Are we going to see less places where consumers can buy their compatible printer ink cartridges? It looks like the large printer brand makers want more control over the lucrative printer ink cartridge market. They see that their share in this market becomes smaller due to the less expensive ink cartridges supplied by non-OEM manufacturers. So the top printer manufacturers try to regain some market percentage.

Industry leader Hewlett-Packard now approaches chain stores, probably offering them better conditions if they agree to more aggressively market the HP printer ink cartridges and stop or reduce their efforts to supply their customers with third-party replacement printer ink cartridge products. Hewlett-Packard tries to convince consumers that it is better for the printer to use genuine HP cartridges. Sounding like a real warning that it may be bad for your printer if users print with other than Hewlett-Packard's ink cartridges.

But a lot of consumers don't buy that and are not willing to pay for the over-priced genuine ink cartridges. Especially not when the non-genuine ink cartridge manufacturers and suppliers guarantee an ink and print quality that matches that of OEM ink cartridges. See for examples HP Ink Cartridges.

Also printer manufacturers Lexmark and Epson try to stop the production of compatible ink cartridges.

And then there's Kodak, stating that for far too long, people have felt restrained from printing due to the high cost of printer ink. With their new system - the EasyShare 5000 printers - Kodak thinks that the printer ink market will never be the same and claims that consumers can print the same number of pages at half the cost of other consumer inkjet printers.