Cartridges that go bad after a set amount of pages regardless of the ink level. Quality of printing going down over time just so that a technician can reset a counter. High prices.
I thought that maybe the digitalisation of paper work had made the margins so thin that the only way to go forward was to resort to the mess that we have right now. But afaik the same was true 20 years ago.
In particular, there is some brand that was praised for consumer friendly practices here on HN that joined the dark side recently too; Brother iirc.
Most people I know "print at work", and they don't want to have a printer because when they did have one, the experience was atrocious.
People that do print at home, are mostly photographers that want physical prints of their photos.
I wonder if there's anyone here who worked in the industry and could provide some insight.
There were a few big problems with this:
- People often could buy a new printer, with supplies included, for cheaper than a new set of cartridges.
- The primary focus of new printer development was on eliminating as much cost as possible.
- Refillers and remanufacturers compete with the official supplies.
The result was an almost completely customer-hostile industry. Printers became worse over the years. DRM and write-only memory were used to try to stop refilling and remanufacturing. Expiry of the ink was considered a good thing, as it would force customers to buy more ink even if they had low usage.
While I was there, Lexmark sometimes made losses by selling too many printers. About a decade ago, they left the inkjet industry, which they had played a major role in wrecking. Laser has come down in price to the point that it has largely supplanted inkjet for light-duty use. The manufacturers in the home/small office laser market haven't been quite as hostile.
Interestingly, we're seeing a similar dynamic play out in the venture-backed startup world of the past decade. What's old is new.
Companies eventually started marketing higher quality machines, targeted towards power users with broader needs. But the era of the bargain inkjet printers seems to be pretty much over. Also, it took an entire generation, but we're finally much further along towards the paperless office/society.
Every time one stopped working (probably ran out of ink, or printed poorly because of long delays between printing) he would go to Best Buy, get talked up by a salesperson about a nice new printer, and buy it.
It's just incredible to see this story in action.
In a past life I worked at Best Buy, and the standard printer sales tactics were nuts. If a customer wanted to buy a printer, you were supposed to sell them:
2 packs of color ink (remind the customer that the included cartridges are only half-full)
2 packs of black ink
4 reams of regular paper
2 packages of photo paper
GOLD printer cable
The Best Buy Service Plan, of courseHe told me they weren't replaced because the fur killed them, it just wasn't worth replacing the inks since it was so damn expensive. It was always cheaper for him to replace the printer instead of replacing the ink, and because he never held onto a printer for much longer than a year he never bothered trying to keep it protected from the shop environment.
About the only think he ever printed was the occasional door flyer, checklists and general office paperwork, probably a single ream of paper a year at most.
A guy on FB marketplace was locally selling one brand new for $250 (and took $175 if I picked up same day), because his dad had one that ran out of toner so the father had just bought a new one. It actually came with the new receipts from Best Buy. Looks like BB upsold on lasers too.
Except, it's a low-end business class laser, and they last forever. This thing is great.
I had a friend who would actually do this -- every time they ran out of ink, they'd buy a new printer. I found out when I helped him troubleshoot something and saw 5+ different printer drivers installed.
After he told me about it, he opened the closet door to reveal a (actual) leaning tower of printers
I have a relative that does this all the time. Personally, if it costs me more than it cost me to buy a cheap printer to refill it I will likely do the same thing. I just don't print enough to justify.
Related to the printing industry? (if so, I'd like to hear more)
Or do you mean in general?
I got a Canon laser printer 2 years ago. I guess I'm a boomer now.
Then I saw those videos about the printing industry scams (which does happen) and tried a third party toner that costs 1/5 of the price. Guess what? After like 10 perfect printed pages, it started leaking some powder, then stopped printing random chunks of the page and turned impossible to use.
I went back to the genuine cartridges and never left ever since. Also, the printing issues it had were identical to some issues I've had with public printers in libraries etc in the past. I guess that's because they're using those low-quality toners.
My department switched to buying toners directly from the manufacturer and reimbursing staff to get around the financial blocks that were put in to place. After two years they dropped the policy as a complete waste. We paid out so much money in repairs, new cartridges, new printers, and management that it made buying 'real' toner look cheap. Theoretically OfficeMax/Staples offered repair guarantees on their toners but of course managing those warranty claims is essentially impossible when you have thousands of printers scattered around.
Detecting scammy behaviour could be a leading indicator of an inflection point in a market or company where its growth phase is behind it. Printer companies are responding to paperlessness by hollowing out the goodwill of their customers, because there is no longer any long term value in it.
Agree this would seem like a good indicator.
The counterpoint is entire VC-backed industries that unnecessarily use scammy biz models from the start, e.g., requiring everything to be an internet-based "service", exfiltrating data and requiring subscription funding when it obviously is not required. Examples: robot vacuums, remotely-settable thermostats [0], security cameras [0], etc...
[0] No I don't need the full "service", at most I need a way to keep track of the external IP address of the device. If you want to offer the extra "service", fine, but it needs to be an add-on, not an obligatory dependency and cost.
The companies position themselves that way because they want to take advantage of peoples indifference to small subscriptions - because they know their products are objectively lame.
Printers have multiple times this complexity. And the products bought are bought for lowest price. Or at least reasonable price. You get what you pay for. And what is paid is often very little. Thus poor quality and need for other revenue streams.
I have a Dell small-business multi-function color laser and it's run like a champ for about 5 years now, with only one round of toner changes in that time. The only downside is that this particular model doesn't support cardstock or any thicker types of paper (~60lbs cover stock max IIRC).
But that's only been an issue a couple of times in the past.
Sure we do. A few years ago I looked for a list of the best printers (I used wirecutter, but there are other comparable options), and got one they recommended. It works great, even going a few months between prints, was easy to setup, and is still running great with just the toner it shipped with.
1. Even more so than cars?
2. Printers are also one of the few devices that need to measure liquid by the picoliter.
> products bought are bought for lowest price. Or at least reasonable price. You get what you pay for. And what is paid is often very little. Thus poor quality and need for other revenue streams.
This reminds me of the perennial discussion on airline quality. People comparison-shop by the sticker price, so the entire industry evolved into nickel-and-dime scams instead of having honest all-inclusive pricing.
The printer industry is horrible, but also HP is toxic at every level and across every product and service. Just avoid.
Their early 90s laserjets are still going. My friend's school was throwing one out a few weeks ago. It was sitting dusty in a closet. I plugged it in and it worked right away. Probably 30 years old.
They stopped making things like that a long time ago. They've got the resources and the public capital to turn the ship around if they wanted to
Don’t have a lot of brand loyalty but nice to see them not shit on their customers.
They do now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
And parents printing color-in pages of Elsa and Anna
I can relate.
I probably printed more coloring pages than anything with my printer.
If you only need to print a few times per year, it's far cheaper to buy a laser w/ toner. With inkjet, you'll have to buy (and wait for) new ink cartridges because they dry out in less than a year.
If you need to print a lot of color materials frequently and don't mind the quality, then ink jet is a better deal.
I had good luck with Oki printers (most of them come with Duplex unit, Ethernet and all OS support), a lot of people are very happy with Brother printers.
The money is made on the ink/coffee, and machines are pushed at a discount to dominate the ink/coffee distribution.
The market is big and uncritical. Investing in high-quality machines is a long game that many can't justify and so avoid.
Some years ago Walmart had a HP printer on sale for so cheap that it was more expensive to replace the ink than to get a new printer.
I _wish_ printers would die. I've hated them with a passion ever since I've had my first job as a computer "operator" where I had to feed and align perforated paper forms to monster IBM printers. The boundary between electromechanics and software is a very dirty place.
The 4000N is also a modular design with the ability to add attachments for things such as extra paper trays, auto-staplers, auto-folders, or networking cards; if that is your thing. I’ve have mine connected to my home network and have never needed an explicit driver or had issues using the printer from any of the major operating systems.
If you are someone that only needs to print in black and white, and has the space, it may be worth checking out - I assume they can still be found for cheap/free as well
I've gotten "please replace ink cartridges" messages when I've never even printed a single page since I replaced the previous cartridge — since I use the printer mostly for its ADF scanning function.
Well, that's ~$100 I'll never get back.
It's sad that the industry has moved in this direction.
This solved most of the frustration for me. The upfront cost is slightly higher, the print quality is slightly decreased but the long term satisfaction is greatly enhanced.
Ink jet in any form is dead in my mind.
OK but they still stop updating the drivers after 3 years, which is the main problem. Otherwise they would last forever.
Good printers use PS/PCL, nobody cares about drivers, a generic one usually works
That's heavily understating it.
If I want display quality photos on heavy weight paper, I go to WalMart or Office Depot and pay for their commercial printer. For small photos embedded in business documents on plain paper, my Canon laser jet does an acceptable job and is relatively frustration free at reasonable cost. Text quality is never an issue.
Ink jet and photos are the main pain points to avoid.
I recommend looking for "office" instead of "home". The manufacturers seem aware of the fact that business people have low tolerance for unreliable crap.
IPv6 completely locked it up. It would reboot over and over. This happened after changing my home router to one with full ipv6 support. Disabling ipv6 on the printer fixed it. It could be that subsequent firmware updates fixed this but I haven’t checked.
I use only genuine HP toner. No way I am trusting random toner from the flea market—er, Amazon.
HP Color Laser Jet MFP 281cdw
Also people are printing less than they used to. So much single-use paper is now a QR code on your phone or completely digitized. I bought 10 reams of printer paper about 5 years ago for home use, my family has worked our way through three over the years. When the kids get old enough I imagine the bulk of it will be used for school papers. On the business side we've seen a mass digitization of most documents, my company is steadily getting rid of the last of the old file cabinets as any relevant info in them is scanned/archived. So volume is less, and existing printer companies need squeeze more to maintain profits.
The same bullship is happening with tractors, home appliances, hospital equipoment, military radio equipment !
The truth of hte matter is that giving companies unremovable ownership and control over a product they've already sold, and allowing them to reach into my house over my WiFi was a step away from freedom and towards feudalism.
Cheap printers are sold at cost or at a loss. The companies make this up on ink cartridges. Obviously this creates an opportunity for third-party cartridges so your printer gets hundreds of firmware updates to try and defeat these cartridges and protect this business model. Ink is also wasted on things like cleaning the heads. This is by design.
But why does this model exist? Because consumers make a purchasing decision based on the sticker price not the total cost of ownership. You see this behaviour all over the price.
Why are their checked baggage fees, seat allocation fees, etc on airline seats? Because consumers make a decision based solely on the seat price.
Companies like McDonald's sell the burger at about cost. They make all their money on the drinks and fries. You can view the burger as almost a loss leader. A bunch of other stuff happens here too, like the medium drink exists solely to get you to buy the large drink (ie it looks like better value).
You should never, ever buy a cartridge printer. Ever. Instead, buy a tank printer. It's more expensive but you literally just pour ink into the wells. There's no firmware to stop you from doing this. It's much cheaper to run.
All the software for this is terrible unfortunately. There's really no incentive to improve it. Sadly no company has yet disrupted this market and forced change through competition. There was hopes Apple might do this at one point. It obviously never happened.
Not true any more - McDonald's change their drink pricing so that S, M, and L all cost $1.
By doing things like: opting for subscription models, short device lifetime, cross financing the device through asking high prices for commodities like the cartrigdges.
I guess it's just more obvious with printers because you have this duality of the device itself _and_ the need for a steady supply of either toner or ink, which most companies abuse with nasty business models.
I have an almost 20 years old HP b/w home laser printer (guess one of the first with USB, no ethernet). It doesn't copy/scan, it can only print.
I don't use it much and it produces some minor artefacts but mostly works surprisingly well after so many years. The cheap toner costs like 10 USD or so and lasts several years with my usage.
No printer company would design such a device nowadays anymore. Since it has no network access it cannot be updated to stop working.
Many people want to print over network today and if I wanted to I could plug it into our router so I can print over WIFI.
Before this printer I went through multiple hp and Epson inkjet models. They were all horrible and usually broken after 2-3 years.
I've literally printed 2 things this year, and one was a boarding pass (I like having a paper backup, call me old-fashioned).
If anything, I've used the scan-to-email function on the printer about 10x more, and I could probably have gotten away with just taking a photo of the documents in extremis.
The per-page cost is relatively high, but still an order of magnitude lower than amortising the cost of a whole printer myself, not to mention offloading the hassle of maintenance and refills, and the money goes to supporting the library - which I'm totally fine with. Yeah, I have to go to the library to do the printing, but it's not that much out of my way, especially if I combine it with other errands nearby.
That said, the scanner has been super-handy through the pandemic
There may be other things I'm not thinking of. Overall it ends up being a few hundred pages a year.
I bought a laser printer almost 2 years ago. No complaints so far, but we'll see how long that lasts.
The android brother plug in sucks and I wish google cloud print was still around. I tried mobility print but it didn't quite work as expected and decided to just stick to printing from my laptop.
There you go, DIY AirPrint
I'm guessing that either one of their firmware updates broke their chip DRM recognition, or the chips that were in my original toners somehow corroded due to age.
Even for laser printers, it looks like it will be compatibles and refills for me moving forward.
This is in no way a defense of the printer industry’s odious tactics! I’m just pointing out the situation that made unscrupulous people consider those tactics.
What did Brother do to join the "dark side"? I and lots of other folks love our Brother laser printers. I haven't heard of them doing anything evil...
Now, to override the alert Brother gives you when it THINKS you are out of ink, I have user Allegra to thank for that as follows:
"Go to the buttons and follow these instructions:
MENU > GENERAL SETTINGS
Press the down button (minus sign) until you get to REPLACE TONER
Hit OK
Please the down button (minus sign) until you see CONTINUE
Hit OK
This is what I use at home, a canon G-series printer. The "down side" of this is that the printers cost a fair bit more upfront. It's also not photo-grade quality. But with decent quality paper & high quality print settings it does just fine, and monochrome is no problem at all. I also don't consider the higher up front price to be an actual down side. I know I'm simply not getting the machine at a subsidy price, and in exchange I have to pay the true cost of the machine but have a much better user experience.
But there are ink tank printers available. I bought a cheap one, it doesn't have nice colors, but it has colors. And that printer doesn't need a refill for months (well, mostly printing for kids)
I have HP Smart Tank 510 series. Altgouh I would recommend researching HP ink tank / Epson EcoTank / (other vendors may have different names), I don't recommend particular budget model I have - sometimes it is frustrating that it doesn't want to print over wifi. And that is my complaint in general, that I haven't been lucky enought to own "it just works" printer.
But no, I haven't been familiar with issues you mention (technician?)
Home printers, yeah the ink is expensive. You're mostly paying for convenience. I don't print photos at home, we order prints online and they're mailed to us, very cheap and easy.
What I print at home is strictly things I need to sign and bring to someone (or sign and scan/email). For that purpose, they work fine. I don't mind paying the price for ink, it lasts for a couple years before I need a new cartridge. I like the fact that I can still go to an actual store and buy ink for my printer if I need it on short notice.
Judge: "Now, on the matter of motive, we ask you: Why did you conceive, plan and execute this dastardly and scandalous crime?"
Edward Pierce: "I wanted the money."
Some models have 12 colour cartridges, each costing more than a budget printer.
I wouldn't say photographers can avoid being scammed, because the industry is basically an Epson/Canon duopoly with HP as a somewhat distant third choice.
So competition is very limited, and unless you're bulk-buying printers and ink for a huge print shop there's no leverage to negotiate prices down.
Dunno, unless you're looking for larger formats most print shops will not have printers superior to decent home units like Epson SC-P900
Time for the tech community to declare a code of ethics and refuse to participate in corporate sociopathy.
Quanta left some unfortunate uncertainty: once a seller had created a product that "embodies the essential features of the patents", and sold it, exhaustion kicked in. However, the printer/ink industry still argued that part of the inventive process was the customer (who fully owned the cartridges and printer) putting ink in cartridges and cartridges in printers. This was not meant as much to sue consumers but to bully ink resellers.
This all came to a head in the Supreme Court case Lexmark (linked below), on this exact question. In effect, the Supreme Court said "Once you sell the printer and ink, you're exhausted", under the argument that allowing Lexmark to sue ink resellers for patent infringement would clog commerce. They used probably the simplest argument in 'exhaustion' doctrine, the "first sale doctrine", which says that, once you sell your product, all IP around that product is exhausted with respect to that product.
This can get very confusing, because exhaustion is NOT about the actual methods of making ink, but about when a specific product--the ink cartridge you found in your grandfather's basement--is totally outside of the manufacturers control. Thank god, the Supreme Court has made it a lot harder to claim IP infringement in 'downstream' commerce, and I bet that the printer industry is currently changing its "free printer but ink costs its weight in platinum" model.
Not sure if there are other aspects of the business that make printer sellers inherently skeevy (the stories here tell me that it is part sleazy salesmanship, part lawyer-bullying), but this is definitely an industry that shaped its business model around using IP to threaten resellers so they could keep the margins on ink sky high.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impression_Prods.,_Inc._v._Lex....
I'm getting the impression ink jet is not the way to go due to the long pauses, but the color lasers are all seem very expensive for such occasional use.
Every big brand now has a range of models with ink tanks you can simply refill. Even the official ink is not overly expensive.
Of course the printers are more expensive but not crazily so. If it always had been like this we'd have had nothing to complain about IMO.
Once the warranty period of the printer expires, it is not illegal withhold the service manual for a printer. It is not illegal to withhold the electrical schematic or operating temperature specification of the fuser. It is not illegal to withhold the details of the toner chemistry. It is not illegal to withhold the printer programming language specification.
It appears to me that what is going on in the printer business (and the automobile industry too) is a deliberate push to make cars and printers consumer items.
The other side of the printer business is a inkjet or laser printer ought to be able to work for 40 years. A little distilled water soak ought to fix any clogged inkjet. A couple rollers ought to fix any paper feed problem.
One answer to Why is the printer industry so scammy is Consumerism in America is now in decline. Many commentors here, just like me have thrown a pile of printers in the trash.
The last 30 years of printers that turn in to garbage is an irretrievable waste of potentially beautiful machinery.
I didn't stay at HP very long. It was during the Mark Hurd era and it was a company being run by backstabbing sociopaths.
We have a Brother color laser (AIO) printer from 2010 at my parents house that still gets a couple pages printed every couple of months. We replaced the toners perhaps 4-5 times in it's lifetime. The thing is built like a tank and weighs like one but works well. My only issue with it is that it doesn't AirPrint.
But it should not be the only thing; Society requires goods and services for people, and incentives should be aligned to society's goals, not finance's goals.
Print by mail works out cheaper than printing at home for my very occasional use.
This question further reinforces my belief that most people really haven't internalized the motives and means of modern capitalism.
You can answer many questions like this by referring to a crude old southern homily:
"Why does a dog lick his balls?"
The very widely applicable metaphorical answer:
"Because he can."