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Comment by epcoa | Hacker News Reader

This is the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard. A standard mono laser printer can somehow print adequately without ANY color toner.

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Because it has a different ink formulation that’s designed for mono-colored printing.

Let’s make another analogy: two wheels fall off my car. You tell me “hey, motorcycles exist, you can still use that car!!”

But my car isn’t a motorcycle, it’s a car.

If you buy a printer that requires two cartridges to function then you keep both cartridges filled to keep it functioning.

I’ve always felt like this whole discussion has mostly surrounded people who are penny pinching to an extreme level that doesn’t make sense. You didn’t run out of color ink because you never printed in color. And if you never printed in color you wouldn’t have bought a color printer. You’ve gotta refill your color ink eventually.

This is the same thing as people who add water to their liquid hand soap to try and make it last longer. It just makes the soap gross and saves 10 cents at best.

The reason to buy a colour inkjet printer is that it's the cheapest thing you can get your hands on. Usually because the various education systems throughout the world somehow fail to centrally handle printing of course material. Either that, or you're one of the couple of dozen people who prints photos, and additionally in the subset that hasn't also decided to pay for someone else to deal with the cursed product category.

Cheaper than the Canon imageCLASS LBP6030w for $87?

I can find some Brother monochrome laser printers for $70 on eBay.

After a quick check I found the "HP Deskjet Plus 4130" new for 350 NOK (so about 37 USD, which includes 25% VAT and a 2 or 5 (probably 5) year warranty mandated of the vendor). Seems similar to the others that come up when sorting by price on one of the local price comparison sites. So 70 USD would for most people appear to be about twice as much money up front for something that needs to produce the bare minimum and otherwise be easy to dust.

Is there some kind of information asymmetry at play where in 2026 customers can’t comprehend a more expensive printer being a lower cost in the long run?

And here we are talking about a difference in cost of roughly $35 or the price of a meal for 2 at Chipotle.

Would you say that it’s unfair that the Toyota Prius costs more to purchase than a Nissan Sentra but the Prius costs less to operate due to having much better fuel efficiency?

Are consumers somehow unable to understand why they might choose invest more up front?

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