Printer Ink: More Costly Than Human Blood

Posted by Mike Slocombe on 6 November 2006 at 2:34 pm | Tagged as: Business

Printer Ink: More Costly Than Human Blood If ever you were in any doubt of the painfully high price of printer ink, a feature on tech website Gizmodo shows a graph representing the relative values of various liquids compared to blood.

According to the statistics, a $30 HP No45 black ink cartridge comes with just 42ml of ink, giving punters a price of $0.71 per millilitre for the ink.

Printer Ink: More Costly Than Human Blood Penicillin comes in at around $0.6/ml, followed by vodka at $0.2/ml, bottled water at $0.1/ml and finally crude oil at something like $0.05/ml (it’s hard to be precise because the graph doesn’t come with a text breakdown).

We’re not taking these figures entirely seriously (it’s a Monday after all, and we’re still waiting for the coffee to kick in) but, as a comparison, human blood knocks out for $200 for 500ml, according to uncited Red Cross figures.

This works out at to $0.40/ml, getting on half the price of printer ink.

Printer Ink: More Costly Than Human Blood Punters have long complained about the outrageously high cost of printer ink - a 2003 study by the Consumer Association’s Which? Magazine found out that the humble smudgy stuff was priced ‘My Printer Hell’.

Meanwhile, those with a keen interest in the pricing of bodily fluids can examine the price of bull semen here, or perhaps peruse a comprehensive comparison of liquid costs from penicillin to ‘punky colour hair dye’ here.

Gartner: Printer ink costs more than perfume

[From Gizmodo]