Printer Schemes

[Perry Winkle]

There is a printer company (and probably others?) now selling printers that you have to pay a monthly fee based on how much you print. They detect when you are low on ink and send you new cartridges.

This is super offensive to me.

First, ink prices were (are) extortionate and people worked around this by refilling cartridges or buying off-brand cartridges. This is a perfect example of the market smoothing out pricing problems.

Second, printer companies compromised the quality of the hardware and partially subsidized the cost of the printers with the cost of ink. Hooking people with virtually free (shitty) printers, thinking they could make it up on their brand of ink.

Instead of recapturing some of that value by obvious conventional means*, they are trying to do an end run that basically makes your printer their's for life.

* Lowering the price of ink and improving the quality of printers and charging for them appropriately. -- Sure, they've trained consumers that printers should be cheap, if not free, but I have little sympathy for their short-sightedness.

[Lamplighter]

Agreed.

I read this morning that Photoshop will be now "rented out" at essentially $1/day or $240/yr

[tw]

Break open a printer cartridge. Notice how little of the 'sponge' actually contains ink.

[Clodfobble]

(Only because now most of it will be on your shirt...)

[ZenGum]

Printer ink and toner are outrageously overpriced. Where's that graphic that's going around, comparing it to water, oil, human blood, and heroin? Hang on ...


ETA here ya go. I was wrong about the heroin.

[Lamplighter]

There was also a "shelf life" scam happening too.

HP printers give an Alert message when the cartridge is "out of date"
(I think it is 1 year, but I'm not sure.)
Anyhow, it is from the date of manufacture, not the date of your purchase.

Go figure....

[Flint]

At a glance, the OP appears to be how many businesses pay for printer/copier/multi-funtion units--that is, lease the equipment, pay a monthly fee per the actual use of the machine and for toner, parts, service. That's toner, not ink. Laser units are more expensive up front and less expensive to keep running, regardless of purchase model. Ink printers I refer to as an 'easy-bake oven' because that is about how robust and practical they are.

[Perry Winkle]

Yeah, I'm familiar with that business model for business printers. These are low-end printers I'm talking about. The levels of subscription are like 50, 100 and 300 pages per month.

[mbpark]

Translation: HP is covering their losses on hardware and consulting with ink. They did it before to offset low margins. Now this makes it even worse.

[JamesB]

Originally Posted by Flint

At a glance, the OP appears to be how many businesses pay for printer/copier/multi-funtion units--that is, lease the equipment, pay a monthly fee per the actual use of the machine and for toner, parts, service. That's toner, not ink. Laser units are more expensive up front and less expensive to keep running, regardless of purchase model. Ink printers I refer to as an 'easy-bake oven' because that is about how robust and practical they are.

I remember the good old days before the ink jet manufacturers started to supply printers with low fill "starter" ink jet cartridges. In those days it was cheaper to buy a new base level Lexmark printer than buy a set of replacement inks for your already owned Lexmark printer. No, they didn't profiteer from the ink sales.

I switched to LASER printers for my black and white home printing bout 15 years ago (one Epson that died after a lightning strike hit the power lines, a used HP4+ that cost me $75 and was still going strong when I gave it away in 2008, and a Dell 1720dn), and really haven't looked back.

Just before Christmas, we needed to do a run to Staples to buy new ink cartridges for our home inkjet printers to print our Christmas cards, and came home with a Brother MFC-9125CN Color Laser Fax/Scan/Printer instead.

Even with the short fill "starter" toner cartridges that came with the printer, with the printer on special at $250+tax, the 1000 page rating for each of the four "starter cartridges" (about 1/2 to 2/3 of normal cartridge capacity) indicated that the entire printer was going to cost less than just the cost of ink cartridges that our aging and more and more unreliable ink-jet printers would need to achieve the same number of pages. It was a no brainer. We're still running on the "starter cartridges", with the black indicating it is low and we should think about replacing it soon. I have a new 2200 page black cartridge ready to go in.

As for the per page costing of printers, where I used to work, over a decade ago, our office copier was on a 1c/page maintenance contract which covered all repairs and consumables except paper. We'd get regular phone calls asking for the counter number. With paper costing about 1c/page, we had a simple formula for costing print runs.

When the copier counter hit 1/2 million pages, then the price/page went up to about 2c/page ... to reduce our copying costs back to 1c/page we'd need to lease/buy a new copier. At 1 million pages, we were given the option of paying for all maintenance and consumables or buying a new copier.

[Flint]

I use a huge, boxy Dell business class b & w laser printer at home, stock it with after-market (shitty) replacement toners for $50 a pop, and just deal with the poor print quality inherent with cheap toner cartridges. After the initial purchase of the machine, I pay so little for toner I could do it on accumulated pocket change.

I'll be printing 'draft quality' for the price of paper, essentially, for years to come.

[MetalHead]

Yeah... HP LaserJet user here... Same thing with their color laser printers. Funny enough, their design is setup in such a way that once the cartridge sends an empty signal, even refilling it (drill a small hole in the plastic cartridge and refill with toner) still signal as empty. That's designed to screw you.

And the initial cartridges are the same size and indicate the same model number as their replacements but are only half-filled (as indicated in their user manual). That's also designed to screw you.

[Undertoad]

^ Text is identical to reddit post from a year ago; IP address from Pakistan; spam incoming

[Gravdigr]

The BanHammer stirs from its slumber...unhappily.

[monster]

say it isn't so...... not after that intriguing post about scarves and outfits for when you feel bloated which I'm sure wasn't plagiarized from anywhere.....