Hi All,

Yesterday my sales person for my ink outsource vendor call me to see if I wanted to add anything to my refill order. Usually a sales coordinator will send an email asking if I want to add to the order after they inventory what I sent to them to be refilled/remanufactured. I sent this sales person a few emails in the past asking if they are seeing an increase in electronic problems with newer cartridges. I again asked him this same question during our discussion yesterday. He then sent me the following email today:

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Spoke with both production and rma people and both said there has not been an abnormal number of hp electronic failure. I have heard from some of my other customers that they feel that HP has downgraded the quality of their recent cartridges. I have nothing concrete to back this up, just what I’ve heard. If this is the case then there’s not much we, as a remanufacturer, can do about that. We can’t make a cartridge better than it originally was manufactured, the best we can do is keep the quality at the OEM level.

You had mentioned in a previous email that your failure rate was only 2% overall. That is in keeping with what we are seeing and is a highly acceptable percentage. Other remanufacturers would be ecstatic to have a failure rate that low…even OEM can have failure rates in that percentile. While we constantly strive to improve cartridges, a 0% defective rate is an unreasonable expectation. We’d be hard pressed to even get the rate below the current 2%. That doesn’t reflect negatively on our production techniques and abilities, it’s just reality. Not to say that 0% isn’t a goal to work towards but you and I both know that it would be next to impossible for anyone to guarantee or achieve better than 2% in this industry.

I understand that electronic failures constitute the majority of the defects you have but when it comes down to it, it’s the overall failure rate that matters most.
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After getting this email I decided to go back to actually count all of my returned cartridges and get the real number for all of my outsourced ink cartridges. I bought a little over 10,000 cartridges from this vendor this year. I return 219 cartridges for replacement or credit. Of those, 121 were due to electronics and 98 were due to ink not printing correctly; such as missing one color of a tricolor cartridges or scratchy printing. Of those 121 with electronic problems; 70 were HP and 51 were Canon, Lexmarks and Dells. Since over 60% of our sales are HP cartridges, I would say that HP is not having any worse problem then any other manufacturer. It just seems so because of their popularity.

I hope this help with some of your perception; but of course everyone numbers could vary…

-Jerry
In God We Trust