Sure. And Also Costs More Than Imported Russian Caviar

Do You Too Feel the Pain of Over-priced Ink Toner Refills?

At a price of $3.50 a gallon of petrol on the US west coast, (it works out to $0.92 a liter - in Jan '08), if it were the ink for your printer you'd be dancing for joy…

The big brand printer ink manufacturers are running a money-grabbing racket, enriching themselves at our expense… While we buy can cheaper and more sophisticated photo-printers, they get us hooked on their ink for life.

Inkjet ink toners are such an expensive story. Why? Ink is not some hard-to-extract rare mineral like petroleum oil, which has gone beyond its peak point and now finishing up, and no ink wells in the Gulf are drying out. Yet, as Tom Spring wrote in PCWorld.com: "At $22 per quarter-ounce, a Hewlett-Packard color ink-jet cartridge is more expensive, by weight, than imported Russian caviar”.

Printer Ink is widely used by school kids, parents, hobby photographers, college students, seniors, professional photographers and all businesses large or small.
Trends are driving the demand for inkjet ink cartridges. The top 7 major trends include: Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) market, Consumer Inkjet (Home computer printers), Color in the Corporation, Telecommuters (Portable color portable photo printers), Digital Cameras, Camera Phones, and Scanner-Copier-Printer-Fax cutting edge all–in-one machines.

According to bigplanet.com, much of the demand for inkjet printer ink cartridges is fueled by the ever growing amount of people using digital photography and printing their photos from home.
In 2004 there were 235 billion digital photographs taken in the U.S. with hardly 50% of the American people owning a digital camera.
However, in 2008, more than 80% of U.S. households own at least one digital camera and one or more photo printers per family. And what with the new range of fantastic photo-printers rendering professional lab-like quality prints from the comfort of your home, there's a large increase in ink toner usage and it has made the printing ink industry a $3 trillion dollar business!

That's nice for them.
But how do we people get more ink for less money?

(Coming in the next days)