HP Talks About Benefits of Ink Advantage Cartridges
Kees Verton is passionate about printing.
For the most part, he has to be. As Printing Category manager, Printing and Personal Systems for HP Middle East, Verton is no stranger to HP, and certainly well aware of the company’s agenda when it comes to printers.
On average, HP sells a printer every two seconds, and it’s this sheer volume of movement that’s given rise to the company’s renewed interest in developing more efficient printers and print technologies. Which is why Verton is addressing the press this afternoon to talk about HP Ink Advantage.
For many consumers, printer cartridges are a complete pain. They seem to run out of ink at the worst times, usually result in a messy or complicated procedure to change them, and don’t always guarantee the best print quality. So in a bid to improve their cartridge life span, HP introduced their Ink Advantage series of print cartridges, which allows consumers to print twice as many pages while still paying the same price.
It sounds almost too good to be true, but Verton confirms that it’s a connection between the amount of ink going into the cartridges, new print nozzle technology, and improved printer heads, which produces this higher output.
But for a company that manufactures both inkjet and laserjet printers, does the new Ink Advantage technology mean that business should be adopting this instead of laserjets? Verton disagrees, saying that the two are designed for very different outputs, so while an SMB may benefit from an Ink Advantage printer, a larger corporation might still gravitate to a laser printer to handle higher document outputs.
When asked about printer cartridge piracy in the region, Verton agrees that this is still an issue the company is trying to stamp out. However he said that most consumers find that once they’ve tried using a cartridge that’s been refilled by a third party, they don’t get the same kind of print quality, and end up realizing that purchasing original cartridges is the right thing to do. The company is also working hard to clamp down on resellers selling counterfeit cartridges that have been branded as HP originals, which again have a poor print quality compared to original ones.
