 | Darren Martin is president and owner of Cartridge World. Darren and his wife Terri Martin purchased the franchise rights to Cartridge World in Wichita in 2004. They currently own and operate two stores in Wichita. 21st and Rock in Tallgrass Plaza and now at 21st and Maize in New Market Square. Cartridge World is now the world leader in inkjet and cartridge refilling and one of the world's fastest growing franchises. The head office is based in Adelaide, South Australia. There are over 917 franchised Cartridge World retail stores worldwide. Darren completed extensive cartridge refilling franchise training in Australia. Darren can be reached by phone (316) 721.2229 or by email at cartridgeworld@cox.net |
Office Supplies
2005-09-01 07:39:00
Inkjet versus laser printers
ANSWER: Although the laser toner cartridge, might be faster, the inkjet, prints much more precise. Here is a reason why.Today's typical inkjet cartridges contain 300 to 600 nozzles that simultaneously jet out thousands of drops of ink per second, delivering professional quality prints of up to 1200 dpi. Try to put that many dots in your square! What's more, each drop of ink is measured in tiny units called picoliters, which are about one-trillionth of an inch in size. Now if you've ever tried to get the last drop of water out of your garden hose, you know what a big job it is for your printer to keep its nozzles clean. However, your print head, its nozzles, and your inkjet cartridge will last a long time with just a minimum of assistance from you.Color inkjet printers have been fixtures in most small businesses for many years. They're cheap (under $60 in some cases), last a couple of years and everybody uses them. So they must be the perfect office tools, right? Maybe not.While the printers are almost given away, the refills bring in a fortune for the big-printer, original-equipment manufacturers (OEM). According to a research company in Massachusetts, the cartridge replacement market is now worth $21 billion annually. One well known manufacturer for example, makes over $10 billion a year from ink cartridge sales, and another earns over $2 billion from ink supplies, more than half its total revenue.One example given is for a well known Color Bubble Jet Printer. The cost for the hardware can be as little as $55, depending on discounts and where you buy it. The average cost of the ink from the OEM is $19 but the yield from that is a measly 170 pages. Even if you print very little, the cost quickly adds up.And it isn't just cost that conspires against ink jets. They typically don't print pages as fast as laser printers. They can also be a major hassle. It is quite common to be inundated with cartridge-error messages when the cartridges are perfectly fine, or have the machine suddenly go crazy and spit out gobbledygook in an endless stream. The printers are also set up in a way that makes it difficult to minimize the amount of ink they use. It appears they're designed to make you use more ink than you need to with no way to default to "draft quality".As a result of such factors, the market for laser printers is catching fire. According to the research company, worldwide desktop monochrome (one-color) laser printer shipments grew 15 percent last year to 14.1 million units. More than half of those are what's known as Multi-Function Printers (MFP), which do print, fax, copy and scan. This research company predicts that over 10 million MFPs will be in circulation by 2008.
