“If you were to fill up the tank of your car with Hewlett-Packard or Lexmark ink, it would cost $100,000,” said Gerald Chamales, chairman of Rhinotek Computer Products, a Carson (Los Angeles County) manufacturer of ink and toner cartridges that are compatible with name-brand printers. “If you filled an Olympic-size swimming pool with ink from HP or Lexmark inkjet cartridges, it would cost $5.9 billion with a B.”
Of course, we’re talking about something a bit more sophisticated than a bottle o’ India from the stationary store.
“There’s an enormous amount of technology in these things,” said Pradeep Jotwani, senior vice president of the supplies organization in Hewlett- Packard’s imaging and printing group. “You get as many as 18 million droplets fired every second as you’re printing a photograph or color document. We have to design the silicon with the appropriate kind of nozzle and appropriate kind of ink so it can get heated, fired through that nozzle, land on paper and cool in a millionth of a second so it doesn’t bleed into the adjacent drop.”
HP spends about $1 billion per year on research and development for imaging and printing, he said. The company has nearly 9,000 patents in imaging technology, 4,000 of them in consumables, which include cartridges, ink and toner. “This isn’t trivial stuff,” Jotwani said.
On the other hand, it’s hardly a hand-to-mouth existence:
Still, the Palo Alto company reaps rich rewards for all that intellectual property. Its imaging printing business (which includes both printers and supplies) amasses annual sales of about $23 billion and enjoys 14 to 16 percent operating profits. Although HP doesn’t break out sales and profits on inks compared with printers, Jotwani said the supplies side makes more than that average 14 to 16 percent profit.
Tidy.
For my character, the arrogant 
