 price tag makes the 3600n an expensive personal laser printer, but something that is affordable for a small workgroup seeking a color laser that can be networked. It prints at speeds of 13 ppm (black) and 13.5 ppm (color). The printer comes with a 250 sheet paper feeder and has an additional 100 sheet auxiliary feeder. A 500 sheet feeder can be purchased for about $250.

Unlike most HP printers, the LaserJet 3600n comes with four full toner cartridges. The toner/drum combo cartridges are the only consumables this item uses. Printing a page of black text will cost you about 2.2 cents, and a color page about 12 cents (when using HP brand toner cartridges). This printer uses the following printer cartridges: Q6470A black, Q6471A cyan, Q6472A yellow, Q6473A magenta. The HP brand cartridges will cost you about $140.00 per cartridge. Pacific Ink offers a 100% compatible version of each of these cartridges for $20 less per cartridge. Visit our LaserJet 3060n page to find out more.

Overall, this printer provides the quality you would expect from an HP laser printer. It is well designed, handles paper well, and has a relatively low cost for toner cartridges (unlike many of the other HP Color LaserJets). It is not an expandable printer, meaning it only comes with 64MB of memory, and cannot be upgraded. It also does not have the ability to add a duplexer to it. Some suggest the HP Color LaserJet 3600dn as a better option because it comes with a duplexer and has 128MB of memory. It costs $849.

Here are the printer vitals:

Buy the HP Color LaserJet 3600n printer

Buy HP ColorLaserJet 3600n ink cartridges

Do you have this printer? Let us know what you think of it.

Growing competition from vendors of compatible and remanufactured inkjet cartridges are having an effect on the bottom line of your printer’s manufacturer.

In a recent report it was shown that remanufactured and compatible cartridge supplies now own about 25% of Australia’s $1 billion market for toners and inkjet cartridges. Much of the purchasing of compatible and remanufactured cartridges has been the result of consumers and organizations adopting “Kermit’s Law” — It’s Keen to be Green, in their purchasing habits. That means recycled products are given first priority and have they have the added advantage of costing less.

To combat this your printer manufacturer has taken to offering a recycling service (see the little plastic bag included with your printer cartridge), and in some cases offering a remanufacturing service. We cannot locate a direct comment from any of the OEM’s concerning their interest in recycling printer cartridges, but we do know that by offering these services they have kept themselves in the running for lucrative government supply contracts. Is recycling truly an interest? Only they can answer that.

Well, not really, but Vyomesh Joshi, the senior vice president in charge of Hewlett-Packard’s printing division, has expressed some concern of a potential shift in consumers printing habits.

First some quick facts.

• The printing division brought in 30% of HP’s $91.7 billion revenue last year.
• Half of the printers sold in the world have the HP logo on them.

Now, back to the story. It turns out that the concern was spawned by Mr. Joshi’s college age daughter. She reported to him that college students find printing annoying and unnecessary. Most of what they would print are web pages, and they are simply not formatted to print on a standard 8.5 x 11 inch piece of paper. She told her father, “I don’t need a printer.” —- Ouch!

Studies show that half of the printing done in homes is from Internet related materials (email, web pages). Printing from software (like Microsoft Word) only accounts for 20% of home printing. So, if the next generation of printer buyers is finding printing Internet related materials (web pages) to hard you can see Mr. Joshi’s reason for concern.

Blogs, MySpace pages, lists from comparison shopping sites, and map directions for Google or Yahoo! are simply not formatted in a manner that can be neatly printed. Printouts are often don’t appear as you see them on the screen. Images are misplaced or chopped in half and large white spaces often appear on the page.

What to do? Well, HP has taken one small step. Last month they bought a small software company named Tabblo. Tabblo specializes in creating web based software that creates templates to reorganize the photos and text blocks on a Web page to fit standard sizes of paper.

An HP inkjet printer that prints 70 pages per minute - Awesome!

HP unveiled two multifunction inkjet printers today that feature their new Edgeline Technology. The HP CM8060 and the HP CM8050 color multifunction printers. They claim the maximum speed for the CM8060 is 70-71 pages per minute (ppm), with an average of 60 ppm for black and white prints and 50 ppm for color prints. The CM8050 is slightly slower, printing 50 ppm in black and white, and 40 ppm in color.

These are the first two printers to be released that feature Edgeline Technology. The increased print speed comes from the fact that the print head does not have to move. In traditional inkjet printers, the print head has to left to right to print a page. In these printers the paper moves under the print head, and the print head spans the width of the page. The printer also features a drum that carries the paper and spins it under the print head as many times as necessary to get adequate ink coverage. The Edgeline multifunction machines also feature a fast drying ink.

Those that are in “the know” in the printer industry are most impressed that this kind of technology is featured in an inkjet printer. If these printers work as well as advertised they will provide some serious competition to laser printer market. And, much as laser printers use a heat element to seal toner to the page, these printers use a bonding agent to seal ink to the page and protect it from spills and smudges.

Both of these printers are designed for use in larger offices. They feature 100-sheet duplexing automatic document feeder (ADF) for scanning both sides of a page, a built-in print duplexer for printing on both sides of the page, the ability to handle paper up to 12 by 18 inches, an 80-page multipurpose feeder, and three 500-sheet input trays. Options include a 4,000-sheet input tray, a four-bin job separator for output, and a multi-function finisher that can staple and stack print jobs.

HP expects that both of these printers will be available during April and will cost $18,930 for the CM8050 and $23,530 for the CM8060. Wow! This price is drastically higher than the MemJet printer produced by Silverbrook Research. It produces 60 ppm and only costs $200-$300. Of course, Silverbrook is not HP so we will see what impact their printers have.

Overall, the release of these two printers, and the MemJet printer, hold big implications for the inkjet printer market. Their success could drastically change consumers expectations of how in inkjet printer should operate. It may also change how much consumers pay for their inkjet cartridges. To date there has been no word on the cost of cartridges for these HP printers. But history has shown that inkjet cartridges are far more expensive that laser cartridges (based on the amount of ink and the number of pages printed).