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Comment by zwieback | Hacker News Reader

I've spent the last 16 years at HP in inkjet printhead manufacturing and R&D. Roughly speaking, we've come up with two models:

- disposable cartridges with printheads (what most people have at home), here we have to recoup the cost of the disposed silicon printhead and the low initial price of the printer

- permanent printheads (what you're asking for) and disposable ink "tanks" of various capacities, here the challenge is to make sure the printhead doesn't get ruined before the printer gets replaced. Third party ink can be a contributing factor to printhead health

We now also have an ink-subscription model where you pay at some anticipated level of ink use and you get a replacement cartridge when we think you need it.

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Apparently a third and more sensible way is possible in the Indian market though, with the HP DeskJet GT printers, which have refillable reservoir tanks (not even disposable!)

Yet somewhow they aren't offered for sale in Europe?

Instead we get the subscription model, which involves yet more data (printer usage, ink levels) disappearing off to someone else's servers.

Didn't even know about that model, thanks for pointing it out. Clearly we're trying out different business models in different markets.

Or maybe people in India wont put up with the sort of crap we somehow do here in the US

Obviously I'm older, but I'd prefer to pay a little more, and give you some profit, for a printer that's built to last, with some metal, rather than <£100 for a near cost pile of fragile plastic as the foundation of my ink subscription - with ink cartridges that seem to get smaller but more expensive with each passing year.

Then pay a reasonable price for cartridge with printhead ongoing, otherwise, if I'm successful keeping the printer as long as possible, I'm still recouping the low cost of the printer long past the point I bought enough ink to do so.

I don't need high throughput, heavy duty, as I don't print that much any more, so buying from the business range isn't usually sensible.

I bought a color laser printer for a few hundred bucks and despite almost never having to print anything it's one of the better purchases I've made.

It just works. It's not wasteful. And it won't dry out from lack of use. I figure I'll break even over buying ink-jet printers and cartridges in another year or so. Even if everything costs more in short term, it's so much less wasteful.

Same here. Purchased a workgroup color laser almost 7 years ago. My printing volume is fairly low (around 500 pages / year) and I'm still on the original set of cartridges. The amortized cost of this printer has been amazing-- under $75 / year. It uses the PCL protocol and has an Ethernet connection, so it's a long way off from practical obsolescence, too. I'll likely be using this printer in another 7 years.

Don't new color laser printers use cartridges? They just have toner instead of ink.

Yeah they do. But they don't dry out which is one of the big reasons every time I had to print I needed a new cartridge.

I tried to do the same thing but bought a cheap <$100 mono laser. I pretty much never print, maybe a page a month, if that.

It's only a year old and now it won't suck up the paper properly. I have to literally stick my hands into it and feed the paper in page-by-page.

The thing has successfully printed less than 20 pages and it's already not working.

It's 2016 and Samsung can't make a rubber roller that works. And I don't want to buy another just to have the same thing happen.

I spent about $400 -- I figure a sub $100 laser printer is much the same thing as buying a cheap inkjet.

I wrongfully assumed that an appliance manufactured and sold to perform a single task would be able to perform that task.

That was a mistake.

I think this whole thread is about how that's a mistake! You get what you pay for and cheap printers are crap; they're so cheap they're virtually useless.

I'm mostly in the same boat as you. However, I have found that with electronics, you run the risk of your beloved older piece of equipment not even being able to connect to your newer equipment because it doesn't have the latest connector (SCSI, Firewire, USB-2, USB-3, USB-C, Thunderbolt, Lightning, VGA, XGA, DVI, Mini-Display Port, HDMI, composite, component, etc.). On top of that, you have the issue of drivers and apps that can talk to the thing, too. Not as bad in the case of a printer, but still an issue for many devices.

USB 1,2 and three has been backwards compatible.

Ethernet is. Most WiFi gear is.

For most video equipment there exist some kind of adapters.

I worked at a .edu for years and we had several of those old, early LaserJets that worked for years, spitting out hundreds of thousands -- even millions, in a few cases -- of printed pages, with nothing more than the occasional change of toner cartridge.

Those laserjets don't have print heads like an inkjet printer does.

How about a third model? Customer replaceable print heads with physically separate customer replaceable and optionally refillable ink tanks of various capacities. Why must such things be mutually exclusive?

That said, I switched to a laser printer from Samsung for any printing that I still do. I had a HP photosmart printer for photo prints, but at the volume of a photo a year, it is cheaper to have the photo printed at walgreens, CVS or any other printing place than it is to buy new ink cartridges, even remanufactured ones.

We have that in the plotter space and had it for a while in the home space as well. Not sure why we switched away from that model although I'm sure economics were involved. It also goes toward what the other commenter says - many of us would prefer a longer-life printer but the reality is that the mass-market prefers low initial prices and it's hard to put replaceable printheads with reliable plumbing into a low-end mechanism.

Which models did that in the home space?

> "it's hard to put replaceable printheads with reliable plumbing into a low-end mechanism"

Isn't that exactly what HP is doing now when they sell a cheap printer with replaceable cartridges that contain ink and a print head? Are you saying the "plumbing" is the difficult part?

I suspect "economics" in this case means they weren't making huge margins on ink cartridges.

My laser printer has a replaceable toner cartridge and a replaceable drum unit that needs replacement far less often. The market can certainly handle the complexity of separately replaceable printheads and ink.

The above is exactly why i got out of ever buying an inkjet again and have re-adopted laser printers.

Hopefully from HP or Samsung... Kidding aside, laser is better for a lot of applications but low-cost color and photo is our sweet spot. That's why we don't like smartphones - nobody feels like they need to print any more.

Yep, HP LaserJet lol

make sure the printhead doesn't get ruined

How does a head get "ruined"? If its clogged can't it just be cleaned? Perhaps by flushing through with a solvent. I call shenanigans.

Cleaning with water is the first defense, solvents could easily dissolve some of the materials. However, with a permanently installed head it's not something we expect our customers to do.

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