How Come? This is madness

[Tim OConnell]

I went into a pc store today to get four toner cartridges for my colour HP wifi printer.

The price for all four plus tax exceeded the cost of a brand new wifi colour laser printer, complete with full toner cartridges.

I am sorely tempted to just buy a new printer but can't bring myself to do that. In any case, how can HP justify that pricing???

[Ish]

I went into a pc store today to get four toner cartridges for my colour HP wifi printer.

The price for all four plus tax exceeded the cost of a brand new wifi colour laser printer, complete with full toner cartridges.

I am sorely tempted to just buy a new printer but can't bring myself to do that. In any case, how can HP justify that pricing???

I got a Gillette shaver free. Your new printer comes with full but tiny ink tanks and the refills are stupidly expensive.
It's cheaper to buy a new laser printer than buy a new cartridge for the one I have.

I think it's called consumer madness, there is nothing that stays around long enough to justify a refill any more.

[Tigger]

They're like drug dealers--they give you the first hit for a cheap price, and then once you are addicted to that model you have to pony up for the replacements!

We finally abandoned colour ink-jet and just went to a B&W laser from good old London Drugs.

[SloopJonB]

I remember when our kids were small, battery toys like remote control cars were very big. A friend said one day "the battery manufacturers should give these things away.

Same thing as the ink - they should just give the printers away.

[BeauV]

I went into a pc store today to get four toner cartridges for my colour HP wifi printer.

The price for all four plus tax exceeded the cost of a brand new wifi colour laser printer, complete with full toner cartridges.

I am sorely tempted to just buy a new printer but can't bring myself to do that. In any case, how can HP justify that pricing???

Tim,

Many many years ago I ran a division of Xerox and customers were perfectly willing to pay RIDICULOUS prices for supplies (Paper, toner/ink, etc...) but were completely unwilling to pay what it actually costs to build and sell a printer. Without the absurd margins on the monopoly supplies the prices of the printers would have to go up by a significant (think 5X) amount. Customers won't consider supply costs when they buy, so we printer builders have to subsidize the initial purchase price through stupid supplies pricing.

It's also the case that when a company (not you personally) is buying the initial purchase of the printer comes out of the Capital Equipment budget and the supplies are expensed and come out of a different budget. Companies often constrain the Capital Equipment budget and not the Expenses like supplies, erroneously believing that the Cap Ex is the big deal and the Supplies are cheap. Of course HP, Xerox, Toshiba, et al are plenty smart enough to build monopoly cartridges and then move the cost to the corporation around to the budget that is unconstrained. Big company finance folks are rather slow at catching on to this sort of thing.

There are plenty of similarly idiotic pricing schemes in the world. For example, you get a 300-400 dollar cell phone "free" if you sign up for a two year contract. Well, all that means is you're paying way too much for the monthly fees because they're doing the present value calculation on the subsidy of the phone purchase and guess who's paying their cost of capital and then some - you are. Another example is when car manufactures (Mini and BMW for example) tell you that you get 2 years or 40,000 miles of "free maintenance" with the car. What?! They are simply charging you upfront in the purchase price for the maintenance and doing so at a MUCH higher rate than if you were to purchase the service from an independent and competitive service provider. Not only that but the car company has your cash in their account during the entire two years that they're providing "free service" and they are thus able to raise capital from their customers at a VERY low interest rate. For car companies this is hundreds of millions of dollars in capital that became available at negative interest rates. All of these techniques are used to lock in customers to monopolistic pricing and obfuscate the actual price of things. They work because customers don't actually think about what it is they are paying for at the time they buy it. Only when they go in for new ink cartridges or wonder why the BMW is $3,000 more expensive than a Ford with similar features that it starts to dawn on them. In BMW's case, good marketing removes the doubt and people believe they're getting a better car - that used to be true but isn't anymore.

Going back to your ink jet cartridges, there are perfectly good re-filled cartridges available on the market; you can find them on-line and in some stores. Yes, they technically void the warranty, but you were going to toss the printer and buy a new one just for the ink anyway. Why not try one of the recycled cartridges. You can even re-fill the cartridges yourself by buying a kit. That gets rather messy at times.

BV

CostCo refill center: http://www.costcoinkjetrefill.com
Refill Kits: http://www.4inkjets.com/Ink-Refill-Kits-HP-Refill-Kits-printer-ink-cartridges-toner
Article on DIY refills: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/126821-should-you-refill-your-printers-ink-cartridges-hp-says-no-of-course

[Soñadora]

I was a Xeroid for 5 years

all true

I have an Epson 4000. Paid $100. Genuine Epson inks are $500.

I'm a sucker. Because I pay it. And the prints are facking beautiful.

[cavelamb]

Back before Christmas I bought an Epson LQ-1050.
It was to replace an Epson FX-100 that was 25 years old.
For those who don't know, these are wide carriage dot-matrix
PIN printers. Ancient technology, and not color at all.

The reason I wanted an obsolete printer is because it will do
things that the new crop of color ink jet / color laser printers
simply can not do. It can print full sized patterns that actually
are the right size, and larger than a piece of paper(!).

And - there is simply nothing on the new printer market that
can do that.

That's because, to my mind, the market has changed over the
years. New users want color and wouldn't put up with the
riiiiiiiiiip noise of a dot matrix. So the absolute accuracy and
unlimited banner length of fan-fold (or roll) paper just don't
matter any more.

A friend of mine, who is building an airplane made a big deal
about it a couple of years back. I drew his wings for him, and
printed patterns for his wing ribs. This is an elliptical wing, so
there are a lot of different sized ribs to print. He tried to have
working copied printed at several different printing shops but
they never came out the right size. Printing from DXF files!

The "new" printer was $40. Ink ribbons are priceless!

[Tim OConnell]

After looking at new printers at three stores, all of which were 25% less than the toner, I folded on moral grounds, paid "the Man" and bought the four HP laser toner cartridges...
$400 and change