Until when your printer was being produced, printers competed on their durability. It created a scenario where the companies were in a death spiral of competing with each other on price. Some brainiac, all of a sudden, realized that they were no longer in the printer business - they were in the chemical business (supplies). They could give you the printer for free and still come out smelling like a rose if you used it.

This bred an on-going battle with third-party unofficial supply source. The “best” way to address this was, after the initial milking of a printer family for supply bucks until they were reverse engineered, was to make the printer crappy enough that it would fail shortly afterwards - forcing the user to buy another printer for next-to-no dollars. The current subscription plans make this semi-automatic and “sticky”.

Virtually all consumer-grade printers follow some semblance of this model today. Commercial printers (office workhorses) reverse this by selling relatively expensive printers with lower cost-per-page for supplies.

The most effective way to choose between “equal” printers (of any sort) is to do a Total Cost of Ownership calculation.

This starts by evaluating the duty-cycle of the printer (verify that it is based, for example, by printing its monthly duty cycle for three years before needing a major overhaul) against what your projected printing is going to be, then calculate the cost of supplies for that period and add any periodic maintenance is required.

“Back in the day” I was able to demonstrate that there were huge savings (in the thousands of dollars) to a school to buy two rather expensive high-speed color laser printers compared to four $80 ink jet printers. They couldn’t justify the laser printers (capital budget), but were thrilled by the prospect of buying such cheap color inkjet printers (operating budget picked up the supply costs).

This is not an unusual progression. My first electric typewriter purchase was a standard IBM Selectric that I bought used at an auction for around $800 and then bought an annual service contract from IBM. Today, an “equivalent” (not really) is under 100 bucks. My first fax machine was bought used for $1,200, weighed nearly 100 pounds and was the size of a large laser printer. A fax machine today can be lifteed with one hand and costs around $60.

That said, things do frequently get more sophisticated as well as cheaper given enough time. My first PC had 16K of RAM, used a 40 character green-screen TV and had a tape recorder for storage (Steve would recognize this puppy) and my first wrist watch didn’t have a barometer, altimeter, thermometer or compass built into it.

Jeff