Lies, damned Lies, and Printer Cartridges August 31, 2011 12:54 by Matt Bird

It always makes me chuckle when people attempt to hide lies in statistics. It makes me chuckle even more when they do it so painfully unsubtlely that it is simply a matter of time before they have nowhere left to hide.

We originally blogged on a report by Sir Philip Green last October regarding the cost of printer cartridges in the Government. To quickly break it down, the report stated how poorly organised and managed Government spending was across numerous departments, using printer cartridges as a prime example of poor spending.

Sourcing cartridges from 5 principle suppliers, containing 83 individual contracts, Sir Green (am I allowed to remove a Sir's first name?) showed how prices crazily ranged from £86 to £398 per cartridges. Surely this should create an outrage at this heinous act?!?! Well, maybe... if you actually told us what cartridges you were price comparing, Sir. (sod it, I'll remove both names).

We know the printer cartridge market isn't an attractive one, but we try our best to provide competitive priced cartridges and help our customers save money. It's figures like this which don't help our case, so when information protecting our product comes out, we sure better use it!

Hey Stinkyink, More Information Has Come to Light!!

Hat's off to PC Pro's journalist Barry Collins, whom has fought through repeated-denials by the Cabinet Office and enforced the Freedom of Information Act. Providing information from the report, it has shed light on the shameless manipulation of quoted figures.

One example shows the comparison of a laptop costing around £350, with the "same model" costing £2,000 in a separate department. By "same model" they mean the same range of laptop, with vastly different specifications.

In regards to printer cartridges, The Cabinet Office still vehemently supports the report, and states the quoted figures are from cartridges for the HP Laserjet 5500 model.

As of yet it is still unclear where the price differentation comes from, but after the laptop figures you really have to wonder. Indeed, in a competitive market such as ours a price swing like that is nigh-on unheard of.  Could they just be reporting on originals versus remanufactured? Black vs Colour (as the latter is more expensive). I'm not sure... Once we find out more information we will update this post as soon as possible.

It's the strangest thing though. If you compare our prices for the HP 5500, the Remanufactured C9730A Black and Genuine HP Cyan Toner, that price difference looks pretty close. Nah, couldn't be that unsubtle...