Hacker News Reader

Comment by trboyden | Hacker News Reader

I still have no idea why people don't buy printers by first looking at what refills cost. It is simply baffling. The only way to penalize manufacturers that practice this type of anti-consumerism is to stop buying their products, not coming up with work-arounds. The average toner cartridge replacement from HP is $150. My Ricoh C261SFWn's replacement cartridge from Ricoh is $50. The quality is just as good and the Ricoh machine itself was cheaper than an HP. No brainer.

View on HN

Most people don't print much. For typical home use, a printer might last 5 years printing 10 pages a month.

That's 600 pages in the lifetime of the printer, which is less than a single cartridge.

The real mistake people make is they don't realise they'll have to buy a new cartridge every 6 months because the old one has dried out.

I was in that category once then I got kids. A cheap color laser serves me well, even if the colors are off key enough to change any photo to some halloweenish nightmare. Kids dont care. Neither do I.

Now the printer before that basically never printed. I used it to scan my (postal) mail. One day it decided to upgrade its firmware, then refused to scan without ink. What a waste.

If you're printing a lot, this kind of calculation makes sense. If you only print a couple of times a month, it gets swamped by uncertainty: will the ink dry up before I use it? will they still sell those cartridges in 5 years time? will it have broken anyway? Under these conditions, it's not that illogical to spend less on the printer.

It's also not always easy to compare. Maybe I can see that a HP cartridge holds more ink than the Epson one - but do they use ink at the same rate? How much do they use for cleaning the nozzles when you're not printing? Will I be able to get unofficial cartridges, and will they affect print quality?

It's getting easier to compare, because they're getting on the subscription bandwagon, based on pages per month. But the smallest plan I see is HP's 15 pages/month, which is probably at least 3x what I actually print.

it's a very old business model, the same way people don't buy 4/5 blade razor by first looking at what the ongoing blade purchases cost.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com