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Comment by orev | Hacker News Reader

At the low number of pages printed at home, I don’t mind buying the actual name-brand toner. If you’re only changing it every 2 years, the cost doesn’t matter much, and at least the company (i.e. Brother) gets some profit from being a good citizen. Going with non-OEM toner in that situation just drives the company into needing to find more revenue streams, such as locking down the cartridges, which undermines you. At some point people need to be willing to pay a little more to a company that treats them with respect.

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I put a piece of black tape over the window on my Brother starter toner like 4 years ago. Print quality is still good enough for anything I print at home (which is obviously very little).

What does this do?

There's a sensor that checks the toner level. The tape tricks it into thinking the level passes instead of not passing.

I don't remember if it just stops the printer from complaining about the level, or if it refuses to print with a low level.

Hides the fill level from the optical sensor. They can be rather pessimistic about the quality of print that you'll get at lower levels.

How about they make their money by selling a good printer? I don't have to buy has from my car company if I want a good car.

Would you rate the typical car buying experience as one that’s fair where the customer generally isn’t taken advantage of?

In terms of vendor lock-in on the fuel supply? Yes absolutely.

It’s has historically proven difficult to sustain that model because the consumer printer market for the past 20 years has been race to the bottom. It’s hard to compete when competitors are selling their printers at or below cost.

Consumers mostly tend to make their purchase decisions on the margin, and so the razors-and-blades model works well.

I guess there may be a few recent exceptions to this like the Epson Ecotank, although I don’t know how profitable that has been for them.

Brother has been selling solid printers and software for as long as I have used them, which is 15+ years.

I agree, and I have a couple of them myself.

But they’re not the ones cranking out the $20-$50 inkjets that litter the shelves at Walmart/Best Buy

Well, the EcoTanks are pretty expensive to begin with. They also have some colour quality issues that requires you to waste ink to like… recalibrate every so often, or something thing like that?

But most of the time, it's fine, and the ink is cheap.

All of the inkjets on the shelf would have similar prices to the EcoTanks if they weren't sold at or below cost and subsidized by their cartridges.

It costs HP/Canon at least (if not more than) $49 to build a $49 inkjet all-in-one.

In my country, it seems inkjet printers with tanks are quick replacing printers with cartridges.

The reason being people in my country don't really care about warranty, would go out and buy a cheap cartridge-based printer, then bring that printer to some hack shops that will "convert" that printer into a tank-based one, allowing you to use any third-party ink.

So manufacturers keep absorbing loss on their lower-than-cost printers and couldn't make a profit from ink sales.

That's why cartridge-based printers are slowly being phased out for ink tank printers... So manufacturers can grab profit directly from printer sales :-)

I'm using a 10 year old Brother with the starter toner. Still going strong, but I haven't given Brother a cent since I bought it for $100. Can they survive off that? Hopefully.

One purchase does not give a company the rights for all future purchases. If their business model assumes that, their business model is faulty.

I switched to OEM toner after using up some generic stuff I'd been working on for two years. It's barely more expensive and it was nice they included a prepaid shipping label for me to return the used cartridge to them.

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