Disposable Printers
My wife's last job, she worked at home and had a computer and printer to use, so we used that printer for personal stuff as well. Before that, all the printers we have had have been broken by one kid or another. Anyway, we need a printer. Not badly, as we don't print much stuff these days (seriously, I think I could live the rest of my life without needing a hard copy of anything), so I look around at printers occasionally when I'm out.
So today, I was at Wal-Mart and I see a printer for $44, and I think that seems pretty good, then I wonder how much it will cost to replace the ink, so I look at the cartridges necessary for the $44 printer and find out that to replace both ink cartridges, it will cost about $55. So, if I buy this printer, when I run out of ink, it would be cheaper for me to buy another one than to replace the ink. What the fuck?
Anyway, then I noticed that they had a couple of printers for under $30. Now, these didn't come with a black ink cartridge at all, but it would still be either cheaper or as cheap to buy a new printer than to replace the color ink that comes with it.
Something tells me these ink cartridges are way, way overpriced, or the hardware in a printer costs almost nothing to manufacture and distribute.
5 comments:
The ink cartridges included with the printer generally have 25% of the volume of ink that the replacement cartridges have. They make their money on the consumables (ink) and not the printer. DuPont ran ths model with their medical analyzers 25 years ago.
Yes, the old razor/blade model. Ink is pretty expensive. We have 6 ink cartridges in our new printer.
Speaking of razors, I had avoided buying a Fusion because I knew it would be awesome, and I didn't want to pay almost $4 for a blade. But I finally did buy one, and let me say that I am happy to pay almost $4 for a blade, because the shave is that fucking great. It's like I'm shaving with a plastic toy razor. I know there's a blade on there because there hair goes away, but I can't feel it.
Oh, I should mention I got the Power version.
I've never done it as I don't own an inkjet, but you can REFILL those cartridges everywhere these days. Seems like that would be the cheapest (and least wasteful) way to go.
Congrats, John, on the 100,000 beer.
Check out the Canon printers. Several of those have much cheaper ink. You'll pay more for the printer, but the ink is cheaper because you're not replacing the heads each time you buy new ink. The black ink on the one we replaced this year was only $7 per cartridge.
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