Is it just that unprofitable to even try? Or the hardware too difficult or tricky? Or the driver software?
Seems like there are zero good alternatives for home printing.
HP doing this stuff or making you subscribe to HP+.
Brother offering basically zero support.
Is epson or canon even competitive for a home printer?
Printers are kind of expensive to manufacture.
Ink is extremely cheap to manufacture.
The printer industry charges a ton for ink and uses the enormous profits from charging for ink to cover the cost of design, and to heavily subsidize the price of printers.
Competing with printer companies as a startup looks like this: you burn a bunch of VC money to get a working design, then you burn even more VC money to make and sell printers at a steep loss, and once you have established a market presence your investors look on in horror as you use it to sell a very cheap commodity product a few milliliters at a time.
There's very little difference in how I use a printer today versus 10, 20 years ago, so why can't they just sell me the same basic printer?
I'm sure there's someone on the "edge" of the printer space-- maybe a firm that formerly offered laser printers but moved out of the home market (does Okidata still sell those LED-based printers?) where you could probably buy the rights to a proven design and firmware, maybe even the tooling itself, for basically scrap cost. Polish it up a little- fix the known issues on a 20-year-old design-- and restart the line with an advertised guarantee of long-term availability.
If the main cost is design, then limit the design. Don't come out with a new model every year. Don't have a dozen products. Sell a color laser printer with USB-C and wifi, that's it. Have a black and white SKU if needed. What other major innovations in printer technology do we need?
I'm more surprised that the printer market hasn't followed the security camera market, with lots of cheap and open options on markets like AliExpress that ship with phone-home firmware.
Someone on ebay sold me the wrong power board.
The local brother service center wanted me to sign some kind of business support agreement to even talk about fixing it (it is just me at home).
So I threw my $400 paperweight in the landfills electronics section and swore i would never buy another one.
Worth checking out.
I've had no problem finding Linux drivers for my Brother printers (or for their scanner components, since I've had all-in-ones for some time now), and they've never given me any problems that I needed any other support for.
Yes, there are IPP/Gutenprint options out there, but sometimes I feel like the image quality of the Brother driver is slightly more superior in imperceptible ways.
I have an old HP one (8-10 years old) that works and the laser cartridge lasts a really long time. It’s even Wi-Fi enabled which works most of the time (unplug and plug back in for the times it doesn’t gets it humming along again).
Granted I only print probably 5-6 pages a month.