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Comment by six2seven | Hacker News Reader

You see, around ~10 years ago I could just buy online a (even non-genuine) refill kit and just refill the ink in the cartridges by myself. And I could use the printer whenever I wanted. If I run out of the ink, I would just buy the ink refill set which costed around 5-6€. Think that such kit could be re-used to fill multiple carriages and last many months. If I did not use the printer for 2 months, I would not need to pay any fee for just having a printer in idle state. I "owned" the printer.

Nowadays, you seem not to even "own" the printer nor the cartridges. Everything becomes a service where you should be in the loop continuously paying for it. And we are consciously supporting such economy.

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Epson advertises a tank based injet on the TV. The ads star Shaq!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1GWHfg2P5Y

HP has a subscription printer, there's no printer apocalypse.

I worked at Staples in university when the EcoTank printers first started coming to market. There was an Epson rep that came in and offered to print anything for anyone using the top-of-the-line model, as a demonstration of the quality and longevity of the ink and tanks, as well as promoting the cost benefits over even a cheap laser printer.

Needless to say, most of us employees (who were students at the same university) had everything printed. Textbooks, assignments, posters. Thousands upon thousands of pages got printed on those Saturdays, some days you'd swear it just went continuously from the minute we opened to well after we closed. With my family having owned nothing but lasers, I was incredibly impressed by it. Being able to refill the tanks while the printer was going was just incredible, leading to zero downtime or the suffering quality you start to see when cartridges run low.

For the low volume of printing I personally do, I'll stick to laser, but for those who do a lot of colour printing and want the high-quality inkjet offers, I'd go as far to say there's no competiton.

Haha - I've seen that one!

The best printer-related job for Shaq would seem to be crushing them in his giant hands. Can you picture him wearing bi-focals, trying to type on a standard keyboard with those frying pans?

Sort of. Epson has tanks but charges for a “maintenance box” replacement that fills up with waste ink.

Can you empty that box yourself and reuse it? Just asking because I was pleasantly surprised when I found out I could do this for a similar box in our office copy machine (this one catching waste toner particles) when the machine from one moment to the next stopped working without prior warning and wanted a fresh box.

I'm sure many do this. I honestly don't own a printer and make use of a nearby library instead.

some printers now use an "ink pad": "Caution: Power Cleaning may cause the ink pads to reach their capacity sooner. When an ink pad reaches the end of its service life, the product stops printing and you must contact Epson for support."

https://files.support.epson.com/docid/cpd5/cpd56719.pdf

It was his choice. He could either buy a regular cartridge or a subscription cartridge for the same printer.

Yup. I bought my mother a new printer a year or two back. She wanted Instant Ink, I explained how it would work but I was pretty cynical, nevertheless she was immediately attracted. "Are you sure?" I asked, "It makes no real difference to me which mid-range inkjet printer I buy you and some of these are reviewed as being cheap to run with large ink tanks you can re-fill yourself". She was insistent that HP's Instant Ink business model fitted her needs. I installed the printer & set up Instant Ink before I left.

A year later she reports everything working out just how she wanted and no regrets. She's on one of the middle tiers so it's not an inconsiderable amount of money but she prints quite a lot of stuff, she does craft projects with local kids in various organisations and does dress making, these days mostly for dolls because we (her kids) grew up - and it all ends up using paper patterns. She enjoys the small puzzle of managing the page budget to avoid excess fees, and she very much likes never finding that it's low on ink unexpectedly without a spare cartridge ready to go because of course HP ensures that frustration won't happen.

Yes. I do this too with ink from Precision Colors for photo printing. The cost per page is a fraction of ordering new, original carts. They even include a chip to reset the "low ink" flag built in to the cart that is suppose to prevent you from refilling.

[0] http://precisioncolors.com/

This is still possible today. Costco has an ink refill service [1], which I assume should support all printers they sell.

[1]: https://costcoinkjetrefill.com/

Its not a perfect match as the inkjet refills are provided by another company (called RIS) but it does cover a lot of printers and has the ability to re-chip many cartridges that are protected from reuse that way

Same as with running water. Thankfully I don't have to dig my own well anymore, even worse: in some countries I'm not even allowed to, and I have to pay for the service!

This model is there for a very long time, and makes our lives much easier. And if it doesn't lock you in, is offered for quite cheap (we are talking about $3-5 per month, or even the free tier) I don't see the problem with it. As long as you have the freedom of choice (to switch vendors, or do it yourself), I don't see the problem.

Water supply is a natural monopoly which is pretty different straight away. The externalities are really nasty (say you extract water under your property, the water doesn't care about property lines so water will flow from other land and potentially cause subsidence, a big cost to somebody else) and water is actually part of a global cycle so while one person can get away with just taking their water from a well and dumping effluent into the lake if a million people do that a bunch of them are going to die.

And as a result of all this it's heavily regulated unlike printer ink.

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