Printer Mfgs Lose Initially?

[Nehmo Sergheyev]

Is it true that printer manufacturers actually _lose_ money when they
sell an ink jet printer? But that they recoup when they later sell the
ink?

 

[MCheu]

Is it true that printer manufacturers actually _lose_ money when they
sell an ink jet printer? But that they recoup when they later sell the
ink?

At the low end, quite probably. The higher end printers, I'm not so
sure, but the manufacturers definitely make more money on the inks
than the printers. Here's a fairly rediculous example. There's a
printer that's being advertised as a back to school special for $29
Cdn. Based on its specs, it uses a single colour cartridge, and mixes
the colours to create a black for general printing. So right there,
you know you're going to have a pretty high burn rate for inks (3x as
much ink as with a printer that has a dedicated black cartridge). The
colour cartridges for that printer cost $34 Cdn. Admittedly, that
printer costs $40Cdn regular price, but you can see how nuts the
pricing is.

The more you pay for your inkjet printer, cheaper it seems the ink
replacements become, and the less waste there is in the ink usage.
However, it still won't take long before you've spent more on ink than
on the original printer.

As with anything else that requires consumables, you have to expect
that eventually, the amount you spend on consumables will exceed the
initial price of the equipment.

 

[Impmon]

Is it true that printer manufacturers actually _lose_ money when they
sell an ink jet printer? But that they recoup when they later sell the
ink?

It's a common practice to sell an item like printer cheap since it's
generally bought once and used for a few years. But ink cart are
regularly bought and that's where the real money is.

Imagine for a minute a typical printer has a raw cost of $80 but the
mfg sells them for $50 at a loss of $30. But ink cart have a raw cost
of $15 and they sell them at $30, that's $15 profit each. Now assume
you go though about 20 or so before you retire it, that's $300 profit
per printer in the end.

Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft sell their game console the same way,
cheaper than raw cost but most of the profit is from the games.