A cheap printer is priced to sell you the ink
Most people who own a home printer know the moment. The ink runs out, you look up a new set of cartridges, and the total feels out of all proportion to what you paid for the printer itself. It feels like a pricing mistake. For HP's cheap cartridge printers, at least, it is not.
In January 2024, on the US business channel CNBC, Enrique Lores, then chief executive of HP, the American printer and PC maker, said it plainly : "We lose money on the hardware, we make money on the supplies." He went further. "Every time a customer buys a printer, it's an investment for us," he said, and if that customer "doesn't print enough or doesn't use our supplies, it's a bad investment." Asked whether printers follow the old razor and blades model, where the handle is cheap and the blades pay, he answered that it is "part of the business model that has been developed over time." Lores has since left HP. In February 2026 the payments company PayPal named him its chief executive.
So, in HP's own telling, a cheap cartridge printer works less like a product you buy and more like a sign-up. The machine is the entry fee. The cartridges play the part of a subscription, even though most owners have signed no contract and simply buy them when the ink runs out.
Where HP's printing money comes from
HP's annual report for the year to October 2025, filed with the US securities regulator, shows where the money comes from. Its printing business brought in $16,702 million. Of that, $10,916 million came from supplies : ink and toner, along with paper and other supplies. Printer hardware for businesses, which HP calls commercial printing, brought in $4,633 million, and printer hardware for consumers $1,153 million. Roughly two dollars of every three came from what goes into the machine, not the machine.
The same report shows why that matters. HP's PC sales bring in far more revenue than printing, $38,532 million against $16,702 million, yet printing earned more : $3,118 million in operating profit, an 18.7% margin, against $2,054 million and 5.3% for PCs.
One limit should be said clearly. HP reports printing as a single business, so its filings do not show printers on their own losing money. That part rests on the chief executive's own words, not on audited figures.
Why an ink cartridge carries a chip
If the profit is in the cartridge, a cheaper cartridge from another company is a direct threat. HP's answer is a chip on each cartridge and a system it calls Dynamic Security : the printer checks the chip, and firmware updates sent to the printer over time can change what it accepts.
HP's own wording, agreed in a 2025 US court settlement, describes it without hedging. The notice it shows on affected printers says the printer "is intended to work only with new or reused cartridges that have a new or reused HP chip, and it uses dynamic security measures to block cartridges using a non-HP chip. Periodic firmware updates like this one will maintain the effectiveness of these measures and block cartridges that previously worked."
HP presents this as protection. Lores said in the same 2024 interview that HP stops printers working with cartridges that violate its intellectual property, and that cartridges could in principle carry malicious code into a network. Those are HP's stated reasons ; HP offers no finding with them that cartridges from other makers generally pose such a risk. HP also ties some printers more tightly to its own supplies. A printer set up under HP's HP+ scheme must use original HP ink for as long as it runs. HP's ink subscription, Instant Ink, is by contrast optional and billed separately ; a customer can cancel it and go back to buying original HP cartridges.
What courts and regulators decided about ink lockouts
Italy's competition authority fined HP €10 million in December 2020. It found that HP had not told buyers, at the time of purchase, that its printers limited non-original cartridges, had renewed those limits through firmware updates without explaining the consequences, and had refused warranty help on printers that had used other cartridges. It called the practices misleading and aggressive. Trade press later reported that an Italian administrative court had rejected HP's appeal. HP's own annual report, though, describes the Italian matter as concluded except for an appeal it still lists as pending, so the public record does not show a settled final outcome.
In the United States, a 2019 settlement over a 2016 update to HP OfficeJet printers set up a $1.5 million fund for affected owners. Reports of the settlement also say HP agreed not to reactivate the feature on those models. In 2025 a federal court in California approved a second settlement, covering 21 HP LaserJet models. HP admitted no wrongdoing and paid no money to owners beyond awards to the named plaintiffs and lawyers' fees. It agreed to keep disclosing Dynamic Security and to let owners decline updates that carry it.
Not every court has gone against HP. In the Netherlands, an appeal court ruled in November 2024 that HP's use of Dynamic Security is not unlawful. According to HP's filing for the quarter to July 2026, the Dutch Supreme Court then decided the case on June 5, 2026, rejecting the claims and likewise holding that the practice was not unlawful. A class action filed in Illinois in January 2024 was dismissed in September 2025, with permission for the plaintiffs to file again. HP's annual report says it has faced such cases since 2016 in the United States, Italy, Israel, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand.
- AGCM : HP fined 10 million euros
- HP's Italian appeal is denied, €10 million fine still stands
- Notice provided to settlement class in HP printer firmware update litigation
- HP Dynamic Security notice
- HP printer lawsuit settled
- HP Inc. annual report (Form 10-K), fiscal year ended October 31, 2025
- HP Inc. quarterly report (Form 10-Q), period ended July 31, 2026
HP's own filing says its tank printers may earn it less
The model is a choice, and HP's report says so in its own words. HP also sells printers with large ink tanks that are refilled from bottles rather than cartridges. HP writes that these tank printers "typically have a higher initial margin" than cartridge printers, but "do not result in follow-on sales of high margin traditional ink cartridges" and so may earn less over the life of the device. That describes the trade-off in HP's business, not the lifetime cost of every printer to every buyer.
High cartridge prices are not HP's alone. In September 2022 the British consumer group Which? priced a set of Epson's own cartridges at £111.99, which worked out at the time to £1.78 per millilitre, more than seven times the 24p per millilitre of Dom Perignon champagne. Lockouts, though, differ by maker. In the same report, Brother told Which? that its printers accepted other makers' ink, and Epson said it did not use firmware to block third-party cartridges.
The model also has a ceiling. HP's supplies revenue fell 3.4% in its 2025 fiscal year, which it put down mainly to fewer printers in use, less printing and currency effects, partly offset by higher prices. The same filing describes a push toward subscriptions. But for HP's cartridge printers, the logic on the desk has not changed : the printer was priced to win the ink.
