HP Original Cartridges

(The "X" size won't fit the M601)

Reliable Remanufactured Cartridges

1000 Staple Cartridge

HP Q3216A Staple Cartridge for HP LaserJet Printers.

HP Part Q3216A is a 3-pack of 1000-staple-cartridges for HP's big mono LaserJet Printers.

We need to qualify that description just for now.   We are pretty sure that if you pay us about £20 one of our distributors will send you a box containing three staple cartridges each with a thousand staples. Staples are a bit expensive at nearly a penny each; we'd like to charge less and that ought to be possible but this product seems to be caught in strange limbo.

• It can't break through into mass manufacturing, but dealt with on a craft basis it has an unattractive price. That goes for the staple cartridge and even more so for its partner the stapler stacker
• At some point the Q3216A cartridge lost the "3 in a box" bit from the description. That inflated the apparent price threefold from being merely unattractive to offputting. Wrong descriptions now outnumber right descriptions both on the Web and in HP sources. So we will ask HP but there is a very good chance their first answer will be wrong.

So this essay isn't really about the Q3216A, its about printer manufacturing, cartridges and spares using the benighted staple cartridge as an example.

HP is the biggest thing in office printers with something over 40% in a vicious market. Epson and Canon might be bigger in home printing (but home printers produce 14 sheets a week). Ricoh and Canon might be bigger in copying - quite the opposite problem, few installations and some huge volumes.

Stanford graduates Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started what became Silicon Valley's first business in a garage in 1939. First product was an innovative audio oscillator that used a lamp as a feedback resistor to give stability. Several were sold to Disney for use in setting up the sound systems for the film Fantasia. Economics ultimately serves entertainment.

Instrumentation became a major industry as aerospace, radar and computing came to be the core of science and defence. HP instruments gained a solid reputation for quality. HP developed an interest in computers, needed to control laboratory instrument systems. When they introduced one of the first pocket calculators in the 1970s this became a high profile addition to a growing product list. In the 1970's they avoided the word "computer" because IBM seemed to own the term much as Apple has taken the SmartPhone mindspace.

HP is a big organisation; too big for any one person to fully know. In 2015 they are responding by splitting in two, an "enterprise servers and services" and a "computers and printers" company. Back in 1999 they split from the original instrument company, spinning it off as Agilent Technologies. Historically, then, HP know how to make high quality complex devices in small quantities. Lab instruments sell for thousands of dollars and did even in the 1980s when a thousand dollars meant something, (Inflation since 1990 has roughly halved the value of most currencies).

Paper handling machines still do cost quite a bit: for just under £700 you can have a Rimo A4 jogger and £1000 gets the Muro M43x43 jogger on a floorstand. Essentially a jogger is largely a hopper for paper with a motor and an eccentric cam, vibrating a stack of paper gets all the edges to line up neatly ready for binding, so these machines are popular with printers and book-binders.

Q3216A was introduced with the first staple-stacker the Q2443A in 2002 and is still used in the F2G72A in 2015.   With print cartridges the print brands are continually changing design to keep imitators at bay. With the staple cartridge, obscurity has allowed stability.

Stapler stackers are rather nice output gadgets providing both an extra output bin and a way to keep reports of up to 15 sheets (30 sides) neatly together.   This allows a printer to run longer unattended. Printers with built in staplers make a great deal of sense because a lot of printing runs over more than 2 sides and staples are the standard way to bind such things together. Somebody will be stapling the report that just came out of the printer but they are going to waste a minute or so hunting around for the gadget to do it - then a bit more time when they find it's out of staples.

Some printer manufacturers get around this by building a "utility stapler" into the printer. It isn't really part of the printer, its an ordinary stapler built into the printer body. Offices on a budget can achieve the same thing by getting a Rexel "Meteor" priced at about £10 (staples about £9 for 5,000) and tying it to the printer with string.

The nice thing about printers with an automatic stapler stacker is that they do the whole job for you: they collect the paper into a neat pile and then stick the staple in. Printers with staplers are a way to make life a little better; its technology that humanity knows how to do and ought to deliver.

Stapler/stackers ought to be popular   …

      …   … but have not been so, perhaps that can change.

Politicians like

In practice the stapler and its cartridge seem to have become so obscure that HP themselves have forgotten it. They make it, but whatever drives their pricing has been acting randomly. In July 2015 we found it priced on their US website at $249 and on the UK website at £573 including VAT, (so £477.50 without). We don't know if this valuable gadget sells better in the US because even there it may seem pricey. We can say that in the UK they sell rarely in ones and twos - one of the distributors we deal with once had six!

At some point, instead of saying it was a three-pack of a thousand staples it got described as 1000 staples and this spread out through data feeds unchallenged

Online information for this product has been a bit misleading.   HP seem to have a data-feed describing this just as HP 1000-staple Cartridge and then in a field that doesn't always get displayed on web-sites as "3 per pack".

HP Information

Almost every site has the same blurb culled from IceCat or some similar feed:

Avoid job interruptions with the HP Staple Cartridge Refill. With 1000 staples in the refill cartridge and messages that indicate when the stapler is low on staples, you don’t have to worry about running out of staples in the middle of a print job.

HP.com/UKStore website on 23rd July 2015

… and …

Nearly £30 for a pack of a thousand staples wouldn't be value, more like robbery. Pick up a stationery catalogue and a pack of 5,000 staples can be had for under £3 or 0.06p per staple.

Things are better than they seem.   You get 3 packs of 1,000 cartridges With a bit of research we found HP's document   Expand your paper handling and finishing options (4AA5-2818ENW) which definitely says you get three lots of 1,000 staples.

… but at typical pricing it still works out at nearly a penny per staple. No wonder sales are slow!   And think of all that money they spent developing the stapler-stacker.

Web Research

There are two things to research here: what went wrong and what is true.

Icecat shows product code Q3216A and GTINs 8087363064926 8032976006702 4053162296763 0082014025132 4250905205192 0808736306492. There are 148521 product views on this part

The part also appears as Q3216-6050. Ordinarily this sort of number would be an engineering spare, but it isn't clear why HP would need spare staples. Spare staplers, perhaps.

If you are suffering stapler jams or failures then you do in fact need a new stapler - but just the module, not the whole stapler stacker. For the M601 and M604 series its RM2-6202-000CN. For the older LJ-4200 to 4350 its RM1-1164 and for the P4014 series stapler-stacker CB521A the part is RM1-0235 / Q3216-60501

A google Query on Q3216A (in quotes") in October 2014 gave About 24,100 results (0.46 seconds) with the first in organic search being as follows:

hp.com no price,amazon.com $28.59 free del,staples.com $42.59, newegg.com $26.99, CDW $27.99, ticexpress.com call for price, suppliesoutlet.com $32.41, priceless-inkjet.com $32.97,bestbuy.ca $22.98, shopbot.com.au $21.47, optishop-online 31.25 EU,4inkjets.com reduced to $28.99, provantage.com $21.75, digitec.ch 50.60, 123ink.ie 32.50 EU, printerworks $29.50, inet.au $26, hbsx.com $31.73, auspcmarket.com.au $52.80, hourbuys.com not relevant, amazon.ca $23.00 free shipping, printershowcase $24, caretoclick.com multiple listings, facebook no pricing, bestbuy.com not available,amazon.co.uk £49.99, staticeice.com.au multiple listings, precision roller $52.95, amazon.de 29.89 EU

When we looked at the subject again in July 2015 we had been researching HP's accessories, which don't seem to sell very well in the UK. We paid a bit more attention to what you get for what price. So alongside is a snapshot of HP's own website and their price.

Supply Situation

In 2013 HP's staple cartridges were listed by one distributor, holding some stock and we thought demand for the part would be quite low.

We can provide these parts when required. Price in July 2015 was about £21.00, largely reflecting what HP charges us. That price can be squeezed a bit by using that other product code.

These are guidelines, our prices change with distribution lists - see the catalogue and the prices alongside. Stock numbers indicate there has not been much call for the part.

Copyright G & J Huskinson & MindMachine Associates Ltd 2013, 2015. Some pictures derived from HP User and Service guides. These technical pages do not constitute an offer for sale; just our knowledge at the time of writing. See the catalog. Sales pages on this Web site use cookies to store user information. We also use Google Analytics to track site useage patterns.