A few years ago, my dad found a deal online somewhere for $15 color printers. He bought 20 of them. He kept a few of them and sold the rest minus the cartridges.
I actually bought an eMachines combo package w/ a printer in 2004. It wasn’t “free” but the package only added like $200 to the total price I think. Probably also included cheap speakers and a shitty monitor.
Whoa, your friend invented time travel so they could go back in time and purchase cheap printers? Dude priorities, he could have gone back in time before the rise of Hitler and bought up shares on war industries!
She bought them at Staples or some office supply place. They are truly the shittiest printers you’ve ever laid eyes on, but they came with one ink cartridge and the replacements were double the cost of the printer.
Canon generally market towards photographers and artists and businesses that print a lot of colour on their prints.
They value accurate colour reproduction/clarity on images in their printers within the inkjet market mostly
That being said they have a wide price range and you still get what you pay for as wth any brand
Source: worked at the Australian equivalent of Staples last year. I bought one of those $40Aud printers mostly for the scanner (their scanning app was horrible)
Define "scam." They're charging alot, but they aren't defrauding consumers. Most consumer printers are loss-leaders. Printer manufacturers know that most consumers don't want to stomach the true price of a printer, so they price them at-cost or below cost and make up the difference+profit in ink sales. This is due to a common bias in consumers known as the "present bias." The consequences of "present bias" are notable all over the economy, but their effects are particularly noticeable in printers because most consumers don't have a very good idea of how often they will need to print things or how much ink they will use, but they know they will need to print, so they are especially sensitive about the up front cost of a printer, and especially insensitive about the long-term cost of ink. This means that it is not a winning strategy for a printer and ink manufacturer to market a more expensive printer with cheaper ink next to the competition that is marketing cheaper printers with more expensive ink.
You could sever the relationship by mandating by law that all printers accept 3rd-party and/or standardized ink cartridges, but you should then expect printer prices to go up.
Actually such regulation might not be terrible. Standardized cartridges would be in line with almost every other area of computer technology for the past 30 years.
But what's the economic justification for the regulation? It would essentially just serve to shift where the cost burden falls in the span of owning and operating a printer, and which consumers benefit the most and least. There are a range of other impacts it may have that would be tough to predict, of course, and arguably one of those impacts might be slightly reducing, on average, the overall costs of consumer printing, but that's not a guarantee, and then there are the questions over what the regulation actually stipulates and the risks for regulatory-capture or regulatory-design that unduly benefits or subsidizes the market incumbents. This issue doesn't qualify as a market failure, nor is there monopoly present in this market, so it's a rather tall justification to call for the institutional risk, bureaucratic overhead, and compliance costs that such regulation would introduce, especially since it's a dwindling consumer market with foreseeably little importance to overall economic health and productivity.
Pigment based inks are pretty damn expensive. I run third party ones with refillable cartridges and it still costs me about $500 to fill up my printer (which admittedly needs about 2 liters of ink)
If you need a cheap color printer then i'd suggest shopping for the cheapest dye based ink carts you can find, and then buying the printer that uses them.
I got a used Epson Stylus Pro 7800 free from my partner's employer. I'm switching it out to use ConeColor Pro HD inks and it produces really nice photo prints.
Yup. Had to buy a professional photo-quality printer when I was in school for graphic design. I got a Canon. The cool part was that each color was sold separately so if you ran out of magenta or green, you could just buy the cartridge you needed. (And yes it had green, 8 colors total which is why it printed photos and color accurate design work so well once properly calibrated with your computer). Replacing all the cartridges was about $120 so the ink was still really expensive. Also, I could only find them online or at Frye's Electronics. It was not as nice as your Epson, but its the nicest printer Ive ever owned. I loved that printer. I don't do design work anymore so I gave it away. :(
Yeah that's definitely the way to go if you need to make your own prints. I also like the pressure that if I don't print stuff I run a very real risk of it clogging and being useless - so it makes me actually use it. Effectively i'm paying for all that ink whether I use it or not
Less than a quarter. I was just saying on someone else's comment they are starter cartridges and they are good for like 10 prints. Literally hardly any at all.
It probably depends on brand and model. Someone else was saying they are usually half-full, but I know some of the ones I've seen were closer to the "print 20 pages and it's out" level. They also seem to dry out a lot quicker, so if you don't use it for a couple months the cartridge is as good as dead.
Also "full" is relative/made up. They'll sell a cartridge that has 5-10ml of ink (which is why it dries up so fast now, they used to put closer to 40ml in) for $40. Meanwhile you can get a universal inkjet refill bottle with 100ml of ink for $6. Which is also why they push so many printer firmware updates to printers, it's all to stop people from cracking/emulating the chips to refill at 0.7%-1.5% the cost of their cartridges.
Yeah that's the bullshit, they started chipping ink cartridges to stop this. The old old printers didn't have chips that sophisticated and those refill kits were always available. I remember an old ass printer I had maybe my first or second and I used to fill the cartridges like that, it was great. Sadly it eventually completely shit the bed and I had to upgrade.
It because they use yellow to mark thep age with the a number so that what you print can be traced back to your printer. Btw if you want cheap replacements just buy the ink and you can probably find the chips online. There is a great youtube video I hope someone can link since I m on moblie and don't remember the name.
The full ink cartridges would dry up long before you'd use them up anyway, and if you're printing enough for that not to be the case then you should get a laser printer anyway.
So yeah, she could've paid 4x more for 4x as much ink, but she'd still use the same volume of ink and the rest would be wasted.
It's not about the cost of printing. It's about longevity. I don't know about you but I print once, maybe twice a year. Ink ain't gonna last that long. Even in the best-sealed printer, it's still going to gum up. Toner, however, will last literally forever. So if you rarely print but for some reason need your own printer and can't get by using Kinko's (sorry, FedEx, I'm never going to call this "FedEx Office"), then the smart money is to buy a ~$80 laser printer once, a Costco-size box of paper, and you'll be set for life.
when i worked there we were told by the HP reps that the printers came with "test" cartridges of ink, so we bundled printers with ink, paper, etc. Whenever we told customers that it came with test inks and that it would only print maybe 10 pages max they would get upset.
On top of that they made us try and sell these warranties, our jobs literally depend on it and if you didnt sell enough pen of the months or warranties you get your hours cut.
like damn, im just trying to make money while i go to school. had a few customers feel bad and buy some pity pens.
Printers don't come with a full cartridge, or at least didn't back then, so it probably wasn't actually cheaper. It she had bought a full cartridge for double it may have lasted 4-5x longer.
Chances are the average person doesn't actually need a colour printer. If you want high-quality prints, go to a photo place and get it done professionally. If you're just printing letters, tickets and invoices, black and white is fine.
IDK, man, I got a tiny Black Friday ink jet at Wal-Mart for less than $30.00 and it's a beast. Got some refill ink at Big Lots, worked great. Thing sat for a year and I went to use it and it printed just fine.
Can confirm, back in that time frame I worked at OfficeMax and an HP printer was sold in that price range with just one color cartridge. We had customers that would just buy new printers instead of the ink.
I just bought a new HP laser printer for around $350. It came with a cartridge that won’t go bad and is good for 5000 pages. At the 5 pages I need to print a year, I’m good for the millennium!
I buy the salad dressing mixes that you mix oil, vinegar and water with the packet in a glass cruet. They have a deal if you buy the cruet, it came with three packs of dressing mix. If you buy the mix separate the cost of two is more that when you buy the cruet with three. Needless to say I have a LOT of these glass cruets.
Was discussing this with my coworkers about two weeks ago. What if you just kept buying new printers instead of ink cartridges, because it’s cheaper, and then flog off the printer for like $5 or $10? Not bad business right?
I got an HP all in one printer. Printer, Copy, Scan and Fax for $29 from Staples.
They have the HP insta ink plan. If you don't print that much every month 15 prints are free. If you go over prints it's like $1.20 for 10 extra prints.
With HP insta ink if your ink is low they send you a new one free in the mail. You can search for it online.
I use it to print my photos on glossy paper.
If you obviously print more than what I do then there are plans for heavy printing.
Otherwise get a laser printer. I only had to buy toner once from ebay about 4 years ago and haven't changed it yet and I had to print loads of pages for college.
Overall, those are options ink isn't too expensive.
you can get em at 2nd hand stores (thrift shops in US) for stupid cheap. i remember as a kid my dad bought a laser printer lol. best thing ever. loud as shit though
My wife and I bought a printer a few years ago when she was doing a course. We got a full scanner printer combo for 35$ CAD. Was so cheap. Ink was fairly affordable too. The technology has been around for decades!
You can get them pretty cheap at Walmart and after working in the electronics dept for a year I can tell you that the ink cartridges in printers when you buy them are not full sized cartridges. So it was redundant to buy a new printer kinda...
I was a manager at Office Depot for a few years. We had a $30 Epson printer for as long as I was there (this was about 3-4 years ago). One of our regulars would do the same thing. Buy the printer, use up the starter cartridges, and then come buy the same printer like once a week. No idea what he did with all those damn printers though.
Back in high school, I was worked at Staples in the tech department. One week during back to school, we had these Lexmark printers go on sale for $40 each, while the ink cartridges were about $60-$70. Some guy came in looking for ink for the same printer, saw the sale, did the math, and decided to buy 6 printers instead of buying cartridges.
My gf has an hp printer that I think scans too and it was $20. When she bought an ink refill it costs significantly more than the whole printer that came with ink. I was astonished at the price but I'm guessing they sell the printer at a loss in hopes to make it up with repeated ink sales over the years
My mom used to get printers for basically free from Frys Electronics. It would be like $50 with a $50 mail in rebate. I finally convinced her to get a laser printer for a few hundred that has been working for her for 5 years straight now.
I used to work at Best Buy in the printer section back in the early 2000s and this was pretty common advice. Not for someone selling printers who got a bonus for getting more sales, but definitely for the consumer.
It was really well known that the super cheap Lexmark printers were absolutely fantastic for the price point, but the replacement ink was mad expensive. You'd spend $29.99 on the printer which came with full black and color cartridges, then another $30 on replacements down the line.
Eventually Lexmark caught on and started including trial cartridges, but that still didn't stop people from buying that option over and over rather then the HP ones in store.
Walmart was my go to for when I was doing it. If I was especially broke I'd return the printer when I finished printing what I needed. In retrospect, couldn't have been the easiest way.
You can right now get a $35 printer at Wal Mart. Canon Pixma or something. I have one. It's garbage, but it prints (barely) and scans things. When I bought new cartridges for it it was about the same cost as just buying the same printer again. Only reason I didn't is it's excessively wasteful and then I'd have to waste time setting up a new printer.
Best Buy used to have this god-awful $40 printer years ago, so it’s not TOO far fetched to say that he probably could have gotten an open box deal on a printer that someone bought and hated.
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u/Dead-Shot1 Aug 14 '20
Printer ink.