Would You Like to See the Ink Volume in Cartridges?

I saw a blog entry that made mention of the proposal of the National Conference on Weights and Measures to indicate or disclose the ink volume on the inkjet cartridge label. The post further said that the conference will take place this month in Nashville, Tennessee.

This blog post led me to thinking: of course, if beverages and other consumer products print the volume of the content on their labels then how come ink cartridges don't do this? Well, as a consumer, I think this proposal is highly-commendable. The disclosure of ink volume on the cartridge can help justify the amount that consumers have to pay when buying printer cartridges. If the consumers know how much ink they are paying for, then they might not complain as much as they do now about cartridge prices.

Printer manufacturers should have already foresaw that a proposal like this is bound to come up. After all, one of the ways to justify the price of cartridges is to show the consumers how much they are getting for that amount. Disclosing the ink volume on the cartridge label can also settle the issue on whether or not printer manufacturers are milking money from consumers by selling expensive OEM ink cartridges. If these printer manufacturers can make the consumers see that their ink cartridge products have higher ink volumes and can print more pages than the other brands in the market, then consumers may prefer buying OEM cartridges.

As for printer manufacturers, I can probably predict that they will reject this proposal. Although it is true that they can make more money out of selling ink cartridges than from selling the printer devices, standardizing the ink content of ink cartridges may cause some of these printer manufacturers to lose some profit.

As such, when news about this proposal first came out, printer manufacturers have been prompted to release statements that, in accordance to the provisions of the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act, they do not have to disclose the ink volume in their cartridge products.