Kodak attacks rip-off inkjet rivals

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 6 Feb 2007 at 15:35

Kodak claims the days of rip-off ink cartridges are over, with the launch of its first-ever inkjet printer that takes £10 colour cartridges.

The company claims its EasyShare 5300 multifunction printer will halve the cost of printing, producing 4x6in photos for as little as 7p per print. The pigment-based ink system takes just two cartridges, priced at £7 for black ink, £10 for the five-ink colour cartridge, or £15 for both.

Speaking at the London press launch, Kodak executives launched a scathing attack on the existing inkjet manufacturers. 'Huge chunks of the market have been taken advantage of because they pay too much for ink,' claimed Jaime Cohen Szulc, general manager for consumer digital imaging at Kodak. 'We're offering lab quality prints and ease of use for half the price. The market will never be the same after this.'

Yet despite usurping the normal business model of selling cheap printers and taking a huge margin on ink cartridges, Kodak claims its business model is sound. 'We have a healthy margin on every ink cartridge we sell. This is not a strategy to undermine the price of our competitors. This is a technology-driven business case,' claimed Cohen Szulc. Although UK pricing of the 5300 is yet to be announced, it will sell for $199 (about £100) in the US.

Kodak claims that it's not only competing on price - it claims the printer offers 'lab quality' 6x4 in prints in less than 30 seconds. We can certainly vouch for the speed,while the carefully selected prints at today's demonstration were more than respectable, with no visible signs of grain and strong colours.

Kodak says its pigment-based inks and micro-porous paper make the photos both fade and scratch resistant, and we witnessed first-hand that prints show no ill-effects after being splashed with water. Prints are also dry straight out of the machine, thanks to the nano-particle ink, which is absorbed by the paper within 50 milliseconds.

While the printer has a permanent print head, Cohen Szulc admitted the company has no cartridge recycling scheme and was forced to concede that the plastic packaging on its cartridges wasn't environmentally friendly.

The printer itself, which has both scanning and copying facilities, is a rather large and quite unattractive unit, with dated-looking white plastic exterior. It will go on sale from May. A second all-in-one with fax functionality, the 5500, will arrive in June.