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Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

Inkjet makers are not cannibalizing their own market. They understand the basic reason that people purchase inkjet printers in the first place—because they think about capital costs and not operating costs.

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Most people I know who bother any more to own document printers own lasers, precisely because the operating costs are so much lower. I actually don't think anyone I know even still has an inkjet, except for other photographers.

It's funny because lasers are better for people like me who very infrequently print documents. I don't need things printed often, so I was always having the ink dry out and be unusable when I needed it.

My color laser printer that I got a few years back is just so much better in every way.

Inkjets are actually superior to color laser for photo quality, but almost everyone would be better served by just having their occasional photo printed at Walgreens or target

That's a good point. I let others print my photos if I really want to frame them, I basically never print photos.

For sure, yeah. I print and frame my own because I like to print and frame my own, not because it's really all that cost-effective. It's not overly expensive to do my own, especially since I lucked out and got my large-format printer for $100 with a stock-clearing rebate, but if I didn't enjoy the feeling of reifying my own work that comes with the process, I'd likely be better served having it done by Bay Photo or some other shop that specializes in it.

(I do get my prints from Bay Photo when they're too large for my own equipment, which tops out at 13x19". They're super good! I can really recommend them.)

That doesn't work for everyone. We print a lot of kid photos for albums and what not. And then grandma visits, and we hand her the phone, and say "press here if you like the picture" and minutes later she has the prints. The short latency and not having the hassle of a 20 minute trip is worth the investment in our case.

Yeah, I'd figure if you plotted a distribution of photo printing frequency you'd see a pretty sharp peak centered on zero and a very long, very skinny tail. The cutoff for "makes more sense to order prints at need" vs. "makes more sense to own and maintain printing equipment" would probably happen right about where that tail started.

Yes. I have an ink tank Epson inkjet, so there's no nonsense about overpriced ink cartridges. The trouble is, if I don't print anything for a week or two, I have to go through the nozzle cleaning cycle a few times before clean prints come out.

Maybe this reflects more on the people you know, and they can afford to worry about operating costs? Most of my community is college students, and I don't know anyone who owns a laser printer. I simply don't own a printer at all and only print at the office, because the printers I can afford suck that much to own. I suspect you'd see similar problems among most of the target market for inkjets - we can't afford to have nice things.

I mean, most of the people I know don't bother to own any kind of printer. What I'm saying is, except for a very few who, like me, optimize for maximum photo print quality and are willing and able to pay extra for it, those few I know who do bother to own printers have lasers, because they're no more expensive to buy these days, and a whole lot cheaper to feed.

I've never been a college student, but I've been plenty broke a few different times in my life. If anything, the relevance of being flush would seem to be in not having to worry about operating costs. I sure as hell would never have considered buying a photo printer that eats three bucks in ink per print, and God knows how much in cleaning cycles, if I wasn't lucky enough to be flush these days. Sure, I got it cheap with a rebate, but so what? It's the running costs that kill you, if anything does.

I just bought a used laser printer for 40 Euro when i was a student. Many years later I bought a new toner for 20-30 Euro. The printer is one of the best investments I ever made. It rarely gives me any trouble and when I need to print something it just works, even when I haven't used it in months.

There's an exception to this for wide-format color laser printers. I have occasional need to print 11x17's, but relatively infrequently. When I do have the need, I can't afford a delay, and I often need to do a quick repeat when I spot a small mistake or something. Unfortunately, the jump from a color laser that will handle 8.5x11's to 11x17's is like at least $1,500, whereas I can get an inkjet that will do 11x17's for like $300.

Well, yeah, for sure. Outside the "monochrome, mostly text, on US letter or smaller paper" use case, lasers get pretty wild pretty fast.

For photos specifically, I haven't recently had the chance to compare, but I would not expect any even remotely consumer-attainable laser printer to produce results on par with inkjet. A lot of the reason inkjets have gotten so good over the last decade or so has been trickle-down of tech developed for the professional market, I believe thanks in no small part to the gallery market for "giclée" fine art prints. For color management as well as print quality, I just don't think laser can get there, and even if it did, I'd expect a comparable result to cost an order of magnitude or two more.

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