Decades of innovation that have been invested, not to make a better product, but mostly on how to extract more and more money from their victims, I mean "customers".
I would like to own a printer again, but for printing something like once a month, I just can't financially justify spending several hundred bucks on a device that might, at the whim of the manufacturer, decide that the way I'm using it is not okay anymore, is probably designed to break after two years, requires me to sign up for a subscription service for ink, or whatever BS else the decision makers in this space come up with.
For printing something like once a month, it is even harder to justify wasting space by putting a printer. Printers should be put around in form of vending machines which would let you you insert a USB stick, drop some pennies and print the PDFs.
Every Fedex Print/Office center has this service. Most city libraries do as well.
Definitely more expensive than ink+paper if you print a lot, but for my uses (couple of times a year) it's a no-brainer.
Rent. You are effectively renting your printer, supplies are the payments. The hardware is expensive, sold cheaply, and supplies have high margins to make up for it.
It is often investors forcing this model.
Anyway, I don't have a printer. I always just take my pdf and take a walk to a local printing service.
Until my kids were a little older, I had an old HP laser printer and then one of those cheap Brother devices. Now I use a little HP mfp with instant ink… it’s essentially a worry free existence.
Ink jet? Nope, those starter packs are only enough to get you hooked on expensive replacements.
This is the dying gasps of an industry that is mostly irrelevant in the modern age.
When I was growing up we always had a printer, and while ink wasn't cheap, it wasn't too bad, so we used it a lot and printed everything we needed. The industry grew to expect this, most households with a computer also owning a printer and regularly buying ink for it.
This isn't the case anymore. So much of our lives happens "digital-only" that printers aren't needed by most people, and those who do need them don't need as much ink. I have never owned a printer myself, and my parents still own one but buy ink on a yearly basis now.
The market should be shrinking naturally, and so every printer company is trying everything they possibly can to grow or at least keep from shrinking as much. In the panic they are in, it's understandable that this will lead to crappy business practices.
I also like to print out A3 posters for my kids and these printers can do that, whereas I'd never buy a huge A3 printer to have at home.
We finally realized the problem was that excess ink was drying up on the (outlet/spout/I'm not sure of the right term) where it's fed out of the cartridge and onto the paper. In short, *we weren't printing _enough_.* Sure enough, as long as we print a page or two a week, it keeps working properly. Also, for some reason, the "Clean print heads" function or whatever it's called doesn't resolve the issue.
People lease cars, which is also a bad deal. Same motivation.
US 7-11's absolutely do not have this service, and you're lucky if you find a grocery store that has a photo copier these days (was somewhat common in the 90s).
Laser is more expensive, but is the only way to go for rare printing.
This is why I use and recommend a black and white laser printers - total cost of ownership is easiest and cheapest in my experience. I suppose they're more expensive than an ink jet to start off with, but it's not that big a difference and a decade of near trouble free printing is worth something for sure.
I don't see the need for color printing documents, but if so there's office stores. For photo prints I'd be looking at places with high end inkjets most likely these days, but there are other color processes that should still work well - I did RA-4 chemical photo printing way back when and it was excellent at the time and should hold up well, but I don't know that anyone bothers with that today.
Coupled with the concentrating monopolisation of the economy, this creates a phenomenon where helpless consumers are held at ransom: the ultimatum being that they either continue to be exploited in ever more devious ways, or to simply do without. Small businesses that spring up to fulfill the void are bought up quickly in order to squash any hope of real competition.
This is not an economy that works for ordinary people. Ordinary people does include temporarily embarrassed millionaires (and real millionaires, and startups and micro-businesses for that matter) on Hacker News.
The only people who are benefiting overall from these practices are major shareholders and those chasing endless quarterly growth targets.
I purchased it in August 2021 and the demo toner it came with ran out this week.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B079Z44VZ7
Toner is like £40 which works out at like £3.30 a month
I have an iPad and downloaded PDF Expert and got an Apple Pencil to sign digital documents and I've only occasionally had issues I can't get around - Amazon return labels are the biggest pain in the ass.
If you're from Amazon, sort out a way we can ship returns without needing a printer!
There's no room left for innovation or competitive advantage. Its a commoditized market where they only make money when you buy their supplies so naturally they will engineer the product to work well with their supplies only.
This might be an opportunity for open source printer components. Maybe someone can create replacement parts to take out the "brain" of a small printer and replace that with a connected Raspberry Pi that doesn't change the print quality or reject 3rd party cartridges. I know there's likely a lot of settings in the software for head movement, ink usage, etc. so that might take some (possibly illegal?) reverse engineering. I'm a web software person so that idea may sound stupid to someone more knowledgeable.
What? A hackable, OSS printer whose manufacturer puts time and effort into reducing waste and creating the best, longest lasting ink on the planet would crush it.
Well, maybe not. But anytime anyone has said: “That’s it. There’s nothing more to do here.” It tells me there’s a complacent market ripe for disruption.
It SEEMS like you could make printer "kits" for people to assemble themselves, which would take bulk ink, and escape all of this nonsense. But then you'd have to sell it in stores, where HP, Epson, and Brother would act like any other large corporation to block chains like Best Buy and OfficeMax from carrying it.
Now the printers, mechanically, seem pretty good. Some still feel cheap but not necessarily low quality. But all the firmware and software around them seems to be geared at whatever it takes to get you to spend a little more money. Stories like this one are exactly why I don't update my Brother TN-730 firmware.
The only reason I even have a printer is that I happened to find an old LaserJet for 10$ at my local thrift store. It was "broken" but all i had to do was oil the laser scanner motor. Right era of printer, toner cartridges are only around 20$, and I put in a JetDirect card. Only thing is the memory is a bit lacking, even being fully upgraded, so for complex documents it sometimes will pause between pages.
I definitely wouldn't have bought a printer new today.
Then they were horrible for 20 years until I decided to buy a Brother laser printer, and suddenly everything was right in the world.
The cheap printer market has always been an abusive, anti-user shitshow. Arguably bad for the sellers, too - I've heard an argument that making cheap printers was the catalyst that ruined HP.
Amd a very good case for anti e-waste laws and right to repair.
Never throw out a serviceable laser printer.
All my printing is via a 15 year old desktop mini laser printer rescued from a dump. It's been worth locating a printer engineering company to service it. Most of the time it sits idle in a clean, dry cupboard. When I print it's usually a whole document for marking, so it's worth the bother of getting it out, plugging it in and running one print job. Ink-jets, and that whole market is a failed technology in my book, not for technical reasons, but because the vendors have turned every product into toxic crap.
At my local library, prints are $0.05/page, vs. $0.15/page at my local commercial print shop.
There's also reprographics places and most shipping stores do printing as well.
None of that is as convenient as a home printer, though. If you can get a decent color laser and lightly use it, it should treat you well for quite some time. Inkjets don't really like light use though, although I have fond memories of first page time on the ancient Deskjet 660C and 720C.
In the modern era, I've just bought a cheap Brother black and white laser printer and called it a day. The toner lasts F-O-R-E-V-E-R.
1. HP Deskwriter. Built-in localtalk networking, connected to two Macs over phonenet. Bulletproof, paper handling was great.
2. HP Laserjet 4N. Built-in Ethernet print server, fast, bulletproof. Worked with 3rd party toner just fine. It was priced to pay HP enough for the printer even if you never bought toner.
3. HP Deskjet 6000-series. 6210? Worked great, beautiful color, obsoleted by USB replacing parallel ports.
4. Lexmark laser, bought used, worked with 3rd party toner, fast, networked, postscript. Was the workhorse for a political campaign.
Since about 2007 I haven't been happy with a printer. The toner is very expensive and the products are poorly made and not easily repaired.
Epson Workforce Pro: needs to print every week or its jets dry out.
HP OfficeJet X page at once, a great idea, but the jets jam if you don't use enough color, and the paper path breaks.
Brother printers: always yelling at me for some reason, and they wear out.
Lexmark color laser: great physical printer but the controller board hangs. Too unreliable for business. Toner is expensive.
Before the Deskwriter I had printers I was less happy with. An Epson dot matrix, I mean, nobody liked their dot matrix printers, and an Apple Stylewriter that was finicky, not crisp, and didn't hold much ink.
I've seen a clip on the Internet where printer rolls a customer satisfaction survey during printing on a little screen panel locking its features away.
I'm afraid that once my Samsung laser printer will be broken beyond any repair I won't have any other choice than to get the one of the newest anti-customer devices that will maneuver me into "supplies as a service" scenario.
There's been a sea change. In 2000 if you wasted time on a website for a pitch, it was a gimmick. People wanted a nicely printed, bound pitch book that they'd have in front of them at the meeting. They'd probably throw them away but one would float around for a while if you were lucky.
Now people expect you to have it digitally, and don't have a place for paper.
Now you know why the manufacturer wants to change things.
It's why industries need to be regulated. A company run for shareholder value is going to maximize profits and externalize costs. This class of behavior is not at all unique to this product segment or this industry. You think this is annoying? Gonna be somewhere between interesting to horrifying to see what big tech does if the profit growth flags.
We're already shifting towards a society where things that offer a traditional offline, anonymous way of transacting information or currency is being construed as a threat because "terrorism", aka it cannot be monitored and controlled. Easily justifiable to still have one.
My dad still uses a Laserjet 4L daily to print ebay stuff and refuses to replace it because it works, and my 14 year old brother mfc, with an ipv6 stack(!) still works as good as the day I bought it. These things last generations.
Alternative (game console model) printer company license right to make ink for printer. Printer company does not go bust.
Cost of printer is printer + driver + server over life time of printer... what the public pay; a single one time purchase price.... model doesn't work.
It's a shame there aren't any open standards like lpd, jetdirect, postscript, and pcl for printers. /s
The printer business model has been abused for a long time in an effort to squeeze every last dime out of the market.
There is no “monopoly” in the printer industry and it’s definitely not holding the economy “hostage”.
We do not need the government to break up “Big Printer”.
I was concerned my instructors might question wether I typed it, or used a dot matrix printer. None had a clue.
I was one of the first people to have a computer and printer, and I was embarrassed. It felt like cheating.
I will never understand why we as a society go from a device that works and is built well; to overpriced gadgets that are constantly trying to trick us to giving them more money.
I would like to see a ratings system, like that one we had here from I believe the EU that rated items on repair, but include any other shinaggigans after sale.
It's too bad Brother's caved in to greed. I was one of their unpaid promotional guys up until today.
I like to give credit where credit is due. I throw this in.
If you need a plumbing fixture buy Moen. I have two faucets that I have gotten free parts with for 15 years plus. I fill out a simple form, and send my receipt to them via email, and the parts arrive in the mail. In all honesty, I need to change my pipes to copper, or pex, but have procrastinating for years. Hence, I always buy Moen, and tell people just how good the company is. Moen recently changed up their lifetime warranty, but most products are still lifetime. If I was CEO at that they would go back to a simple lifetime guarantee on every product. It's free word of mouth advertising, and it's honest customer advertising. Once a company has word of mouth fairness on their side; they will actively have to make stupid decisions to not attract new customers. They should teach this in MBA day school. Just be fair, and honest.
My comment is a general one on markets at large, hyper-focusing on the printer market is only valid as a rhetorical device.
I consider myself pretty ordinary and my life is impacted almost 0 by the forces of elastic markets.
https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk
Businesses are choosing to use their profits to perform stock buybacks instead of innovating or improving standards for their workers:
https://hbr.org/2020/01/why-stock-buybacks-are-dangerous-for...
Meanwhile the cost of living is going through the roof:
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
And pay is not catching up, further aggravated by inflation:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1272447/uk-wage-growth-v...
In the UK we also have a 54% increase in the residential cost of energy (within the context of extreme profiteering from energy manufacturers):
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/03/business/energy-prices-uk...
And 9.1% inflation:
https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/other/uk-inflation-rate-hits-...
This is true across the world. I'm not sure what your life is like, but it sure as hell doesn't match the lived experience of many.
Outside of our bubble nobody cares about that
There is always something you can do, we see it with phones, just add more gimmicks on top, the thing is smartphones are aimed at the general population and became a fashion/class/status symbol. Printers are just printers, they work just fine and most of them are used in pro environment (aka most people don't pay, maintain or replace printers).
> It tells me there’s a complacent market ripe for disruption.
Then let's disrupt coffee mugs, or the wheel... some techs are good enough that further """progress""" isn't required.
Most people who have issues with printers buy cheap ones and/or use them once every 6 months, they then proceed to complain that they don't work anymore and that all printers are bad. It's like buying a car and never doing any maintenance until it dies and then complain about reliability.
The printer market is a commodity market - the very opposite of a monopoly.
There's still room to improve insulation on mugs, and I dare you to go tell any car manufacturer that wheels are a totally solved problem with no room to improve (personally I'm hoping one of the airless variants gets to mass market so I never have another flat).
Some techs are good enough that people get complacent; that's not the same as running out of room to improve.
I was making a general argument about the pattern one can see across the economy. The printer market is another example of the same pattern that we see all over the place.
I don't claim that the printer market is a single entity that towers over all - my point is that our economic system optimises for this eventuality. Again: this isn't controversial, antitrust laws have been in place for a very long time.
It’s nice that they give lifetime warranty though.
Will home printer usage decline? Probably yes, but just like I have a home phone that I barely use, people will probably keep a printer around just in case.
What does the material your pipes are made from have to do with what company's faucets, showerheads, handles, etc. you buy? Also couldn't you replace your pipes but keep your existing Moen parts?
But which technology market is a legally defined “monopoly”? Before you mention the phone market, that was already adjudicated during the Epic trial and found not to be the case.
As far as “everyone agreeing that capitalism optimizes for monopolies”. The car market has been around for over a century, is it a monopoly? The computer market? Exactly which market around technology is a legally defined “monopoly”?
Just as a thought experiment, what about the other way round, where you could only rent a printer, fully serviced, as an appliance? Surely, this kind of business wouldn't be sustainable with this kind of tech with consumables running out every now and then, things breaking at any possible instance, non-replaceable consumables, etc. Follows, in addition to all this vendors are off-loading considerable hassles onto the "customer" (or rather, those who have no way around these offerings) to enable this scheme.
Suggested title for a fictitious article on the matter, "If the IBM 1401 had been built like a modern printer".
For real world prints I just go to walgreens or now more likely to use a digital frame. My mom with memory issues LOVES her digital frame even more than photo albums as she can sit there watching it rotate through her memories. She has boxes of albums in her room but forgets they're there.
However, I'd not want to be the device manufacturer, making it secure against all kinds of USB attacks
Cool anecdote. Here in Brazil, some small shops and cybercaffes will offer copy/printing services to you for a small change. That's usually where people go if they have to print/scan something. BTW this service is also know as Xerox.
I saw some shops running on retail printers, but most use those printers you can just fill with cheap ink.
Buying cheap third party consumables is a hack. It is people taking advantage of the low prices (entry level printers are often sold at a loss), without paying for the overpriced consumables that is where the real profits are. Back then, manufacturers could absorb the loss, but now, with the printer market tanking, it is becoming harder and harder.
A company that decides to tolerate third party consumables is likely to attract customers who want to do exactly that, a significant loss. If they want to stay profitable, their printers will be more expensive, more than what casual users are ready to pay.
I don't know about laser printers but traditional manufacturers sometimes offer an alternative to expensive ink cartridges: ink tank printers. They are way more expensive than their equivalent cartridge-based printers, but ink is sold in bulk with no DRM (cheap). These, however, are only worthwhile if you print a lot.
Captain Pedantic checking in: the 1020 was the printer. Your computer was likely an Atari 800 or summat. The 1020 was also a plotter, and not an inkjet.
<insert XKCD reference here>
I've had to dig into this a fair bit at work, and it's rather amazing. Certainly not perfect, but basically printers which are certified for IPP Everywhere (Mopria for Android, Airprint for Apple) are required to have built-in format support for a set of given formats. For example, Mopria certification requires PCLm (a backwards-compatible subset of PDF, designed for streaming), PWG Raster and PDF. IPP Everywhere mandates PWG Raster, JPEG and PDF. Of course Apple being Apple, they have their own Raster format (urf). The printers can support more (and typically do), but they have to include the base. Also the formats (and capabilities) the printers support can be queried via standard IPP. (*)
That sounds complex, but it means that as long as the printer supports any of those standards, you have a good chance of printing to it). I've printed to some pretty strange, limited printers via IPP, and had surprisingly good luck doing so (mostly via raster-urf).
Apparently in Linux CUPS is going this way completely, and has recently added built-in on-the-fly conversion. So CUPS will query the printer, and then send documents in whatever format the printer supports. If it's an AirPrint certified printer, then it'll send raster-urf; if it's IPP Everywhere it might send PWG-Raster or PDF.
Certainly not perfect (as my testing has shown), but it's a heck of a lot better than what we had before. And I've heard that they now have a standard for 3D printing (3MF*) aiming to replace STL. Apparently developed with the Linux Foundation. I have no personal experience with it, but with the complexity of 3D printing, I'd not be surprised if it's still immature.
(*) https://openprinting.github.io/driverless/01-standards-and-t... (**) https://www.pwg.org/3d/
it's a basic dichotomy of long versus short-term thinking. markets in general and their people tend to be on the short-term side.
https://www.keypointintelligence.com/news/editors-desk/2018/....
This is not even close to being correct. First, monopolies are almost always the products of government interference with markets; "natural" monopolies are rare. Second, antitrust mechanisms were not put in place by benevolent governments to help consumers; they were put in place by governments who were getting political contributions from the failed competitors of the so-called "monopolies", who could not compete on a level playing field and so went to the govenrment to buy favors. The actual results of antitrust enforcement have been to make things worse for consumers, not better.
Setting aside the general decline of the printer industry, and simplifying slightly, those two interests compliment each other into:
1. Producing the cheapest possible product, and then selling it for a loss while concocting subscription schemes to make-up for the lost profits at the point of sale of the product.
2. Paying employees in general less and less money proportional to inflation to "reduce costs", thus forcing the average person to demand cheaper and cheaper products. Completing the cycle.
The average person is impacted by capitalist market economy shenanigans on a continuous basis on nearly everything required to stay alive.
If you don't know the argument against your point of view, that is a good time to do some reading, not more writing.
I don't think you get to pick that service anywhere as such, so it might be regional or limited in some other way. When you initiate a return, you don't know whether you'll need a printer or not.
> my point is that our economic system optimises for this eventuality. Again: this isn't controversial, antitrust laws have been in place for a very long time.
This is a very strange argument, the fact that laws exist to prevent/punish something doesn't mean that everyone agrees that society is optimized to cause such eventualities. Laws are on the books in case something "bad" happens, it doesn't mean that society or the economy is structured to hurtle us towards those "bad" situations. It just means, they could happen and we need to deal with them. There are numerous laws against murder, but I doubt anyone would argue that everyone agrees that our society is inexorably optimized towards common and widespread homicidal tendencies.
I kind of want to spend some time on this printer thing, now!
Then HP bought Samsung and killed that model.
Now I see they go for £130+ second hand on ebay.
I think that says something about how the market's going to hell as it were.
How well does it work in practice? Well on my Epson ET4500 I get a few clogged jets every two or three months, but running a cleaning cycle has always cleared them. A bottle full of black Epson ink costs about £7.50 and seems to last about 1000-1500 pages. Colour has the same price, but I don't use enough colour to estimate low long it lasts. There seem to be several alternative ink suppliers.
This isn't a universal recommendation, just a response to your specific points. There is a premium for the tank models, so whether they are worth it depends on the amount that you print.
From what I understand, once you get far enough above the SOHO market, even current printers are still that way. I suspect in the past, the small laser printer market was getting trickle-down benefits from technology innovations to service the commercial market, but now it's become its own free-standing market which no longer responds to the same signals.
It also makes me wonder if that's the road to an affordable, if overkill, printer-- a module that bypasses the scanning side of a used copier, and renders your PostScript data to it.