• @Thann
    link
    112 years ago

    There is a small cabal of like 7 companies that make inkjet printers.
    They implement secret govt fingerprinting and anti-counterfeiting protocols.
    They all work together for anti-consumer and anti-competitive reasons.

  • CHEF-KOCH
    link
    11
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Action and lawsuits, everyone got minimum one, basically

    If any action has been taken, then why is printer ink still so expensive?

    There are multiple reason, it is not just one reason

    • Producing specific color is research as well as resource intensive, we have shortages and so.
    • Patent and licensing. If you spend millions of dollars on that you want your money back.
    • If you get sued and loose, you still want you money back right. So there is the answer, if someone sued me and I assume I loose I want my money for it back. It is all about profit. Same like Sony does not make money with the consoles, they make the cash with the expensive games and equipment you need to buy. Selling supplies needed to print or play a game is a nice cash-gab to get money.
    • People switch to laser printer. The manufacturer controls the technology and the prices.
      • @pingveno
        link
        32 years ago

        It depends. If you’re going to print a few pages a year and they might have photos, inkjet’s your best bet. They’re cheaper upfront and have better color quality. If you print black and white by the stack, laser is going to be far more economical.

        But now the real answer: just use a print shop. They have a wider array of equipment and paper, so you can choose exactly what you want for your printing task. You don’t have to have an entire extra electronic device sitting around, with all of the cost, space, and e-waste that implies. That takes care of the needs of 99% of customers.

  • 10_0
    link
    82 years ago

    Because they sell the printer a loss, and rely on ink cartridge sales to turn a profit, like how amazon sells kindles at a loss and make their profits though the built in kindle store over time.

    • @pineapple@sopuli.xyzOP
      link
      fedilink
      22 years ago

      Sure. I understand that. Bu the companies should be a bit more considerate and reduce the price. 50 dollars is like way too much.

      • 10_0
        link
        22 years ago

        50 dollars for a full pack, just buy a different printer with cheaper ink

  • @dragnucs
    link
    72 years ago

    Maybe because there is only one tiny fraction of us that still own printers. We have a regular and a two-in-one printers at my parents home that have not been used in over 7 years.

    Probably because of everything being digital now, we are not affected by the scam. The rare times I need to print something I just go to the nearest printing center and print my papers for almost nothing. About USD0.053 per page.

    Probably the most affected portion are business and corporate. However, they use a different kind of printers in general, like Konica Minolta with toners and huge replaceable cartridge inks.

    https://www.abdofficesolutions.com/products/konica-minolta-bizhub-c258

    So all in all, I think we don’t do anything because we are not affected.

  • @sexy_peach@feddit.de
    link
    fedilink
    62 years ago

    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.

    • @kevincox
      link
      52 years ago

      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.

      • @sexy_peach@feddit.de
        link
        fedilink
        52 years ago

        Maybe price per page or per 100 pages of a set standard print would be cool to enforce to show next to printer price

        • @kevincox
          link
          12 years ago

          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.