How to save on printing? Why you should save money on it. The unsuccessful struggle of vendors for the death of the photodrum

How did this happen with printers? Well, out of greed, of course. Vendors' greed. First, you buy a printer at the store. And look at the price. This is an important purchasing criterion. And the moment you stand in the store, you look at the price tag and don’t try to calculate the cost of ownership over 5 or 10 years. You just buy a printer. Often with a scanner. By the way, apparently overly cheap printers with scanners have killed the scanner market. And so vendors began to compete powerfully, reducing the price of the device. Earn less and less. And at some point we crossed zero. Now they make no money at all on the initial sale or incur losses. In this process, for example, laser printers received a strange option – an almost empty cartridge. That is, the very first installed cartridge is much emptier than those that can be bought in the store.

How did vendors have the opportunity to lose money on printers? Due to consumables. Even the theme itself – selling a whole cartridge with a drum and powder at once arose precisely from this process. After all, in ancient times there were no cartridges. There were replacement drums for 100 thousand copies or more and there was bottled powder. The powder was poured into a hole in the printer or copier and the drum was not replaced at each refill.

So the titanic battle for the initial low price drove the vendors into the minus. But if you want to make money, you have to make it. Given the fact that many companies, as it turns out, can produce powder (or ink), although they are not able to produce the printer itself. And then these nice people began to take advantage of the situation when vendors, in the process of competition, fell into negative income on printers.

The situation with printers was aggravated by the fact that vendors cannot make such a shitty photoconductor for a cartridge that it will become unusable at the same time as the powder runs out. No matter what they did, they could not deteriorate the quality of the photodrum. The reason for this is a simple contradiction – you cannot deteriorate the drum so that its physical properties are impaired at one specific moment. It deteriorates gradually. And you can’t sell a cartridge with a drum that works fine at the beginning, but hardly prints at the end. We have to make a drum that still prints as well at the end as at the beginning.

The first way they tried to solve this contradiction was to install copy counters. Mechanical first. Then electronic ones. The cartridge seemed to count down copies and seemed to die in digital form.

And then the piranhas swooped in and let’s refuel and reset the meters. Vendors made the meters more complex, and companies either learned to produce them or inserted refill nipples into old card cartridges. And with varying success this continues to this day. The fight for the digital death of the photoconductor.

Can vendors kill this secondary market for gray cartridges and at the same time continue to make money and release new models, delighting us with convenience and service?

(This is generally a separate question – why do we need new printer models? They still printed at 300 dpi 15 years ago. I would also be happy to use the LazerJet 4L. It does exactly the same thing as my current MFP m140 printer. And inkjet printers are exactly the same – they didn’t print better)

In order for vendors to return to a normal economic model – selling both printers and cartridges with income – they need to stupidly raise prices for printers. Up to normal. And then they will be able to reduce the price of cartridges. Eliminate this initial imbalance. And then we wouldn’t buy fake cartridges like fools. But this is completely impossible. Due to antitrust laws. To increase the price of printers, all vendors need to do this at the same time. And agree on this. And this is a cartel agreement, which is prohibited by law. And generally speaking, vendors will immediately try to cheat each other. Bourgeois are generally prone to fraud for the sake of profit. This is how it happens in cars – Diesel emissions scam.

Is there a way out? There is almost no way out for vendors. Just releasing models that will consume powder instead of cartridges will not help them in any way. Due to the objective structure of the market, they will continue to cling to their model with the sale of expensive consumables. And therefore, the system for checking cartridges will become increasingly complex.

As a result, the final outcome of this will be the complete victory of the vendors over the gas stations. The counter in the cartridge will be such that it cannot be reset or replaced with a new one. And drilling holes in the cartridge to add powder will no longer work.
This also goes with the ink theme. Irresistible counter.

There is, of course, not a technical, but a marketing option for manufacturers – to make two prices for the printer. One is tall. You buy a printer and have a 50 percent discount on original cartridges. And the second price is two times lower, but without a discount on consumables.

In fact, a similar economy is obtained when you buy an inkjet with CISS from a large vendor. The price is high, but 10 thousand photos. And many are already doing this.

Is it possible to do something similar with laser? I think it's possible. SNPP. Continuous powder supply system. We must take advantage of the fact that the drum resource is extremely high. And go back from the model of a disposable cartridge with a drum to refilling with a separate powder and replacing the drum separately. And for example, sell a printer immediately with a set of 5 bottles of powder.

I generally like this option more than all the others. Because it does not generate unnecessary plastic waste and makes the planet cleaner for our grandchildren.

How much should we expect such a market to appear? I think we will see it all soon. And the reason for this will not only be the bourgeois economy and the new sales model.

The legislator must have his say and simply ban the production of non-refillable cartridges. To reduce the amount of waste. As they already bent Apple into charging TYPE-C. And then it turns out that there is no point in cartridges and it makes sense to return to the norm – refilling powder from bottles.

It will all start with Europe and the USA. And then other countries will be forced to catch up.

I think that in Europe this should be expected in the next election cycle. While they are all busy with other things.

And the answer to the question of how to save on printing today? Just like before. Buy non-original cartridges or refill original ones. Until the last.