ere is a good strategy to sell more ink. First spend $1.4 billion developing a new inkjet printing system.

Justify the cost by flogging the technology as one that will transform the computer printing industry.

Then sell some printers cheap, at or below cost, along with some exorbitantly priced ink to make a mint on the poor suckers who thought they were getting a deal.

In the old days I would have used that analysis to describe Hewlett-Packard?s strategy in the computer printing market. HP was only following the industry?s usual modus operandi.

The rise of refilling services and non-brand cartridges was slowly destroying that market model.

With HP?s release of the Photosmart 8250 and Officejet Pro K550 a compromise seems to have been made and indicates a refreshing change is in the air.

I want to pay the true price of my printer and my inks rather than subsidise low volume users.

First the machines cost about $200 each, a hefty price in a market where you can get a good printer for $40.

The 8250 is for home users. The K550 is designed as an alternative to laser printers for small to medium sized businesses.

HP has answered consumers? beefs about ink prices with an efficient management system that reduces the costs of printing all those high quality photos.

The new machines come with six inks cartridges, going for about $10 each, which is decent price in the market.

The six-cartridge solution allows owners to change each cartridge separately as the colour runs out.

Since you have less mixing of inks to achieve a proper colour the system also boosts print quality.

Each cartridge is good for about 350 prints, which is quite a good efficiency rate.

What?s really new is the management system that indicates when a cartridge might run out during a print run.

This prevents the wastage of the other inks, which is what happens if you run out while printing.

A new ?Auto Sense? technology also helps eliminate wasted ink or paper.

The technology reads what paper is in the feeder via a barcode-like technology that identifies the size, orientation and type of photo paper.

HP also flogs the Officejet Pro K550 as the world?s fastest desktop colour printer in the business world.

It can print up to twice the speed and for 30 percent lower cost-per-page than colour laser printers, HP claims.

HP does this by fabricating the print heads as one unit rather than welding them together in post-production.

This results in the precise alignment of the chamber, nozzles and heating element, which then improves the accuracy of ink drop placement.

The design allows HP to pack 3,900 nozzles or more on a single print head.

More nozzles and increased dot placement accuracy means faster prints.

Because there are more nozzles the head also prints over a larger print surface on the paper, speeding up the process.

The head also keeps a store of ink ready, apart from the print cartridge, so printing can begin immediately. The printer is designed to deliver laser-like quality text and water-resistant prints. HP plans to release the machine this autumn.

However I am betting that HP has missed the curve for most home consumers.

More and more people are simply sending their photographs via the Internet to regular photo print shops.

It is as cheap or cheaper than printing a regular photo from a negative.

And the price equals HP?s 24 cents per print estimated cost for using its Photosmart 8250. Twenty-four cents is not bad, but consumers want the hassle taken out of their life.

Sending a photo over the Internet to be printed by someone else beats fiddling around with the vast array of printing parameters and getting the right paper and ink together.

Printing out two or three prints to get the quality you want soon takes the excitement out of watching our prints roll out of a home printer.

Let someone else deal with mis-prints I say.

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Contact Ahmed at ahmed.elamin@wanadoo.fr.