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Epson Is Trying To Kill the Printer Ink Cartridge
An anonymous reader writes: Inkjet printer cartridges have been the bane of many small businesses and home offices for decades. It's interesting, then, that Epson is trying something new: next month, they're launching a new line of printers that come with small tanks of ink, instead of cartridges. The tanks will be refilled using bottles of ink. They're reversing the economics, here: the printer itself will be more expensive, but the refills will be much cheaper. Early reports claim you'll be spending a tenth as much on ink as you were before, but we'll see how that shakes out. The Bloomberg article makes a good point: it's never been easier to not print things. The printer industry needs to innovate if it wants us to keep churning out printed documents, and this may be the first big step.
Early inkjet printers basically did this. The ink bottle was replaceable, but what ended up happening is that the nozzles got easily clogged, so a number of printer makers went with replaceable ink reservoir/nozzle assemblies. Similar with laser printers which had separate toner/drum parts, but eventually, those were merged into one unit, so all consumables were in one unit.
I'd just be happy with larger ink cartridges. It is sad how few milli-liters most cartridges have, and when one weighs the cartridge full, before loading, and empty, it drives the point home.
Same here. I got tired of paying $10 per use due to cloggage. I bought a scanner / color laser for regular prints and started sending photos to Walmart. Even then I would try harder to buy a laser printer with less expensive toner cartidges.
I did an analysis once and it seemed the black stylish laser printers cost more per page to refill then the beige office tone ones, generally speaking.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Canon solved this problem ages ago. They use an ink that is melted during the print phase, so it never dries out. They're great for people who print quite infrequently.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Does anyone remember the company that started the whole 'printing is a razorblade business' model? Lexmark.
At the time businesses were laser copy shops or IBM wheelwriter typewriter houses. Epson, HP, and Canon were the dominant forces in ink jet printing in the 90's but IBM's fledgling Lexmark brand has just gone independent in their own buyout, and figured they could turn inkjet printing into a razorblade business where the hardware was commodity but the cartridges were the real money to be had. CPD, the consumer printing division, was tasked with making something IBM historically had never done: consumer inkjets. Cartriges were never cheap, but lexmark took this to a whole other level. by early to mid 2000 you could get a Lexmark laser printer for around 50 dollars that came without cartriges. Those were around 50 a piece as well, and the reigning opinion at the New Circle campus was customers would go for it in hordes...except they didnt, for two reasons.
1. Quality: BPD, the Business Printing Division at lexmark, ran like a well oiled machine because it had to. business customers that relied on IBM printing now had to rely on Lexmark, and processes and methods for manufacturing an entire line of laser and ribbon technologies was sacrosanct. CPD on the other hand was horribly mismanaged, and driven in direct competition with BPD. corners were cut in order to meet an inexorable demand for new releases each year and lower costs. Hardware in the Z series finally became so awful, and so failure prone, the lines name was changed out entirely and CPD was eventually folded into BPD during a large round of firings and layoffs.
2. Internet.: The internet was fast obsoleting printers and while Lexmark had all-in-one laserjets, these were still marketed almost solely to businesses. CPD had plans for a high-speed scanner based on an array of digital cameras, but it came too late. Lexmark building 10, 58, 98, and much of their remaining manufacturing areas were being demolished or leased out.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Well, this made me laugh. The very first color inkjet I ever saw (circa 1987) used refillable reservoirs, and simple squeeze bottles of ink. The printer (Tektronix) was pricey - perhaps $1600 1987 dollars - but cost almost nothing to operate. I think an 8 oz. bottle was six or seven bucks.
BTW, that printer was a wide-carriage, 300 dpi model with a SCSI interface.
Back in the early days of inkjet printing, Epson had their print heads on the printer, and the cartridges only held ink, making the cartridges cheaper than the competition. They also had separate cartridges for each color, while the competition (HP, Lexmark, Canon) combined the color cartridges into a single three cell cartidge and in some cases even included black in a four cell cartridge so you had to replace all at once. I was a light user, and had the same printer for about 3 years, going through two sets of cartridges in that time (maybe one or two more black cartridges). After three years, the printer was still in good condition and printing well, and I gave it to a friend because I was moving overseas. No inkjet printer I have had since has matched up to it. Unused ink clogging up print heads was an artificial problem caused by additives in the ink, it was never a fundamental issue with the technology.