Comment by kube-system | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kube-system | Hacker News Reader

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The difference between this:

https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-deskjet-2755e-all-in-on...

... this:

https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-laserjet-enterprise-mfp...

... and this:

https://www.office.xerox.com/en-us/multifunction-printers/al...

... is not some metal gears.

All three of those are machines with fundamentally different functions and capabilities.

I have (long ago) supported consumer grade printers in an enterprise environment. They're so bad as to be unusable. You spend way more than the $10,000 on the nice copier in lost productivity due to poor reliability and additional IT labor required to fix a fleet of inkjets.

With a $10,000 copier, you push out an group policy to install it on everyone's PC and it runs pretty smoothly and can take the load. If you put $100 inkjets on 80 different desks, you end up having to hire another FTE just to manage the cartridge replacements, driver installations, head cleanings, paper jams, etc. And the experience is worse for the end users too. If they need 250 handouts printed in the next 10 minutes, they simply can't do it.

There is obviously a difference between the three, but is it that much? And how much is it really because of underlying technology and how much is it because of artificial market segmenting?

I also take offense with he fact that the 3rd example does not even have a listed price - that is a BIG red flag for the habit of making the customer pay as much as possible.

And the HW cost is justified, the SW cost is NOT, the interface should be simple and clean. Why is it not? No, here vendors are to blame.

Yes, the functional difference between those items is staggering.

The difference in capacity alone between the HP all-in-one and the Xerox copier is literally the same in magnitude (60-80x) as the difference in capacity between a semi truck and a passenger vehicle.

These are different tools that literally do different things. You can't print 250 handouts with that HP all-in-one, and you can't transport 25,000 lbs of freight in a Camry.

A routine use-case for one of those large copiers is something like a person needing to give a 25 page document to 10 people on short notice. Not only is it not practical, it's not even possible with a consumer inkjet. A high end workgroup copier will spit them out in a short moment, already stapled (or bound!) and ready to go. Do you realize how silly it would be to make 10 people with 6-figure salaries stand around waiting for a consumer inkjet, even just one time? You'd be wasting thousands of dollars to save pennies.... and that's assuming you don't consequentially impact your ability to generate revenue. I certainly wouldn't want to be responsible for a b2b sales team relying on a consumer inkjet to submit proposals on time.

> And the HW cost is justified, the SW cost is NOT

These aren't separate itemized costs when you buy a printer. You either get the Xerox printer with the Xerox software, or you get the HP Deskjet with the Deskjet software. You don't get to choose to use the DeskJet Printer with the Kerberos integration from the Xerox software. The teenager working at Best Buy is not going to be able to help you find a copier with software that is HIPAA compliant.

> I also take offense with he fact that the 3rd example does not even have a listed price - that is a BIG red flag for the habit of making the customer pay as much as possible.

It's an example of a ~$10000 copier. The price isn't listed because customers don't buy this type of machine directly through Xerox anyway. These types of purchases are done through formal proposals through Xerox vendors.

Large businesses don't buy things the way you do. They submit RFP/RFQs to vendors.

25 page X 10 is a total of just 250 pages, a desktop Inkjet printer (the kind that uses ink tanks, not cartridges) can handle it no sweat, if a bit slower. Probably takes half an hour to complete.

When you hit 100 pages for 20 people though... ;-)

But I agree with the general gist of your post. Desktop personal printers are simply not built for _regular_ high load.

The DeskJet I linked wouldn't be able to complete that print job, under any circumstance. Besides running out of paper, and overflowing the output tray -- the cartridges would run out before you finished the print job. The newer consumer inkjets with tanks will have enough ink, but likely won't have the tray capacity either. Most consumer printers are made to max-out around the length of a long school paper or a family's tax return.

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