I think it’s a problem that exists in many spaces. Normal people lack the knowledge to be certain that they are getting ripped off. They aren’t sure, that printer ink maybe just is this expensive, they don’t know that better and cheaper solutions exist.
It’s even deeper than that. Most consumers don’t realize what is happening and most printers have few if any comparable characteristics. So users buy primarily based on price. In order to make the cheapest printer these companies sell at a loss. How do they make their money back? By charging a lot for ink when the consumer doesn’t have the choice to select based on price anymore.
If we want to solve this problem the solution is to make the Total Cost of Ownership visible up-front. Users can see the cost of the printer, cost after 1 refill, cost after 2 refills… Of course this system isn’t perfect because it is hard to determine how often you need a refill (some printers come with a small ink cartridge to start, so you refill sooner and some use lower quality inks or print heads so that you refill less often) but at least it would give the average consumer the ability to discriminate based on TCO price rather than first-purchase price.
Basically printer manufacturers have optimized for what consumers discriminate based on and they have done so incredibly effectively. I’m not saying that these DRM and scummy techniques wouldn’t have appeared anyways, but the way that most users decide what to purchase certainly put a lot of fuel on that fire.
I think it’s a problem that exists in many spaces. Normal people lack the knowledge to be certain that they are getting ripped off. They aren’t sure, that printer ink maybe just is this expensive, they don’t know that better and cheaper solutions exist.
It’s even deeper than that. Most consumers don’t realize what is happening and most printers have few if any comparable characteristics. So users buy primarily based on price. In order to make the cheapest printer these companies sell at a loss. How do they make their money back? By charging a lot for ink when the consumer doesn’t have the choice to select based on price anymore.
If we want to solve this problem the solution is to make the Total Cost of Ownership visible up-front. Users can see the cost of the printer, cost after 1 refill, cost after 2 refills… Of course this system isn’t perfect because it is hard to determine how often you need a refill (some printers come with a small ink cartridge to start, so you refill sooner and some use lower quality inks or print heads so that you refill less often) but at least it would give the average consumer the ability to discriminate based on TCO price rather than first-purchase price.
Basically printer manufacturers have optimized for what consumers discriminate based on and they have done so incredibly effectively. I’m not saying that these DRM and scummy techniques wouldn’t have appeared anyways, but the way that most users decide what to purchase certainly put a lot of fuel on that fire.
Maybe price per page or per 100 pages of a set standard print would be cool to enforce to show next to printer price
But even that depends on how often you print. With inkjet printing 1000 days in a couple days will cost a lot less than 1000 pages over 10 years.
Maybe they could have 2-3 profiles of how frequently you print.