Epson: Cheap printers, expensive ink? Let's turn that upside down

Re: Hm..

If they really wanted to make a difference, why not establish an industry standard for printer ink, let anyone make that, and then the printer companies can compete on price and quality of their printers?

Why not? Profit and market share. One can't level out the playing field anymore as there's just too many greedy folks involved.

Re: Hm..

I think you're missing the point. The $379 printer is the same as the $70 printer because the $70 printer is over charging you for ink. If you print a lot as business do, you stand to save thousands of dollars over the life of the printer. Epson will make a few more bucks up front and you'll save a few bucks in the long run.

Can't fly in the face of fashion

From the grave goods of neolithic tombs through to SpecSavers, the one constant in humans is the deep compulsion to look good (by whatever standards prevail at the time). So the money will get spent on the visible bits: providing that the prescription isn't so bad that the wearer squints like Quasimodo and that the lenses don't look too much like beer tankards then the frames are pretty much all that gets noticed.

Is this rational, to ignore the ostensible function of good vision and focus on the presentation? For an individual possibly not, but for a gene line possibly so: a rational peacock might pluck out his tail for better personal survival odds but at the expense of reproductive success. This shades into behavioural economics - the fine art of trying to explain why investors (in any field) so often don't pursue what looks superficially like their rational self-interest.

The frames are seen as "status symbols" by a swath of the population, and the prices match because the manufacturers can do it, and most people have their insurance company foot the bill.

If you don't want to look like Velma from Scooby Doo, you pay through the nose for what sits on your nose. It also goes up 5X in price if a brand name is associated with the frames.

Although now the styles are changing, and the "Velma glasses" are getting more expensive, the "high school librarian" look is catching on again, and people are starting to like the idea of the pince-nez...

Ah, but there are more pricing models than one. Take your glasses example:

Like everything else, I buy my glasses online at places like 39dollarglasses.com (one of quite a few such firms, but I have personal experience with them) You need your standard prescription plus your Interpupillary distance (distance between eyes)

They offer PDF printouts of frames, so you can roughly see how they fit. It's not great, but then I'm not looking for top fashion.

I've had lenses that were mis-made several times, but that was done by the expensive opticians, and I've never had a problem with the online ones.

This enables me to have 4 pair of glasses for computer use and for driving, with spares, and costs less than $120 TOTAL, instead of the usual $280 per pair.

My exams are NOT free, as I see a professional optometrist, but it's paid for by my health insurance. Instead of the huge machine with the dozens of lenses in carousels where the doctor constantly asks which is better, she has a computer operated unit where I stare at an image and it somehow figures out my prescription. A couple minutes on that, another machine that puffs air at my eyeball to check for glaucoma, she does a exam of my eyes with the bright flashlight, and I'm done. She then usually spends some time discussing how much my prescription has changed, and why (because I am getting old, that's why)

Things have changed.

Are the real profits even in the frames? The optician I use seems to have a permanent 2-for-1 offer on glasses. However that doesn't include lens upgrades such thinner lens, anti-scratch anti-reflective coating, tint or light-reactive so the second pair can be sunglasses, etc. The 'free' second pair can work out quite expensive if you want anything other than the basics.

legal protection

Interestingly the frame design can be protected by copyright or a design patent and so the price of a desirable frame can be kept high.

Once you've hired good staff and got a decent lens machine (as any optician in business will have) how else can you add value?

And if the customers assume good staff and a good lens machine, what they are buying is fashion.

You don't have to play along, though.

I get the cheap eye tests from Boots and then buy the glasses online for £10 a pair. I can even see through them.

There are two different methods of providing ink, typified by HP on the one hand, and the older Epson printers on the other.

HP, along with Canon and also Lexmark before they left the market provide you with a cartridge which includes the print head.Every time you change the cartridge, you also change the print head. This makes the cartridges much more complex (and expensive), but at least should maintain print quality over the lifetime of the printer.

Epson and Brother cartridges are buckets of ink, and if you go back to the late '90s, that's literally all they were. Plastic boxes filled ink, sometimes with foam to control the ink, together with the required holes to let the ink out. More recently, they've had a small amount of electronics in them, supposedly to allow the cartridge to monitor how much ink is left, but actually IMHO to try to make sure that you only use genuine cartridges.

I currently have an Epson R1800 photo printer that takes a T054X cartridges. I have cartridges from other Epson printers. I've recently found that the physical cartridge from another printer designated T06XX (i.e. the next generation of printer) will fit in the R1800, but the electronics prevent the cartridge from being recognised properly. This strikes me as being a blatant artificial control of the post sale ink market.

I kept a Stylus 1160, and before that a Stylus 880 (both models without electronics in the cartridge) going for a many years as my always-on network attached printers, because the ink was (comparatively) just so cheap. The 880 eventually had some print nozzles permanently blocked regardless of how I cleaned it, and the 1160 developed a power supply problem. That's when I picked up the R1800, hoping it to be similar. Unfortunately not.

So it sounds as if Epson are going to go back to their old method of making the printer everything, and the cartridges/ink tanks nothing other than reservoirs for the ink. Great. Just don't push the printer price up too high for artificial reasons.

glesses

I had a customer that buys lens on-line only, claiming 25% the cost of Walmart.

"Cartridges of ink costing upwards of $30 a shot"

Or you might go with the 1/2 liter bottle for <$30. I love my HP printer much more since I did that and paying top dollar for new HP cartridges is much less painful if I know I'll burn some ink through them..

Your Not From Marketing Are You

Never confuse price, cost and value.

My older Brother printer with the larger print tanks automatically cycled through ...print head cleaning cycles, to keep the thing operational when not in regular use.

The British consumers' association recently had a look at ink use by domestic/home office inkjet printers - there appears little correlation between the ink use in cleaning cycles and reliability or performance, and some brands (Canon separate ink printers in particular) were wasting three or four times as much as actually printed in cleaning. Not only does this waste ink, but it means the printer spends ages chuntering and shuffling when I just want my damned print. Some other makers were able to offer self-cleaning printers that wasted far less ink than the Canon single-colour cartridge printers. The combined tank Canon printers wasted far less ink (ISTR that these had an integrated disposable print head on the combined cartridges?)..

The truly irritating thing about my Canon is that despite its voracious appetite for ink when running self cleaning, it still needs periodic manual cleaning of the print head, which is a chore to get out of the machine, and takes hours of soaking and rinsing to clear.

I've always liked Canon for their high quality photo capabilities, but I've got tired of the cost of wasted ink (even using third party cartridges), I've got tired of the noise and delay, tired of the need to hold a permanent stock of replacement cartridges, tired of the difficult task of cleaning the print head. Next time round Canon aren't assured of my business.

Yes, laser is the solution

Used ink printers for years - Epson included. The result was invariable :

Buy printer

Use up included ink without trouble

Buy new ink cartridges (brand name only, no Chinese knock-offs ever)

Start needing to clean heads regularly

Start getting degraded print quality

Move on to head cleaning before each print while cursing profoundly

Chuck the whole thing out and buy another printer

Of course, some people would say that I didn't print enough. Sure, about a page a day on average and I agree that is not much, but why does it work find with the purchase-included cartridges then go to Hell with store-bought brand name ones ?

I solved the issue with a laser printer. Doesn't do color, but it bloody works. End of.

Re: Epson was doing this to some extent

Epson has been doing this to some extent already, at the lower end the Epson will cost like twice what a similar HP costs, but the Epson will have less expensive, larger capacity cartridges.

I have a fairly new WF 7610 (the +A3 version of their printers/scanner), and that choice was made by FIRST looking if I could get replacement ink. However, it seems to be quite reasonable in the way it uses ink, and the black XXL cartridge I just replaced the 'startup' cartridge with is an absolute bucket - it's huge. It wouldn't surprise me if it made sloshing noises when printing, it's that big. Given how that small "startup" black cartridge lasted with normal print jobs I cannot see me replace that before the new year.

The issue with imitation ink is usually colour rendering. The printer it replaced didn't do a good job using replacement ink, but it was so old it was nigh impossible to get ink for it unless I used the replacement ink market. Hence the Epson. As it stands I'm not sure I'll use replacement ink on it - depends on the costs when I'm ready to buy. So far, the signs appear to favour Epson :).

Re: Epson was doing this to some extent

"[...] but my mom prints photos and such on it and man does it churn through ink."

Our Kodak Express photo printing shop has said that the quality and durability of their digital printing is cheaper and better than doing it at home. That certainly appears to be true if you want an occasional A3 or A2 - or even bigger.

Re: Kodak tried this cheaper ink, more expensive printer business model

As did HP with their Office range of ink jet printers about 10 years ago.