The rising price of cheap ink cartridges in New Zealand is becoming evident across the page. This is due to a number of trends in both NZ and the printer consumables market. Compatible cartridges offer a cheap alternative to the genuine cartridges, but not as cheap as they used to be. Here at Affordable Ink we used to sell almost all our cartridges at $24 for a set of 4. Now a set of 4 cartridges can cost as much as $69, or even more. This remains far cheaper than $218 “value pack” for a set of 4 genuine HP 955XL cartridges. We will look at the reasons behind the rising price of cheap ink cartridges in today’s article.
The NZD/USD Exchange Rate
The first factor in the rising price of cheap ink cartridges might seem obscure, but there has been an enormous change in the exchange rate between the USD and the NZD over the last few years. All of our purchases are in USD, so as the NZD goes down our costs go up.
From 2011 to 2014 the NZD exchange rate was sitting between 80 and 85 cents to the US dollar. Now it is in the range 65 to 70 cents. This means that the cost and price of ink cartridges has risen about 20% for this reason alone. Affordable Ink just became a bit less affordable because of this.
Courier Costs Are Rising
The costs of delivering Affordable Ink cartridges overnight anywhere in New Zealand have been rising. In particular we have seen a sharp increase in fuel prices throughout NZ. It also costs us a lot more to deliver packages to our rural customers with all packages now charged a rural delivery fee. You may not pay this fee as here at Affordable Ink we offer free delivery on cartridge sets, but we do. A small but important contribution to the rising price of cheap ink cartridges.
Bigger is Better
Ink cartridges now hold more ink then they used to, which contributes to the rising price of cheap ink cartridges. A set of ink in an early Brother printer that takes the LC39 cartridges held 57mls of ink. A set of the latest LC3319XL cartridges holds 120mls of ink. In the same way a Canon printer using the PGI520 cartridge set had 62mls of ink, while the latest Canon business printers take the PGI2600XL cartridges with a massive 145mls of ink. Along similar lines HP printers have gone from 63mls in the HP564XL cartridges to 128mls of ink in the HP955XL cartridges. Epson is the only printer manufacturer that has resisted this trend. They do have a few printers that use larger black cartridges but these are not very common. The simple logic that follows from this is more ink, more printing, higher prices.
Printer Manufacturers New Tricks
We all know that printer manufacturers use all sorts of tricks to make you use genuine ink cartridges. These tricks have been getting more sophisticated. Planned updates from Brother and HP, an extremely complex chip from Canon on the PGI680/CLI681 cartridges and online updates from HP. It took the chip manufacturers 18 months to develop a chip that would work in the Canon printers. When an online update is issued by HP all of the existing stock of that cartridge becomes obsolete. These tricks contribute to the rising price of cheap ink cartridges.
Here at Affordable Ink we will continue to do our best to provide you with great prices on cheap ink cartridges and reduce the impact of rising prices as much as we can.