I recently bought a refill kit (the one pictured above) for my HP 1210 printer for $14.00. While that sure beats the thirty-something the HP cartridge cost, it was a pain to load ink into a syringe and literally inject it into the top of the old cartridge. I’m sure I barely avoided spilling ink everywhere, and the first dozen prints I made with the new cartridge were crap.

Now it prints fine, if not in great detail, but really, we need to face the fact that the printer industry is screwy. The problem is that printer manufacturers base their success on the sale of ink, not the sale of printers. Not only does this mean that the low cost of printers is offset by an ink price of over $1.40 per mL, but it results in a lot of crappy printers. Shouldn’t we all have printers which connect wirelessly and automatically to our computers, which don’t require individual driver downloads to work? This isn’t just me whining (I don’t think) – I really think the industry is poorly structured from the consumer’s perspective.

While we’re on the topic of inks, I was unable to find soy or linseed-based inkjet refills, which is not entirely unexpected. The closest I came was edible inks. This reminded me of a great article in the Times about Chef Homaro Cantu in Chicago. Cantu uses edible inks in a Canon inkjet printer to create a kind of meta-food: he prints pictures of sushi, which he makes into rolls. In fact, almost everything in his restaurant – called Moto – is edible, even the menus.

Homaro Cantu (via NYTimes.com)

Edible Inks for Epson printers

Related posts: On Squid Ink, Toxicity in Newspaper Ink, Thermochromic Ink

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See Also: On Squid Ink,The Epson Diet,Exploding Ants,

This entry was posted by Jeffrey Warren on Monday, February 20th, 2006 at 8:29 am and is filed under Design, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.