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Digital Photography And The Home Printing Boom

Author: Michael Stollery

Article:
Digital cameras have rapidly gained acceptance as the main
camera product that people now buy. The rise of the digital
camera and the high quality home printers now available mean
that we no longer need to rely on the traditional photo
developer for our prints. It has become very much a shoot and
print exercise for consumers without any delay or inconvenience
that even a one hour developer means for us.

The ability to shoot our own pictures as many times as we like
without having to worry about rolls of film together with the
convenience that the home computer revolution has brought us has
led to a huge surge in profits for ink manufacturers worldwide.
These huge profits have in turn led to a massive range of
genuine and substitute ink cartridge suppliers coming to the
market while the quality varies enormously.

While home digital printing has lagged behind the sale and use
of digital camera because of the concerns over print quality and
the advent of easier digital print facilities at many outlets
such as Wal-Mart, modern printers and particularly the printer
ink that is used has improved enormously. Printer ink that is
used for making prints needs to be of a higher quality than that
used for straight text printing. This used to be monopolized by
the printer manufacturers themselves with highly priced, high
margin ink cartridges that had hard to replicate cartridge head
mechanisms.

Canon, Epson, Lexmark and Hewlett-Packard are the top four brand
name manufacturers who have used their position as printer
manufacturers to make cartridge replication as difficult as
possible in order to ensure tat consumers buy their ink. Many
customers often wonder at the low price of a hi-tech printer but
do not realize that the bulk of the revenue and profit that
these manufacturers are going to make is not on the printer but
on the ink that you have to keep buying again and again.

Third party printer cartridge manufacturers have started making
a dent in this effective monopoly as the manufacturing
technology becomes more widely available. Canon and Epson in
particular have effectively contracted out manufacturing of a
large range of their printer cartridges and have allowed clone
copies to be manufactured under license. Hewlett-Packard has
vigorously tried to restrict clone cartridge copying by legal
restrictions and increasing the technical complexity of the ink
cartridge and integrating the printer head with the cartridge
body.

Despite the big four dominating the ink cartridge market at the
moment their grip is slowly being released while the actual
demand for photo quality ink cartridges is expected to continue
to increase much as it has been over the last three years. The
major consideration for consumers when buying clone ink
cartridges is that the ink itself is good enough to produce the
print finish and that they do not get short changed with a
cheaper clone cartridge that does not in fact contain as much
ink as the genuine cartridge.

About the author:
Our company http://www.easyinkz.co.uk is a leading expert in printer ink A full range of our product can be found at http://www.easyinkz.co.uk where we
supply cartridges for Epson, Lexmark, Canon and HP inkjet
printers

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