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Comment by baltimore | Hacker News Reader

Does this mean that printer prices are about to go up since HP/Brother/Lexmark will no longer be able to make as much money on the ink?

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The writing's on the wall for the whole business anyway.

Lexmark did attempt to move to new markets some years ago due to this. They sold off their consumer/inkjet business and have been buying a bunch of software companies. This attempt to "softpivot" failed miserably. Lexmark was sold to a Chinese business some time ago. Now the software business is being split up and sold.

Perhaps, but how often do you really need to buy a printer? And they're so cheap a mild price increase wouldn't harm much.

The Canon MG2520 (I think there's a newer version now) is a printer/scanner/copier combo that often retails for $20. (And comes with ink.)

Price of ink would fall in exchange, since they have to compete with the off-brand folks.

Hmm, cheapest I found the MG2520 was $30 shipped including ink. Not bad, and still pretty low. I'd expect the minimum for a wireless printer-scanner with ink, shipped, to be $40 or so. $9 shipping, $3 wireless chip, $5 ink, $9 plastic/frame, $5 motors/print heads, that's already $31. (I could be off, of course.) I wonder how much, if anything, Canon loses on the printer, and how many people buy replacement ink.

The $20 price comes and goes. Micro Center was where you could easily pick it up for that regularly. And it's not wireless, FYI.

The new version is the MG2522, which is currently $25 at Micro Center, and a wireless model, the MG3620, is $40.

The ink doesn't cost them $5. It's almost entirely markup.

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