HP Explains Why Printer Ink Is So Expensive 651
CWmike writes "'There's a perception that [printer] ink is one of the most expensive substances in the world,' says Thom Brown, marketing manager at HP. Well, yeah. One might get that feeling walking out of a store having spent $35 for a single ink cartridge that appears to contain fewer fluid ounces of product than a Heinz ketchup packet. Brown was ready to explain. He presented a series of PowerPoint slides aptly titled 'Why is printer ink so expensive?' I was ready for answers. The key point in a nutshell: Ink technology is expensive, and you pay for reliability and image quality. 'These liquids are completely different from a technology standpoint,' Brown says, adding that users concerned about cost per page can buy 'XL' ink cartridges from HP that last two to three times longer. (Competitors do the same.) The message: You get value for the money. No getting around it though — ink is still expensive, particularly if you have to use that inkjet printer for black-and-white text pages."
Confusing (Score:5, Insightful)
If people are paying for the precision and technology behind the ink printing itself, that still doesn't explain why it's so expensive. How can they afford to print the label on that ketchup packet for so cheaply? Printing and ink technology isn't exactly brand new, I guess I'm a little confused. If I pay $35 for an ink cartridge that is the size of a ketchup packet, it better be super concentrated precision ink that can stick to tin foil and will last for a gazillion print jobs. HP seems better at selling snake oil then they do printer ink.
Give me Laser Toner any day of the week (Score:5, Insightful)
No... (Score:5, Insightful)
When you control the market (Score:5, Insightful)
You can charge anything you want. This might as well have been titled "DeBeers explains why diamonds are so expensive," or "Saudi Aramco explains why oil is so expensive."
It's their business model... not the cost of ink (Score:5, Insightful)
It's simple. They sell printers at a loss and ink at over 500 to 5000% it's value. That's why you see all those kiosks that will refill your ink. The problem is some of them don't use "quality" ink. You know a company is full of shit when they start to use microchips to prevent 3rd party ink cartridges. Be smart!! Buy a laser printer. Most of those are VASTLY more efficient. I've printed almost 2,000 pages off of my Samsung ML 2581ND laser printer and it's still going strong.
Color prints work the same. If you invest in a good printer, the ink doesn't cost much. If you get a $20 printer expect to pay that $50-$70 difference in ink.
Re:Give me Laser Toner any day of the week (Score:1, Insightful)
Meh... or just go to a photo finish place and get them printed at 12 cents for a 6x9.
Razor Blades (Score:5, Insightful)
It's just like Razors and Razor Blades. That's how Gillette and Schick make their money.
Re:Give me Laser Toner any day of the week (Score:5, Insightful)
I bought a color laser printer over two years ago, and haven't had to buy toner yet. I haven't been careful about what I printed...the printer volume page says it has printed 3463 pages, all the color toner cartriges indicate 100% full, and the black toner is 60% full.
I'm never buying an inkjet again.
is it.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it because yachts are expensive?
Collusion (Score:5, Insightful)
Brown says, adding that users concerned about cost per page can buy 'XL' ink cartridges from HP that last two to three times longer. (Competitors do the same).
Collusion?
The message: You get value for the money. No getting around it though: Ink is still expensive, particularly if you have to use that inkjet printer for black-and-white text pages."
...and no bullshit can explain it, even if your competitors do it.
Translation: The market doesn't work. (Score:2, Insightful)
Market competition is ideally supposed to lead to innovation, resulting in customers getting radically more for less over time. Despite the number of players in the printer market, both current and previous, this does not hold true for inkjet printing. You could literally have self-cleaning devices that take gallon jugs of ink at dirt cheap prices if that were a priority, but making an objectively better product is not the goal.
The goal is making a product that will get the easiest money available on the market. This is always the game - and virtually all efforts are driven toward this end. The greater 'market' takes this further, and makes acting in a manner that does not 'return shareholder value' a very serious offense against the market.
In the end, this is not actually the market serving itself, growing to produce more, or expand more markets - it is simply the market spinning its wheels as hard as it can to extract as much easy money as it can, eventually shaping law to extract what marketing cannot. Much like an inkjet printer, this cycle quickly gunks itself up, and falls into an inert heap - and the answer tends to be to just replace it with the same model of printer again, since it seems cheaper than spending the resources on something more reliable or cost effective.
I recommend a nice reliable laser printer (so it will at least work for those few times I want to print), and a functioning regulatory system to break up corrupt, stagnant market players - or at least allow universities to be exempt from most legal limitations ('IP', noncompete, etc.), and allow them to compete when market players will not. Universities are already the only ones doing a lot of the research that happens in the 'market' these days anyway - should demand that private companies keep up, or get left behind when they're benefiting from public research while demanding exclusive rights.
Ryan Fenton
Re:Acceptance (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean Hurd (ex Teradata), not Fiorina. (Score:5, Insightful)
The worse thing is that Fiorina wants to be a part of government, and multiply her failure (as well as make use of her H1-b special interests).
Re:Give me Laser Toner any day of the week (Score:3, Insightful)
I paid about $80 for a brand new Samsung ML-2510 monochrome laser printer. This printer can be found for even less if you get it on sale. I buy the (non-OEM) cartridges on Monoprice for about $20 apiece. One cartridge will last me FOREVER. At least 1000 pages I am sure. Oh, the cartridges are also easily refillable with a $6 bottle of standard copier toner. There is a removable plug on the cartridge that allows direct access to the toner chamber. It's not really worth my time, though, because the cartridges are so cheap. I have been using this printer for about 3 years and have only used up two cartridges.
I haven't been interested enough in color printing to buy a color laser, but I am sure that cheap, good ones do exist.
How much damage done to HP image? (Score:1, Insightful)
I had way more respect and trust to the "HP" brand until I and several others got ripped off by their inks. My respect to the build quality went away when I saw inside of an HP 690C , a printer which the service center joked that I should have bought another printer for a lower price instead of living hassle to get it there. Guess what? Even my 690C looks way more reliable than the current plastic money traps.
On one hand, HP is a very large computer vendor with excellent support regarding drivers, service and huge Unix servers. On the other hand, same brand tries to rip 13 year olds with $50 printer, $70 for ink childish schemes.
I recently found an old HP Scanner, from the days of old HP. It has a perfectly standard 12V input, standard parallel port and scsi connectors. Next to it, 2 HP inkjet printers both having different adapters (so they can sell replacement?) with really amazingly disturbing "drivers" which does nothing but advertise HP inks.Thank God, driver coming with Windows 7 does what it is supposed to do (print!) without any bugging.
I have also used the legendary HP 5L Laser printer under amazingly high load for months, it was connected to a Novell server and did what it is supposed to do without any tricks. I remember toner price was all fine too.
I wonder if HP would spare time to find out if this "ink jet" business hurts their company image. I'd say yes. The brand image of HP in 1990s has nothing to do with the one today...
Show me the numbers! (Score:2, Insightful)
For an article that's supposed to "explain" why ink is so expensive, it's rather short on details, leaving the reader with the impression of reading a whole bunch of numbers - which were all meant to impress you with drops per second, nozzle sizes, pixel sizes, etc...
I can accept that they must turn a profit, and that their prices must reflect that. What I don't see is any kind of ROI analysis. Tell me what it costs to produce and market your ink and break it down per cartridge or by mL. Then, and only then, will I believe you. Until then, this is just another excuse - entirely subjective and lacking any real objective analysis.
Re:No... (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, I don't use a printer at home, there's no point. At work I rarely use one, not too much point there either.
This guy probably actually believes his own BS (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems to me that more than half of the people I meed have made a choice at some point in their lives.
When faced with a difficult bit of knowledge such as, "I work for a company which rips people off," it feels bad. A certain type of person when so faced with this kind of truth will spin words cleverly so that the truth goes away and turns into a nice, calming fiction. It's easy to do this! Words are brilliantly mutable. One quickly learns that with a bit of skill in word-craft and a strong enough will to push through the desired version of the false picture of reality while squashing down all others, one can happily get through life without ever having to face any unpleasant truths. -Truths like being an narcissistic asshole.
This is a choice many people make; that they will face adversity with fictions. It removes the need for real work and the pain of ever being wrong or ever having to improve the self in meaningful ways. Why should one? With lies and denial, one is already perfect!
Whereas others, those who have chosen against this method of dealing with reality, are the ones who grow strong for real. It takes work and pain to face hard and unpleasant realities head-on. But when you do, you grow powerful. You reduce the amount of energy being bled away from you via unhealthy systems, you grow skills in actually working with reality; your mind grows sharp as you hone awareness and self-criticism. Little perks show up, like the realization that you no longer lose arguments because you're no longer trying to win; rather, you're trying to get to the bottom of things.
This HP idiot is a puff of smoke. He can spin words but likely has no real strength; because in the course of sculpting his lies to himself and others, he's needed to limit his own awareness; (you can't get along with lies very well if you see all the facts, so your eyes need to be muted.) Strength after strength is cut away, so that there is no ability to react when truths come crashing in through the web of words. When the web fails, there is only paralysis. No ability to absorb and grow from the light of knowledge.
Sometimes it takes a while for a liar to decay, and sometimes you'll meet a very strong one who is near the top of his/her strength curve, but the end result is inevitable. The decay spreads and eventually liars descend into mush while those who look reality dead-on and deal with it and fight to see ever more grow in strength and ability.
That's just how it is.
-FL
No sensible, honest person would work for HP? (Score:5, Insightful)
You can buy bottles of ink and fill the cartridges, and the ink works fine. They put chips in the cartridges to try to prevent refilling. If the ink were really expensive, they wouldn't need the chips.
The HP "explanation" is powerful public relations. It says, "No sensible, honest person would work for HP. The management is dishonest."
Why be abused?
Re:It's their business model... not the cost of in (Score:3, Insightful)
You bought a $300 inkjet. The problem is you bought an inkjet. Go laser.
Re:Razor Blades (Score:2, Insightful)
Comparison doesn't really hold, as a razor without the razor blade is just a plastic handle.
And what is an inkjet printer without ink?
Re:No... (Score:4, Insightful)
To be fair to HP, some of their concern over image quality is founded in fact; the print heads for HP ink-jet printers are on the cartridge, and are replaced when the cartridge is, so HP doesn't put a lot of work into keeping the print head functioning past the expected usage to empty the cartridge. Also, the print head actually vaporizes the ink with heat to blow a dot of ink onto the paper, and the ink itself provides cooling for the print head elements; if you run a cartridge dry, lack of ink behind the print head could allow the print head element to burn out, degrading the printing.
That said, the price that the manufacturers charge for ink is still outrageous. Yes, it may be technologically complex to formulate a printer ink. However, that's a one-time cost, and economies of scale mean that it's more cost-effective to produce a printer ink in railroad tank car quantities than it is to produce it in demijohn quantities, and it's perfectly possible to design a printhead to feed ink from large bottles outside the printer -- one of the 'continuous flow' systems, generally with 8 fluid ounces of ink in each ink tank mounted away from the print head, so that there is no need to keep the quantity of ink low to improve print head response.
Re:No sensible, honest person would work for HP? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're talking out of your ass.
Once an ink formulation has been designed, it can easily be remade. Kind of like how pharmaceuticals can be remade, except developing ink doesn't take a fraction of the cost to R&D. The bulk of the R&D costs are in the printer itself, but there is far more money charging for consumables rather than the durables.
As was pointed out, ink isn't new. Sure, printers are getting better and better, but I'd be the formulation of ink hasn't changed much since the first Bubblejet printers showed up on the market in the early 90s.
HP is lying. The truth is ink is expensive because making it so makes them lots and lots of money for items which can be mass-produced on the cheap. Oh, and I don't buy your "ink cartridges are precision items" BS either. Some ink cartridges cost more than a low-end CPU. Try convincing me that something that is 99% moulded plastic with a few small parts is harder to fabricate than a part with several hundred million transistors, fabricated in a factory that is probably worth more than HP's market capitalization.
Nah. I don't buy HP's BS. Or yours for that matter.
There is a lesson here (Score:3, Insightful)
The lesson is that you DON'T buy HP printers.
HP printer ink (and toner) is expensive because HP makes it expensive.
There are plenty of printers from other companies (ink-jet and laser) that dont require spending big bucks on ink.
Those who say "you can always get it refilled or use 3rd party cartridges", better answer is to buy a printer where the OEM cartridges are cheap enough that you dont NEED refills or 3rd party cartridges.
Re:Give me Laser Toner any day of the week (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeh, I picked up a cheap laser because I got sick of having to buy new cartridges all the time. Pretty much every time I went to use the inkjet printer I had to get new cartridges because it was dried up, or just empty. I've yet to replace a toner 2 years later.
For AU$350 I got a networked colour laser printer. I would have spent that in the time I've owned the printer on cartridges for an inkjet.
refills (Score:3, Insightful)
Why then are the 3rd party refills so cheap? Considering that the cart is "disposable" it hardly matters if the 3rd party ink damages the disposable print head eventually, no does it?
They wouldn't go through so much trouble and legal shenanigans with the chips on the carts if most people were actually that unhappy with the results from a cheap refill.
I have no doubt they have some significant R&D invested, but the 3rd party suppliers do as well. Given the level of effort and legal contortions printer makers go through to try to prevent cart chip cloning, I have no doubt that they would sue all of the 3rd party ink suppliers if they merely ripped off the expensive R&D. So, apparently the other manufacturers were able to do their own, including extra effort to avoid stepping on an IP landmine and STILL sell the result for significantly less.
Re:No sensible, honest person would work for HP? (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree. Super-parent may have been right, as he says "a bunch of years back" ago. The technology was new and budding at the time. You have to recoup your costs somehow. But the printer companies have got this pretty well established and figured now. For quite some time. Costs should have eventually come down as the initial wave of adoption paid for the development. Instead, they saw a cash cow, and went into legal/obfuscation mode to protect the cow.
Re:No sensible, honest person would work for HP? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've worked pretty closely* with the HP group responsible for creating their ink jet printer drivers. I haven't noticed any lack of sensibility or honesty. A company is both more and less than the sum of its parts, if that makes any sense. We're all just working hard and trying to do our jobs. If you think that people are going to quit their jobs in an economy like this because of the price of ink, you really are out of touch with reality.
I also know one of the guys who designed some of the first ink jet inks (he happens to be the father of one of my closer friends). After spending a few hours hearing about what goes into these inks, at least to the degree that he's allowed to talk about it, I'm not terribly surprised that the inks are extremely expensive. Could they be LESS expensive? Probably, but people are buying the ink. If the prices are so unrealistic, why don't they just switch to a different manufacturer? There are plenty of them. Brother, Canon, Epson, Xerox, the list goes on. Are all of these companies colluding to fix the price of ink? It would be the biggest story since Rambus.
* I said worked with, not worked for. My position puts me in contact with most of the major home printer manufacturers from time to time.
Re:No sensible, honest person would work for HP? (Score:2, Insightful)
something that is 99% moulded plastic with a few small parts is harder to fabricate than a part with several hundred million transistors
It is. Cranking out a ASIC takes 60 days, and any idiot startup can do it for a few hundred $k and it will generally work first try. And wafers cost pennies, why aren't you bitching about Intel's BS? Printing technology takes time to get right, and not many companies do it, not many on their own without buying licensed technology from someone.
Go build a printer head from scratch and get back to me on how that goes. Or better yet, I have a few thousand empty HP cartridges left... get me your contact info and I'll send you a few dozen. You can fill them with homemade or off the shelf ink and see how well it works. You can get back to everyone here with your results on how simple it is. (Hint: out-gassing isnt something you do after leaving Taco Bell) Deal?
Re:No sensible, honest person would work for HP? (Score:5, Insightful)
The model of ink jet printers and ink cartridges being like the razor and razor blade model has been established for decades now. The biggest issue with the pricing of the ink is in the advancement of the technology as well as the replacement cycles.
Once you slow down the replacement cycle the R&D overhead with the new models will become less of an issue, and prices of cartridges will start to fall.
However, no one ever said that you had to buy into the manufacturer's game. If you don't like HP's inkjet prices, then don't buy it. No one put a gun to your head, and if you didn't do your research to profile which printer cost you the least over time for your printing needs, the only person you have to blame is yourself.
FWIW, the technology behind inkjet printers has advanced substantially over the years. Just because you may not appreciate it, others might and do.
The resolution of inkjets has gotten markedly higher, the droplet size smaller, placement more precise, less clogging. Along with the switch to pigmented (versus dye) ink, the permanence has gone up radically (beyond silver halide) and the gamut even larger.
A good indication of where the consumer inkjets are going is from the higher end photo printing market. A decent comparison of the latest inkjets can be found here:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/printers/x300.shtml
That comparison is of the 24" and 44" roll fed models from Canon, HP and Epson. Note the gamut increase from one generation and the competition's. If you don't think the formulation of the ink has changed to get the vibrance of a pigmented ink suspension versus a dye ink, you should really do some research before flaming a guy who had purported to spend some time with the HP engineers.
Are inkjet cartridges premium priced? You betcha. Are HP inkjets carts out of line with the competition? I doubt it.
Just remember the HP formulation may not be the same as another manufacturer's since they have different methods of laying down the ink. As well, HP has cheap user replaceable heads while some manufacturers like Epson, do not. The cost of the head is figured into the price, of course.
As well, HP's profits are definitely anchored by the printing division, but if the numbers were so far out of line with the other printer manufacturers, they'd be doing something wrong. And if all printer manufacturers were so greedy as to be ripping everyone off, you'd have a huge amount of competitors flooding into the market to try to grab their share of the fat profits available. Chinese printers, anyone?
The ugly truth of the matter is that the consumer end of the inkjet market sucks because anyone who prints a lot will get screwed. The corollary is that if you print a lot, don't buy a consumer ink jet. Or refill your own using the manufacturer's bulk sizes. For instance, the ink formulations for a B8850/B9180 are the same as the Z2100 series, which are 70mL carts. Buying one of those and refilling the tiny (15mL) B series works great.
Re:Razor Blades (Score:4, Insightful)
It's just like Razors and Razor Blades. That's how Gillette and Schick make their money.
USED TO. Nowadays, Gillette sells you the handle for 10 bucks and sells you the blades for 3 dollars each. The "free handle" metaphor really hasn't worked since the 70's.
(Incidentally - premium razor blades are one of THE biggest consumer ripoffs of all time. Every time you buy a Gillette Mach 3 cartridge, you're spending 3 dollars on 25 cents worth of materials that aren't really much better than a 30 cent disposable. The only thing cheap about cheap razors are the handles. The blades are as sharp as the expensive one at 1/10 the cost. Behold the power of marketing.)
Printers are evil. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't understand why but printers are the shittiest products you can find , every manufacturer insists on having their own way of dealing with drivers and hp being king at bloatware.
Then there's the windows printing system that absolutely sucks balls.
When it's not the drivers it some sort of failure in the paper loading mechanism or the optical paper detection sensor.
There's no standardized way of remotely managing them , no way to tell if they're working properly or _WHY_ they fail to print when they do.
All i want from these cretins is ONE reasonably priced , reliable printer that would work with bare-bone drivers , have a proper network printing system and management interface and not SUCK so much that i can't deal with actual problems.
All in all this whole thing about R&D is just bullshit , if they'd spend less time building up so many new printer models that have no significant technical advantage , just that they look different and require new drivers the size of an operating system service pack they'd probably have enough cash to stop ripping us off on ink.
Re:No sensible, honest person would work for HP? (Score:5, Insightful)
While I was a senior manager at HP, I got a pretty good idea of the size of printer R&D. It wasn't so big that it cost 1/100 of what they make from ink. But I did get figures on HP margins, which were essentially whatever they could get, not really held to any multiple of internal costs.
The printer market won't change as long as any company that makes printers has to license patents from the others. Eventually that day will end and you might get fair ink prices.
Re:No sensible, honest person would work for HP? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you missed where he said you BS is BS. This is just more of your BS.
MrNaz's points have yet to be refuted here. Ink is cheaper than CPUS to make, period. I've worked in injection molding, I know the overhead is in getting it set up. Once it is set up, it's cheap to maintain. Pennies per item. But overall, hundreds of thousands to a couple of million dollars depending on scale.
Wafers cost pennies too? Per chip, sure. No surprise there. But the setup is even more expensive, and far more R&D went into them. They also sell less volume than printer ink, and the raw materials are more expensive too. But yeah, when you look at the chip alone, it's mere pennies. The setup alone runs into the hundreds of millions, and the R&D into the billions.
The fact that you would even make this comparison is one of the most amusing arguments I have seen in a while.
How about while MrNaz is making his printer, you can make a CPU and tell everyone how well that went. (Hint: He will finish his decades before you do) Deal?
HP continues to lie about prices (Score:3, Insightful)
All this talk about technology and time invested is largely a smokescreen. Do you want to know what's in that ink cartridge? Some colored (or black) dye, a little alcohol and water and some glycol for body. Adjust the non-dye components for best results. Or buy ink refill kits; they're pretty close to the factory formulation and work perfectly well no matter what HP's marketing machine would like you to believe.
How about that "more pages from HP ink" claim? That's like a oil company claiming you get more miles per gallon from their gasoline; in other words, bullshit.
What they're really doing is playing the old "the razor is free but you have to buy our blades" game. Instead of charging you what the true retail value of their inkjet printer is, they give you a discount on the purchase price to bait the "it's on sale!" folks in - then they stick it to you on the ink and make up the difference and then some over the life of the printer. How long will your printer last? Until HP says it's dead - they'll discontinue the ink cartridges and that's it for your printer.
And as long as they can keep the public (and the government) snowed about all of this they'll continue to rake it in. Have ink formulas improved over time? Yes, they have. 1 Billion a year worth? Nope, not even if you pad the budget with lots and lots of hookers and blow. It's just a simple dye formula, not rocket science. Their greed is amazing; they equip their ink cartridges with chips that do NOTHING to improve the operation of the ink cartridge - their sole function is to cause good cartridges to fail early ("to provide the best printing results") and prevent you from refilling their cartridges ("to provide the best printing results"). How about to "enhance HP's bottom line" instead?
Once upon a time HP was a technology company that stood behind their products. Now they're a second-rate consumer electronics company that depends on the revenue from printer ink to balance its books. I mentioned the formula earlier in this message - price out the ingredients and see what it costs per gallon to make and you'll never look at printer ink the same way again. What a scam; they've snookered you folks into paying $35 for a plastic box containing less than a penny's worth of dye.
You know what's really sad? The cartridge refill people are taking you to the cleaners on ink, too. Not nearly as bad as HP does but how do these people sleep at night?
Re:Give me Laser Toner any day of the week (Score:3, Insightful)
Your 24" would have to be about 2400x1800 to match DPI with one of these. They look quite nice up until you're closer than a foot away.
800x600? 8"? This is supposed to be a serious contender?
Have you been to a store lately? Developing film is expensive. Do a few rolls and you pay for some of this stuff.
Film? Rolls? What the heck are you talking about?
It really depends on how much volume you have. My parents have really gotten into using their digital cameras, so they now take about 2000 pictures per year. I suspect developing that many pictures would be more expensive than a laser printer and a few digital photo frames.
Calculate the cost per picture, including paper and actual averaged ink costs. I bet they're paying well over 50 cents a picture, while you can get them professionally printed at any WalMart or whatever for less than half of that.
Re:No sensible, honest person would work for HP? (Score:3, Insightful)
Inkjet technology is the only technology I can think of in the computer industry where it has gotten progressively more and more expensive. Sure the printers are cheap... but the price per page is absurd.
When somebody asks my advice about a printer... I usually say "buy a laser" and unless you're shelling out big bucks for an office, don't even think about HP. Their ink is so expensive and short lived, that it's cheaper to go to Kinko's... and you get better quality.
Tax on those who don't do the math (Score:3, Insightful)
It's the same reason why cell phone contracts are binding for two years, or why text messages are so expensive to transmit even though it is proven that they present absolutely no overhead to the provider.
The recurring cost pays for the device (the phone or the printer) many times over.
"Get a device worth $X FREE!*
(*and pay us $X/10 over the next 24 months, adding up to $2.4X)"
Free? Awesome deal!
Re:No sensible, honest person would work for HP? (Score:3, Insightful)
And that's different from any business how?
HP is lying, but consumers share the blame (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No sensible, honest person would work for HP? (Score:3, Insightful)
It clogs. It clogs constantly. I'll never again use an inkjet, not ever again.
As for the money, your entire post reads like inept astroturfing, from "worth the money" to the scaremongering bit about rubber being corroded by ink.
Re:No sensible, honest person would work for HP? (Score:3, Insightful)
It’s called the color laser printer. Much more reliable technology. Much cheaper per page. Looks better. And they are not much cheaper than a color ink printer. There is no reason for ink printers anymore. At all.
The only reason they still are bought is because of stupid people being so cheap that it becomes more expensive again for them.
Like those who rather buy $10 shirts again and again that fall apart after 3 uses, than 100$ ones that last for a decade.
Re:No sensible, honest person would work for HP? (Score:3, Insightful)
My $10 shirts last longer than your HP Inkjet printer. My HP LJ IV OTOH will most likely outlast cockroaches. Too bad hp spun off its braintrust [wikipedia.org] when they figured out they could make more money selling printer ink than test equipment.
Re:No sensible, honest person would work for HP? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No sensible, honest person would work for HP? (Score:2, Insightful)
We've had inkjet printers for decades now, you can't tell me those things require massive research investments and the mechanical complexity is (or at least SHOULD BE) all in the printer itself which they're happily selling for less than 50 euros.