From the April/May 2008 Issue
I bought my first HP LaserJet printer in 1992. It was one of the best printers ever made — the venerable Model 4, churning out a whopping eight pages per minute at the incredible resolution of 600 dots per inch (dpi). It cost an arm and a leg — just under $1,400 after every discount I could beg or wheedle. I retired it a while ago, but it still does service today in the church to which I donated it, churning out bulletins and correspondence with ease.
In the three years since I retired my LJ4, I’ve searched in vain for a replacement. With literally hundreds of models from which to choose today, you might think the choice is easy. It is not, for the following three reasons:
• There are too many choices
Whether it is an inkjet printer, a laser printer or a color laser printer, just
about every consumer electronics company from HP to Hyundai has jumped into
the printer market. Each uses a proprietary design for replacement ink or toner
cartridges, each works differently in terms of speed and resolution, and there
is no easy way to make a head-to-head comparison.
• There’s little delineation between personal and business use. It would be lovely to return to the old days, when “business” printers were designed for high-volume output and carried a price tag to match. Today, it is nearly impossible to find a printer optimized for business use — they are filled with such features as photo printing that may or may not have relevance to the office environment. One model I saw even has a built-in MP3 player so you can listen to music while printing.
• They don’t cost enough. This isn’t just my opinion. The American Consumer Institute released a study late last year that found that printer companies are ripping off consumers to the tune of $6 billion a year. The study found that inkjet printers are routinely under-priced to entice consumers to purchase the product. Once purchased, consumers are trapped into spending hundreds of extra dollars to operate the printers due to the high price of printer ink. This business model reflects the well-known “razor/razor blade model,” wherein durable assets (printers) are sold below cost and “consumables” (ink) are marked up substantially. In fact, ink is currently priced higher per milliliter than the world’s finest champagne, gasoline and most luxury fragrances.
When it comes to shopping for printers, accountants and their clients are seriously handicapped and misled at the point of sale by the lack of information about printing costs. They pay for cartridges without knowing how much ink is in them or how many pages one will print. They are forced to shop blindly due to a lack of standardized printer ink unit pricing (such as cents-per-page printed). It is not enough to look at the prices of printer cartridges either, since the lowest priced cartridges often have the highest cost-of-ink per page.
Five Tips for Simplifying the Process
So what’s a reasonable office manager to do? There are few hard
and fast rules, but the following five steps may help in the process, particularly
for accounting firms looking to update their hardware at the end of tax season:
Don’t fall for the “all-in-one” solutions. The combination printer/fax/copier/scanner machines may seem attractive, but they may also carry a penalty in the cost of their ink cartridges. A better idea is to fax directly from your computer desktop, invest in a good office scanner (scanners are automatically copiers, too) and buy the printer that will best do the job.
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Reader Comments
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Choosing a Printer
(04/17/08 - 10:13 AM)
Dear David:
A great article and dead-on target in many respects.
One key point you left out is that most printer manufacturers these days aren't content with the "razors and razor blades" business model and have now added "cartridge killer chips" to most cartridges to further boost their bottom line.
These chips "guesstimate" when you are out of toner (unlike your old Series 4 which was one of the last HP(Canon) printers to have a true toner level sensor in the toner cartridge that accurately sensed when you were going "toner low".
These chips generally apply a formula (based on what the manufacturer believes represents the toner usage of the "average user") which estimates how much toner you have left in the cartridge given the number of pages you have printed.
This will shock you (sarcasm alert), but we have found that the average "chipped" cartridge still has 10 - 30% of its toner left when that chip declares it is empty.
Imagine that, a chip on a cartridge underestimating the amount of toner you have used and thereby tricking you into buying toner before you truly need it.
(And also imagine the boost to their profits by virtue of the fact they get bad for all of the toner, and the customer has to step up and buy more, 10 - 30% more often than they would have if the old technology was still employed. What a business model - free money!)
And, as if that isn't bad enough, many machines don't even have an "ignore toner low message" setting (even your old Series 4 had it, and that despite the fact it had a true toner level sensor) that enables you to continue using the cartridge until it really is out of the toner you paid for.
Lexmark actually went to court to prevent companies from "knocking off" their cartridge killer chips (which were made to allow customers to use up all of the toner in their cartridges, enable the cartridges to be remanufactured or refilled and keep them out of the landfills for another 2 - 4 complete uses, reducing landfill trash by up to 80%) claiming they were protected "works of art" and subject to protection under the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act).
Lexmark ultimately lost, but only after costing the companies they sued millions in court costs.
When having this discussion with customers I ask them if they could imagine the hue and cry if the automakers were somehow in league with the gasoline companies and were tricking them into buying gas 10 - 30% more frequently than necessary (through some hypothetical arrangement where a hose had to be hooked to the car to "prevent hydrocarbon emissions from being released into the atmosphere during fill-up" which then surreptiously purged any remaining gas out of the tank that might remain after their "mileage estimator/gas gauge" indicated they were out of gas).
The response to that question is always the same:
"They couldn't do that."
"The government (our friend) wouldn't let them do that."
"It would be against the law."
"Customers wouldn't stand for it."
"It would be all over the news."
"Consumer advocates would jump on that story."
..., etc.
At that point I tell them it is happening, it is happening to them, the government isn't doing anything about it, it isn't all over the news, but it is happening with their printer, not their car.
Our company, www.TonerRefillKits.com sells our ReCharg brand of toner refill kits which enable the end user to refill their own cartridges (takes around five minutes with an average savings of 70% vs. the office superstore price) and includes the cartridge killer replacement chip on all of the machines where those chips are employed.
Those chips can first be used to use up all of the toner that remained in the cartridge (when it was erroneously declared empty) and then use the fresh toner we provide.
But, proud as we are of our ReChargX product line, our toner refill kits still don't address the root cause of the chip problem, they only address it in a fashion where a customer can work around it to save precious dollars.
What is even more amazing about this is that each "average" toner cartridge represents roughly 6 quarts of oil that was used during its production (the cartridges and the toner are primarly made of plastic and plastic is a petroleum-based product).
At a time when oil prices are at an all-time high, the use of these cartridges killer chips should be outlawed.
These chips are anti-consumer, anti-competition, anti-environment, but until customers speak out and something is done about it, their use will simply increase (and, now, other industries are "chipping" their products to prevent customers from using anything other than their parts to force customers to buy OEM instead of generic.)
Now that I have addressed those chips and artificial toner level reporting mechanisms, I would like to offer my "two cents worth" on one other thing you should have mentioned (that we tell all of our www.TonerRefillKits.com customers about when they ask our advice on what printer to buy).
The best place to buy a great printer at an even better price is eBay.
Generally speaking, our rules are simple (and this based on being in the toner and toner cartridge remanufacturing business for over twenty years).
1. Don't buy new, buy used (on eBay).
2. Buy more machine than you think you need (again, on eBay it is really easy to get a great bargain.)
3. Don't buy color. Only a small fraction of users truly "need" color. The toner costs (even using our ReChargX toner refill kits with their 70% average savings) will eat you alive. And, color machines simply are still too new, the technology is still not stable and it will be 2 - 5 years (if ever) before that technology is anywhere near as reliable and stable as the b/w machine are.
(Another quick tip, when/if you truly need color, take your file to one of the office superstores and use their machines and if you aren't happy with the output, don't pay for it until you are.)
4. Aim for HP. They didn't get to be the largest provider of printers in the world by accident (Canon makes all of their machines, but they really do a great job).
5. Try to find slightly older machines where cartridge killer chips weren't employed (harder and harder to do with each passing day).
6. When you need toner, contact us at www.TonerRefillKits.com.
Again, it was a great article.
John Galt
H.T.G. (Head Toner Guy)/President
www.TonerRefillKits.com
John Galt
Central Florida
JGalt@TonerRefillKits.com
