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Comment by ks2048 | Hacker News Reader

ks2048

Is there any printer company that is not 30+ years old? What is stopping a start-up from making a printer people actually like?

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Print is dying. It took a while to realize the "paperless office" and we aren't quite there yet, but in my office, the amount of stuff people print has really dropped in the past decade. Stores offer email or text message receipts, doctor's offices have you fill out forms online.

Printers are not a growth market, so not very attractive to a start-up.

Even back in the last decade, the only thing I ever printed in the office was return labels to slap on a package.

People speak highly of Brother printers and I've been happy with mine. On top of it, lots of people don't really print anything day to day.

I really liked my last Brother printer before I had to sell it in a move.

However, Brother is anything but new; it was started in 1908.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother_Industries

Print is simply dying. Heck, even at airports, it used to be a requirement that you'd have your ticket/itinerary printed but now most officials will accept your phone receipts.

Consumer and small-office print is declining, so there is not enough money to be made making non-shit printers from scratch.

Making shit printers (those that are sold below cost with the profits recouped from cartridge sales and other user-hostile measures) is the only thing keeping the market afloat.

However, that segment of the market is already captured by the existing manufacturers (which have the existing patents and supply/manufacturing chain - aka economies of scale) that a newcomer would never be able to enter said market profitably.

Printers are a shrinking market.

And it's dominated by players who (a) make a good product, (b) produce very diverse lines of printers (such as equipment that prints on fabric - not a dying industry at all, as people continue to desire to wear clothes with designs printed on them), and (c) make other things similar to printers, like sewing machines.

Examples of these players would be Epson (who also make gigantic direct-to-fabric printers) and Brother (who still make sewing machines and popular label printers to print labels to stick on packages). HP and Lexmark are not leaders in the aforementioned spaces - at all.

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