"Give 'em the razors, sell 'em the blades." - King Gillette
No joke. A 6-pack of blades in Perth ran me $50. Ridiculous. I bought the handle for maybe $10.
Obviously, HP Thinks We Are Stupid
71–80 of 99 posts
Re: Obviously, HP Thinks We Are Stupid
#72One of the best investments that I made about 7 years ago was to buy a black and white laser printer for home: http://www.okidata.com/mkt/downloads/B4250_B4350Series.pdf I paid about €250 for it (which then was thousands of pages (I'd guesstimate 5000 pages), it still hasn't run out of its initial toner cartridge, and the prices I've seen for when it does are about €25. With printers, as with much in the electronics…
Brother makes some nice cheap laser printers. I picked up one with wifi for 100 USD two or three years ago
I'll second that. I have a Brother HL-4040CN. I use it for cardstock modeling (www.worldworksgames.com). As in, printing lots of full, dense pages in vivid color.
Several hundred pages in, I'm still on the original cartridges.
Re: Obviously, HP Thinks We Are Stupid
#73"Give 'em the razors, sell 'em the blades." - King Gillette
Y'know, I use a Gillette Fusion. The blades cost about four dollars each and consist of six tiny wedges of high-strength steel sharpened to sub-micron precision and coated with a layer of tetrahedral amorphous carbon.
The "razor" cost ten dollars and is basically a plastic stick.
I'm not sure the old razor/blade analogy applies to razors and blades any more. Maybe it should be the old printer/cartridge analogy nowadays.
Re: Obviously, HP Thinks We Are Stupid
#74"Give 'em the razors, sell 'em the blades." - King Gillette
No joke. A 6-pack of blades in Perth ran me $50. Ridiculous. I bought the handle for maybe $10.
I was doing that for a long time. But switching to the rotary electric shaver was a great decision. It works perfectly and you don't need to change the heads for months / years.
Re: Obviously, HP Thinks We Are Stupid
#75I see not a whole lot has changed! About 14 years ago I wrote the control software for a machine that used high performance inkjet heads and fast-drying ink. Inkjets were fairly new then and we went to a LOT of trouble (working directly with Canon) to get good print quality, and to keep the heads from clogging up with ink & paper dust while still making it easy for the user to replace ink cartridges. We even had to d…
> after that experience, I never trusted the reliability of inkjets
To me, that happened with almost every technology I touched. The more I work with VoIP, the more amazed I am that it works at all with our networks. When I was doing web development, seeing some pages made me think about the crazy data flow they have to handle. etc.
Sometimes, it's probably best not to know and just enjoy...
Re: Obviously, HP Thinks We Are Stupid
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are two halves to price: supply and demand. The investment is a sunk cost. Competition in an efficient market should reduce the price to the marginal cost of production. And if the marginal cost of production was genuinely so high, why would printer manufacturers be putting in all kinds of validation electronics? Why not leave it at caveat emptor?
The investment required keeps the supply relatively low. It's not fair to call it a sunk cost when it's an annual $1b. Keeping up with the state of the art in printers (note the disparity in quality even over the last few years) is a significant ongoing expense. And the reason not to leave it caveat emptor is obvious: your brand suffers. When someone's printer goes bad they don't blame the manufacturer of the ink, th…
Are you saying that producing inks of the same quality as (say) 2006 requires a continual investment of $1B per year? Or that the quality of printing in 2006 was so bad that it would be completely unacceptable by the mass of consumers today? I don't find either of these even remotely credible.
As to brand: I don't buy it, not for a moment. In fact, I have difficulty believing that you're serious. Anyone can go online now and buy generic inks for their printer if they care to look, for less cost (often with hacked refurbished containers). When this generic ink gets worse results than the original stock ink (which came with the printer), do you believe that people will blame the printer? Seriously?
As to iPad / iPhone crashing, that wouldn't be very new, would it? Safari on my iPod Touch crashed (silently, to the home screen) maybe 8 times a day back when I still used it. My iPod Nano regularly crashes (hard lock, needs resetting) after adding and removing mp3s in iTunes, when playback was paused at the time of device insertion on an mp3 that was removed. My estimation of the quality of Apple software, from my experience, is not high. But this is all besides the point.
Re: Obviously, HP Thinks We Are Stupid
#77Sigh, printers. At my office, we have about 40 dell printers...all complete with little smart card readers on the inside that make sure the toner that we're using is "genuine". The problem? Even if we are using toners directly from dell, they will get errors that say "Invalid Cartridge", meaning we have to take it out, shake it around, sacrifice something to michael dell, and hope it works when we put it back in. Pri…
You forgot about scanners.
The most economical choice today is the combination printer/scanner/fax machine. Three frustrations in one!
Re: Obviously, HP Thinks We Are Stupid
#78People are stupid. That's been empirically proven, and the fact continues to demonstrate itself on a regular basis. This has more to do with the definition of 'stupid' being quite unrelenting w.r.t. to human nature.
That said, a comment to the original article, purportedly from an HP insider, described Carly Fiorina's zeal over profiting from HP's inkjet division, and how it caused some medical research being done by that division (cancer research?) to be axed because of insufficient profit potential.
The expectation that medical research should be profitable is an entirely different kind of stupid.
Re: Obviously, HP Thinks We Are Stupid
#79For me, it's Linux support, ease of use, features, and economy. When my little Samsung laser printer finally died, I bought an HP inkjet (OfficeJet Pro 8000 Wireless) for a bit over $100. I got home and took off all the tape, stuck in the large individual-color, separate-from-print-head ink tanks, plugged it in to power and my network, and printed the network settings page (which I turned out not to need). Then click…
For me, the big one is paper handling. Every non-HP printer I've owned mangled paper; no HP printer ever has.
Re: Obviously, HP Thinks We Are Stupid
#80"Give 'em the razors, sell 'em the blades." - King Gillette
Y'know, I use a Gillette Fusion. The blades cost about four dollars each and consist of six tiny wedges of high-strength steel sharpened to sub-micron precision and coated with a layer of tetrahedral amorphous carbon. The "razor" cost ten dollars and is basically a plastic stick. I'm not sure the old razor/blade analogy applies to razors and blades any more. Maybe it should be the old printer/cartridge analogy nowada…
The blades cost about four dollars each and consist of six tiny wedges of high-strength steel sharpened to sub-micron precision and coated with a layer of tetrahedral amorphous carbon.
However, double edged razor blades with the exact same characteristics (also made by Gillette, btw) go for less than 20 cents a piece.