Lexmark To Exit Inkjet Printer Market

Barence writes "Lexmark has announced it will stop making inkjet printers and cut 1,700 jobs as part of a cost-cutting restructuring move. Lexmark will stop all inkjet development worldwide by 2013, and close its Philippines-based inkjet supplies manufacturing plant by 2015. This will provide annual savings of $85 million, rising to $95 million by 2015. The total restructuring cost before tax is expected to be $160 million. The company is also looking into the possible sale of its inkjet-related technology." I know there are some purposes for which inkjets are good (modern home photo printing can be insanely good, and we've featured a lot of cool projects which use inkjets to print sensors, solar cells, antennae, and more), but I get just a little queasy whenever I see an inkjet printer purchased by an innocent friend or family member who doesn't realize quite how much it will end up costing them in the long run.

Comments

executive speak demystified

[Hazel Bergeron]

Executive: "restructuring cost before tax"

English: "way to create a paper loss to avoid tax".

Re:executive speak demystified

[Kjella]

Long story short if you get a tax on your profits you should also get a tax break on your losses, otherwise say you made $100m one year and lose $100m the next year, the government would take a big profit tax while you in net haven't actually made any profit. This is actually true for people too, at least here in Norway. If I had a just terrible year, realized huge losses in the stock market so I should in theory get a tax refund but it exceeds my actual taxes then I don't get a check, I only get zero taxes and a deductible loss I can use next year.

The same is true for companies, which is often a problem for a company posting huge losses and going out of business. The government "owes" them a tax break but since companies disappear when they go bankrupt if you don't handle it right the government never has to honor it. There's nothing wrong with this, it's just making sure that the company going out of business gets the same tax breaks as a company managing to stay in business would have had. And no, you still don't make money by losing money...

Good

[alispguru]

Just wondering, has anyone else ever had a good experience with a Lexmark printer on a non-Windows machine?

Or had a Lexmark printer do, say, ten pages in a row without smudging or jamming?

Or is it just me?

Re:Good

[oobayly]

FTFY

Just wondering, has anyone else ever had a good experience with a Lexmark printer?

Excellent support!

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally, after years of complaints and consumer demand, Lexmark bows to the will of the customer and does what everyone so desperately wanted, leave.

Re:Excellent support!

[irving47]

Came to say this. For those that don't know the DMCA reference, Lexmark filed lawsuits under the DMCA to prevent ink refill manufacturers from putting out products for their printers. They argued since the code in their printer/carts was copyrighted, the act of circumventing it by putting more ink in was illegal.
Yeah, they made a lot of friends with that one.

Good riddance.

Re:Not so bad

[bratloaf]

Except that if you only print occasionally the ink heads clog or dry up, requiring a ink-wasting cleaning cycle or replacement... A cheap laser, even a cheap color laser, is so much better a choice for anything but photo printing. Decent color lasers can be had for $200 on sale sometimes. Really decent ones for $300.

Now if we could get other inkjet manufacturers...

[QilessQi]

...to follow suit, and wean consumers off the "cheap inkjet printer" crack pipe. I have a full-color (4 cartridge) laser printer that I virtually never need to change the toner on, and when I do it's invariably the black cartridge. My significant other, meanwhile, goes through inkjet cartridges like I go through socks. And I *love* socks.

Re:Not so bad

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Laser isn't as expensive as it used to be.

For around $100 you can have a BW HP laser.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16828115639

The quality and reliablity make it woth the extra money, even if you never recoup the $60 price difference between that and this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16828102471

Color laser is closer to $ 170. But most casual printers don't really need color, they just need a readable printout.

Re:Not so bad

[vlm]

The quality and reliablity make it woth the extra money

That's my fear, lexmark will find a way to value engineer lasers to eliminate laser-style quality and reliability.

Imagine if McDonalds broke into the sushi market, dumped into the market to put all independent sushi shops out of business, them dropped quality to the level of rotten canned cat food to generate a modest financial gain, then got out of the sushi market because no one wants to buy rotten canned cat food anymore.

Ink jets are not dependable.

[goombah99]

Inkjet prices aren't so bad for those home users that only need to print occasionally. .

Occasional printing is precisely what Ink jets are the worst at. Those things clog up and when they do manage to print it's only after a good phlem clearing dump of a lot of ink into the waste bin. It's the laser printers that work well on occasional printing, even with the warm up they need they still are faster than an ink jet, and they don't have unpredictable quality problems when they haven't been used in a while. Dependable when you suddenly need it.

I just bought a new multi-function duplex-printing laser printer from cannon for 77$ including shipping on amazon.com. Even the 500 sheet "starter" toner cartridge will last longer than a full ink jet will, and 3rd party replacement toner cartriges (2000 sheets) will be under $15.

given that's the price now for laser printing for a quality company, Why would anyone buy an inkjet?

Refill Your Own

[Bitsy Boffin]

Refilling your own cartridges is super easy if you pick the right printer.

Brother printers particularly are good, the cartridges (at least all the ones I've seen) are just ink receptacles, they have no electronics, just put more ink in job done.

Ink can be purchased on ebay etc in 100ml bottles or more, for a fraction of the cost of buying cartridges.

Even better, it's pretty easy to find good inkjets for a buck or two second hand, I've bought lots of them, most with empty cartridges, often complete with power and USB. Refill the carts, run a few cleaning cycles, and they work really well.

Lexmark is still around?

[macbeth66]

In Mid-2004 their stock was around $90. Now it hovers around $22.

It warms my heart to see the scum of the printer industry slowly die. Whenever I was asked about which printer to get, my answer was almost always, "Anything but Lexmark."

I think the key word there was "laser"

[alispguru]

I have no experience with laser printers by Lexmark. My inkjet experience with them has been uniformly bad.

Re:I think the key word there was "laser"

[mccalli]

With the exception of an original Stylewriter (which, I seem to remember, shared a lot of components with a Canon in the PC universe at the time), I have never had any form of good experience with an inkjet by any manufacturer. It's actually why I ended up with the Lexmark laser in the first place.

For their time, when your alternative was dot matrix or a third mortgage, inkjet printers were astonishing. That time has gone for a while now I think, time to dump the lot and concentrate on low-end colour lasers.

Cheers,
Ian

Inkjets dont have to be so expensive...

[dtjohnson]

Inkjet printers have a lot of advantages. They do a much nicer job on color than laser printers do. They're smaller, lighter, and use a lot less power. Moreover, the power they use while they are sleeping (which is most of the time for home printers) is a lot less than a laser printer. The only thing that makes them expensive are the cartridges which cost $15 to $40 a pop and don't last nearly as long as a laser toner pack. That's a shame because one of the inkjet makers (Lexmark, Canon, HP, Epson) could/should have stepped forward and started selling a refillable ink cartridge which would have had a simple refill valve or cap or something on top where you could take the $6 a quart ink and squirt it in to top it off. One quart would last for about 150 refills. That would make inkjet printers cheaper by far than laser printers. Why don't inkjet makers do that? The answer is that they could never get past the razor/razor blade idea where they make all of their money from the ink cartridges and the printer is just the 'razor' that people buy so that they will be locked in as a customer of the ink cartridge 'razorblades.' In this case, though, that way of thinking like an MBA is killing a very nice technology.

Re:Not so bad

[jayteedee]

I hope you haven't kept it plugged in these last 6 years. I had one of those and it idled at about 400 watts. You could feel the heat radiating on the outside of the HUGE plastic case. We kept it for a few years and would only power it on when we needed it, but then decided it was just easier to get a newer machine (a Lexmark coincidentally) that idles at about 30watts. Yes the old HP 4 and 5 series were built like tanks, and the parts are still cheap at places like precisionroller.com, but they are not economical to keep plugged in 24/7.

Just Don't Buy A Printer

[Baby Duck]

I "exited" owning my own printer 8 years ago. I print so infrequently, the ink dries up too much between my last use. I have an account at my local printing/mailing/business shop. Even with the price of gasoline for the round trip, it's much cheaper in the long run.