Why is printer ink so expensive?
digitalrightsbytes.org
digitalrightsbytes.org
I realize that style of writing appeals to the "us vs them" mentality but I'd rather read about the underlying economics and finances.
The inkjet printer manufacturers are using a "razor and blades" business model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_and_blades_model
The blog's paragraph could have also mentioned that aspect and as a bonus, also educated readers enough to generalize the business practice and later "pattern match" on similar scenarios such as "cheap mobile phones" that are locked down with 2 year contracts. I.e. "teach a man to fish ... yada yada"
An industry built around selling you things you will then not want to use is an industry with big problems. It works for razor blades because we need to shave regardless -- yes, you could chose to have a beard, but short of that, demand is constant.
For printing, that just isn't true. And I print much less than I once did.
But this is the underlying economics and finances.
They can use a "razor and blades" business model because of all the things mentioned in the text you quoted. If they didn't do those things I could just order from amazon a cheap ink for their cheap printers from a rival and they would either go bankrupt or need to sell printers closer to what they make them for. But you can't because they made it illegal for the rivals to create those cheap ink cartridges.
In fact talking about "Razor and blades model" obscures this fact, not illuminates it.
People would like to buy as cheap as possible. That's unfortunately incompatible with printers business model (marketing + cheap initial printer + necessary sales later to bring in the actual profits). As you mention they would go bankrupt soon if this is disrupted, and end users won't win long term in such scenario.
So I don't really get the issue, its so hard to grok that you pay for continuous package? Why would companies building ecosystem let anybody who bankrupts them in? Apple also fights tooth and nail to keep their app store one and only monopoly. Or go elsewhere, ie I have Brother printer, not stellar but good enough, official cartridge costs 1/2 to 1/3 of cost of whole new printer. Seems very reasonable to me and I am happy to pay those 50 bucks once every year or two.
I also buy official batteries when replacing in say phone, absolutely 0 point testing stuff thats marginally cheaper and of famous 'chinese quality'. I am old enough and rich enough to understand that I am definitely not rich enough to buy cheap junk just and exactly because its cheap.
Or they'd adjust and charge the real price for the printer? We won't end up in a world with literally 0 printer manufacturers. People still need printers.
Higher buy in anyway.
And this would be bad?
A laser printer is objectively a better printer for most people, they're slightly more expensive up front but substantially less expensive in the long run while being better at printing the things people actually print.
Most people buy printers the way Americans buy cars, concerning themselves more with having the ability to do things they think they might do rather than focusing on being a good fit for what they actually do, and as a result ending up with something that is objectively worse at what it's used for most of the time.
A cheap inkjet is just a bad printer, it's not good enough at photos to be useful to someone who primarily prints those and no inkjet has ever been good at printing documents without even getting in to the inevitable consumable waste inherent to using them that way. I won't shed a tear if they disappear off the market. Make greyscale lasers the standard entry level printer.
No, not really. Never suggested it was.
Imagine if your power company lobbied to make it illegal to send electricity through third-party cables, and then gave away power for pennies (because "people would like to buy as cheap as possible"), but sold 3-foot extension cords for $139 each (because of "safety", "hackers", whatever). Would you be ok with your power company going through these contortions to support a pricing model not tied to reality?
Well sure, they will do what is in their power, but their power should be limited. Why is it acceptable that these types of firms can manipulate the government to sustain their monopolies? You wouldn't accept them burning down the factories of their rivals. The kind of lawfare they engage in isn't excusable either.
The “razor and blades” pricing is (as the market demonstrates) a dominant strategy. The other pricing strategy (cost-plus) is preferable for the customers printing a lot, not for customers who print little. Then add some customer myopia: I need a cheap printer, where cheap is initial out of pocket, not total cost of ownership. And there you have it: all suppliers ‘must’ follow the dominant pricing strategy because the myopic customer demands it. The twice as expensive printer up front just won’t get store space.
Brother might be (or, was?) somewhat of an outlier for the informed consumer. But who buys a Brother right? HP and Canon dominate the market.
General point is that individual suppliers in a multi supplier market have to take the dominant pricing strategy as a given, or differentiate along other axis.
Imagine a world where Ford sells you a car you can only fuel at a Ford gas station. Maybe they enforce it by having a special tank cover only their pump nozzles can get through. And then when some other gas station makes nozzles which can also fuel those cars people paid from your taxes come and impound those nozzles as “circumvention devices”. Do you think that would impact the price of gas those car owners pay?
And yet, still, many people choose to use "razor and blades" products because it's more faster and more convenient and requires less effort and lower buy-in cost than the alternatives.
Economics and finances are inherently simply a different way of stating "us vs them". Just because the predatory behavior is studied in business school doesn't make it less predatory. Same with finance.
What printer companies are doing is user hostile, not user friendly.
Do they want to make more money, or less money? hmm...
The answer to why it's so expensive (applies to pretty much everything, not just printer ink) is: Because it can be.
Price and cost have almost nothing to do with one another. The manufacturer will charge as much as they can make people pay.
I mean, if HP shareholders weren't going to reap returns, why would people ever print anything to start with?
https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/s9b2eg/brother_mf...
However, I've not had any issue with third party toner in my Brother DCP colour laser printer and haven't heard of any such issues.
My printer is an HP DeskJet 1220C, which first came out in 2000 (it's got USB and parallel ports). I like it because the "ink cartridges" include the print heads, meaning they're easy to replace if they start getting clogged [0]. But that doesn't mean I'm going to recommend HP as a brand to anyone, given the shenanigans of their newer printers.
[0] As what happened to my previous-to-me but newer-model Photosmart 6520. Cleaned them out good with alcohol, got it working again, then it clogged up again in short order. Figuring out the actual problem there has been a bit beyond me.
I believe people are probably buying the wrong printer. If they print a lot, they should be buying an ink-tank printer. The printers cost a little more, but the consumables are very inexpensive.
If they are infrequent printers, they should buy whatever cheap printer they want and then sign up for that companies ink subscription. You mentioned HP and they probably have the best ink subscription program. For light use it's $1.49 / month which is going to be enough for a lot of people. It's nice to never have to order ink.
erm, do any of these subscription services work without having to subject yourself to surveillance of everything you print? I can't imagine the companies are just content to take your word for the amount you've printed or when you need more ink. Off the cuff, I would guess most will force you to even compromise your personal computer itself by installing some proprietary malware.
FWIW the HP official black cartridge for the 1220C is ~$70, whereas generics are under $20. I'm sure the generics cut corners a little bit, but not $50 worth of corners. HP is most certainly overcharging for ink.
But the general failure pattern in our society isn't massive profits going to company owners, but rather ever growing management and administrative layers taking the surplus as their own salaries.
They don’t. These days most people are printing pages from their phone and printer companies don’t get deep access to iOS and Android like they do with Linux and Windows.
The printer counts the pages and sends the page count and ink levels to the mother ship and ink just shows up exactly when you need it.
> massive profits
These companies don’t have rivers of cash flowing into them. Selling and supporting printers and ink isn’t a great business. The software and hardware is expensive and hard to make. The ink is the only thing with a good margin on it and people just don’t use all that much of it.
Lots of businesses operate like this so I’m not sure why people are so upset at printer companies. When I buy a game for my PS5, I get about $2 worth of plastic and cardboard and they charge me $60 or more. Obviously it costs money to make the game and they spread that over all the copies. Well, same goes for printers and their consumables.
If you want cheap ink, buy a printer with cheap ink. They are out there and they are great. If you want to spend as little as possible on a printer, that’s out there too. You just pay more down the line for consumables.
So is the printer running secure (ie libre) firmware so I can know it's not also backhauling the content of what is printed for some imagined "legitimate" business purpose? Or are you saying that I am just supposed to trust the printer manufacturer based on their marketing? If I am supposed to be content just trusting them with the content of what I print, then I might as well dispense with "owning" a device that requires (space, supplies, maintenance) and just pick up prints at Staples.
> Lots of businesses operate like this so I’m not sure why people are so upset at printer companies. When I buy a game for my PS5, I get about $2 worth of plastic and cardboard and they charge me $60 or more
Because it's straight up anti-competitive bundling that would be taken to task if there were any semblance of anti-trust enforcement. Printers and ink for printers should be separate markets. A manufacturer should not be able to abuse their market share of printers in order to make people buy ink from them as well.
People are also most certainly concerned with proprietary locked down platforms (eg PS5, iDevices, web services). The topic of printers is just especially galling because it was an industry that got along just fine before using technological and legal restrictions to kill competition. Newer markets have been locked down from their creation, so people have a harder time imagining better. That anti-competitive arrangements have been allowed to fester across our society is a major problem, not some kind of perverse validation.
(Your example of game pricing also drags in the deliberate monopoly of copyright, but I addressed the substance of the anticompetitive bundling/subsidizing consoles with games)
Took some research and timing but couldn’t be happier with no longer having to worry about ink clogging / going bad if I haven’t printed for a while.
Toner cartridges aren’t exactly cheap, but they will print a ton of pages, and they take way longer to go bad from what I’ve experienced so far…
Practical, reliable, affordable and just works technology; The amazing Brother HL-L2320D printer. I can't remember the last time I bought toner. The thing just keeps on printing. I think they make a wireless version, but I can't be bothered to change something that just works the way this printer has. We have fancy printers at work that are also Laser based and they are not as reliable the printer sitting next to me.
I think they're also not great for releasing gases and certainly my one does have a chemical smell when printing, so I just make sure that I'm in a different room for doing a large print (it helps that the printer is network connected).
probably some burnt toner too
Doesn't matter if they happen to print longer, most folks care about the money on the spot.
The version with no scanner that they recommend is about 100 euro (I think that precise version is now discontinued, but its successor, the Brother-HL-L2400DW, is also about 100 euro).
- laser toner is bad for your health
- laser has a larger upfront cost
However, inkjets are probably better for printing photos, but I'd recommend just using a photo printing service if that's what you're after (assuming that they're not private photos that you don't want to share).
I've chosen to have Black and White only at home, and go to FedEx for my color pages. I do black and white text often enough that it's worth it. But I really don't do color enough to warrant a printer (or upgrading to a more expensive color printer even)
You know it's 10c a page, you can email it to them and pick it up later... right?
It's also a FedEx, so I'm pretty sure they can FexEx you the printout for an additional fee and deliver it. But FedEx Office Centers are all over my area and are common pickups during grocery shopping or other tasks I have around town.
There probably is a cheaper local printer that you should support rather than big business FedEx btw. Local marketing and local printers would likely accept your print jobs and supporting your town is a good idea.
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Consolidated office print jobs also stock rarer papers (cardstock, oversized, legal, etc. etc) and support more styles of print jobs anyway.
You should have a home printer for your most common printing task (which is almost certainly jost plain black and white documents). But if you need serious print jobs with good bindings, cover sheets and less common paper weights (ex: 100lb cardstock or something) in colors and other advanced features that's a printer you go to.
I mean the printer in your local towns main street, and FedEx if they've taken over your town.
Now there are customers that think they can buy a printer for the equivalent of a round of beer, and when that doesn't work out as expected it's only the evil companies.
More often than not the consumer goes for the cheapest, and that's what they get and the company has to make the profit elsewhere.
I appreciate that with all the legal wrangling and anti-competitive behaviour the supplier companies don't paint a very attractive picture, but the consumer decisions have made the bed for this market as well.
Being the "IT guy" among family/friends/colleagues, 9 out of 10 times that's the case. Someone asks me if I can help them with their printer, they bought it 1-3 years ago, they've barely used it, but need new ink cartridge.
It's always the same printers. They saw one on sale for $40 or whatever at some big box store, a bought it.
I don’t look forward to running out of consumables. For some reason these aren’t made anymore.
To be honest, nowadays I would prefer ink tank, as their extra cost (here) are smaller than the price of the cartridges that will need to be bought in the next years. And they are cheaper than the cheapest laser printers sold here.
Because inkjets print prettier pictures, are more versatile, don't have long start up times, don't generate indoor ozone.
There are professional inkjets available that are more respectful of your right to buy cheap supplies than even brother - specifically I can pour bottled ink into printers of at least two manufacturers.
And (professional) modern inkjets keep up with print speed.
I've used Linux on and off since 2005, and every time I've come back to Linux I've been impressed with the progress made on things like this.
What I mind is, that because I use it so rarely, that damn expensive cartridge dries up every 2 or so years, after printing maybe like 30 pages. That's what kills me. That's one thing that it's more expensive than gold, but it has awful quality.
"Funny" thing is, I used to have a Xerox laser printer years ago. The toner dried stopped working in it also if it wasn't used for months. The main difference was that the toner cost 3 or 4 times the price of an inkjet cartridge.
Fuck printers.
I bought a B&W brother laser printer in 2015 and loved it. I had a cheap $80 inkjet and while it worked fine I printed so rarely that my ink cartridge would dry out.
The original brother toner cartridge lasted me 4 years so I'm happy just because of that.
I ended up giving that to my parents and got a brother color laser printer. It's nice for documents but inkjets are superior for photo printing.
But for the last 10-15 years I can upload photos to the Walgreens a mile away and get them in less than an hour on real photo paper and don't have to worry about them fading like a lot of inkjets.
There are other issues of course, I am not trying to give them slack here. If you don't use self cleaning once a week, the printer head clogs and you have to replace it anyway. If you use self cleaning too much, the waste ink reservoir fills up and your whole printer is toast unless you reset the firmware somehow. But there is a whole community for those kind of things.
Canon at least was selling individual ink tanks (by the color, no integrated head) for their BubbleJet printers way back in the 90s.
You get the glucose meter for free (or almost), but you have to pay for the consumables (the strips and lancets), and get locked there.
Strips which are only compatible to specific models within the same brand offering.
Printer manufacturers are not fundamentally evil, they just have a business model that rely on expensive ink. Make it so that they can't use that business model anymore and printers will become much more expensive (like the "ecotank" line). Maybe it is a good thing, but you can't have your cake and eat it too. 3rd party cartridges for cheap printers are a hack, it only works when it is not widespread enough so that printer manufacturers can still make profit thanks to those who buy the overpriced ink.
A friend bought his Epson used from Germany for around €7500. During COVID times he needed more ink, but his supplier said it would be a month or two due to supply chain issues.
He borrowed a cartridge from a friend who had the correct colour, but his printer wouldn't recognize as it, as our part of Europe is a different region to Germany (ink is the same price in both).
He even spoke to unofficial technicians to see if they could unlock it, but the only solution would be replacing the motherboard to change the region.
[1] https://simplywall.st/stocks/us/tech/nyse-hpq/hp/management
Either way, we have externalities between the people actually making the ink cartridge and the people buying the ink cartridge that drastically inflate the price.
If you multiply out percent of stocks owned by boomers (54%)[1] and 65+ year olds living in Florida (10%)[2], you get 5.4%. Which is a minuscule share. If you apply the "planned retirement communities in expensive-to-insure parts of Florida" criteria that drops the percentage even further. Moreover Florida isn't even the top state for seniors. California has more seniors. This still seems like a pathetic attempt to construct a despised demographic for a "us vs them" narrative.
[1] https://www.fool.com/research/how-many-americans-own-stock/
[2] https://www.prb.org/resources/which-us-states-are-the-oldest...
>Either way, we have externalities between the people actually making the ink cartridge and the people buying the ink cartridge that drastically inflate the price.
What you're describing as "externalities" is literally the opposite. It's fully internalized. People who buy printers are parties to a transaction between them and the manufacturer. That's not an externality, any more than starbucks selling overpriced coffee isn't an "externality" to its customers.
None. They just participated in an equities market. That equities market is now the main concern while doing business and it's now just as bad, if not worse, than a free rider problem.
They provided capital for the enterprise, and as econ 101 tells us, capital and labor both factor into production.
Which worked out to about £5 for the syringes, £5 for 400 ml of CMYK ink, and my dad already had a power drill—which was equivalent to about £104-worth of black ink cartridges, and about £312-worth of colour ink cartridges. (Now it would be about £160 of black and £480 of colour). It only took 15-to-30-minutes to refill both cartridges, including drilling the holes.
Some printer manufacturers have implemented DRM for ink to prevent this kind of thing.
Are there downsides to thermal printers I don't know about?
https://www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org/blog/2016/12/23/is...
I stopped printing anything 5 years ago. If I need to print then the local supermarkets do printing - you just take in a usb stick with the files on.
ISO 216 is the international standard (e.g. A4 size) and because they use an aspect ratio of the square root of 2, you can fold in half one size to get the next smaller size.
Thermal printers tend to be expensive as you use either special paper or special printing ribbons. They quite often create fumes which isn't pleasant and the prints tend to fade after a while, so not much good for archiving.
Probably a lot easier than 3d printer knockoffs or smartphone that are still commons.
The only downside is that you have to print something every 2-3 months, otherwise the quality degrades noticeably for the next few printouts. But after that it has always returned to normal quality for me.
They definitely don't make them like that any more.
I wouldn't have it back these days, though. A LaserJet M203dw serves the same role in my current fleet, with vastly higher output quality and input flexibility, and vastly lower environment and consumable requirements; I've lost count of the book blocks I've used it to produce, and the next time it lets me down will be the first.
Meanwhile, the "finicky thoroughbred" role in my current fleet is filled by a Canon Pixma Pro 100, which takes eight easily refillable ink tanks and is extremely particular about which laptops it wants to be friends with. This is tolerable in a machine that produces gallery-quality 13x19 prints on demand, at incremental cost basically only of paper. For a document laser, it's been a long time since anything other than total imperturbability has been a reasonable expectation.
Enshittified passively (on paper) owned by State Street (actively managed behind closed doors in reality, look it up) modern terrible-tastic McKinsey certified fuck the consumer is just how we do now.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-busine...
Taking old cartridge (with the right chips and everything) and topping it up from a syringe (they hold only a few ml anyway), so you don't have to break anything, can't be expensive or hard to do if the ink itself wasn't expensive. Everyone should want to get in on this business model. Since the page doesn't say anything about the actual cost price, I wonder if it isn't so lucrative as they make it seem
If you mean setting up a business refilling other peoples' empty cartridges, this was briefly a thing when people still wanted to print things in color, and therefore wanted inkjet printers. It wouldn't be a standalone business, but an additional service at copy shops, computer stores, and sometimes cell phone shops (the sketchy-ish independent kind). When everyone has a color screen in their pocket all the time, there is little demand for this.
Also, the means to do this are very very cheap and the process requires no special skill. You can buy refill kits with the syringes and enough ink for dozens of cartridges for less significantly less than the cost of a single cartridge. If you're interested in cheaping out on printer cartridges, it makes more sense to just buy one of these. A service that requires $20 worth of capital and no skill is never going to be the basis of a lucrative business.
Any and every tactic and strategy that isn't explicitly illegal is part of the toolkit put to this end. If it's illegal, but the fines cost less than the profit, it'll be used.
Things like principles and dignity and ethics are fluff for ad campaigns or players too small to matter.
Once past a certain threshold of size and age and complexity, publicly traded corporations enter an ecosystem utterly divorced from things like cost and value, they start playing with perceptions and mass psychology, with "what can we get away with" instead of "how can we be the best product in the market".
Consolidations and mergers and acquisitions make giant, soulless bureaucratic blobs out of companies that effectively lack any meaningful identity. What's the effective difference between Pepsi and Coke? Brother and HP? Samsung and Apple?
Any cable company or ISP? Any email provider?
The modern marketplace has been overcome by robber baron corporations and colluding nonhuman agents utilizing implicit rules and arbitraging the human rights differentials at every effective level. They're enabled by a sub-24 hour news cycle and the phenomena that allows outrageous things to happen with such incredible frequency that unless you truly bungle messaging and meme yourself into a Bud Light or Jaguar type situation, you can get away with anything.
The ecosystem of giant corporations that enable enterprise level products allow these companies to economically detach from the humans who actually use the products, while still dictating arbitrary prices and inflicting shitty service and product quality on consumers with no effective pricing dynamics.
You can't break into the printing "market" because they already have regulatory capture via IP and case law supporting their respective moats, and they have all the benefits of vertical integration and supply chains. You'll be acquired or litigated out of existence if you present any sort of meaningful threat to any aspect of these businesses.
So they jack the price of ink up to the maximum that they can get away with. Despite no increase in supply costs, no increase in value to the end user, the rate of increase will continue to rise until one or more enterprise customers get bothered enough to complain, and the contract will get renegotiated. Government contracts and deals with other massive bureaucracies are preferred, because the inertia means years of guaranteed income, often contractually inflated by contingencies like mandatory renegotiations and inflation hikes to the seller's advantage.
But hey, it's a global free market where anyone can sell amazing new inventions and get a commensurate return on the value they bring to the world!