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Comment by zwieback | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: I'm speaking in no way for my employer, who built the laser printer in question.

We've put a generation's worth of engineering into our printers and have a huge supply chain advantage so for any price point you pick it would be very hard to build a competitive laser printer, since printer manufacturers typically take a very large loss on each unit sold.

But that's not really the question here - on my homebrew projects I usually don't try to be cost competitive, it's about the learning, fun and pride in the finished project.

I think the main reason there aren't any open source printers is that the refill/counterfeit ink and toner markets somewhat solve the problem of expensive supplies - you already get better hardware than you can build yourself and you can get cheap non-brand toner/ink.

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The point of an OSS printer isn't just for cheap supplies. I'd love to hook a printer up to an email server so that I could send it PDFs and it would just print. If I had an OSS all-in-one printer, I'd probably hack the scanner to email me PDFs of documents that I scan from the ADF.

There's nothing to stop you trivially scripting either of these. I expect Thunderbird or Mail can run scripts on incoming email, so you could have a printing, archiving, grepping, forwarding email account, if you liked.

I want to run a server on the printer; not run the server on a PC that's hooked up to a printer.

> I'd love to hook a printer up to an email server so that I could send it PDFs and it would just print.

I did that in the 1990s, except I would send it PostScript files. IIRC the printer I used was some Epson dot-matrix fan-fold thingy, but I could have used anything supported by GhostScript.

Are you suggesting companies are losing money in the act of selling printers? I believe they are making a net profit out of every printer sold.

Edit: Look down for an explanation.

No he meant that Printer Companies sell the printer at a loss and then hope that cartridge/toner sales will offset that loss and some. The same way Sony sells PlayStations at a loss, recovering money from game titles and Gillette sells shaving machines at a loss, and earns profits from blades.

No, no, I understood that point of view from the beginning, I just doubt it for the particular example of printers.

I have a few reasons.

Companies would have no incentive on lowering price on laser technology when most people are encouraged to buy inkjet.

I believe there is a rather small cost difference between a $100 and a $2,500 printer. Yes, the $2.5k printer is bigger, but it's just more mechanical parts. I believe most of the cost is in development and the printing technology itself.

Some Printer/Toner combinations have a much lower TCO than others, and the lower TCO does not reflect in a higher then average price for the printer itself (on the contrary).

Companies are pushing forward a lot of models. My Lexmark X203N is in no relevant way better then Lexmark X202N. I believe companies would not waste resources on creating so many compatible printers if they would not make money out of them.

Companies are also pushing forward incompatible models. Toner for your old printer becomes prohibitively priced and you just buy a new printer because of lower TCO. If companies were having a loss from the printers themselves, they would't try to make you buy a new one so much.

I can't comment on our marketing strategy, even if I were in the know I couldn't really do that.

However, it's very clear that the low end models are loss leaders so the worst thing you can do to us is buy a new printer and never buy supplies or buy off-brand ink.

On the higher end models the cost curve changes since lower volume = higher relative price. But those business-targeted printers tend to be compete on TCO, like you're saying, and customers analyze cost per page and support cost, the initial purchase price doesn't really weigh in that much. The $2500 printer will have to last longer, use better materials and have some warranty cost factored in. You're absolutely right that it's not a linear scale-up from your $49 dollar printer at home.

companies often take a loss on a product with the expectation of making it up by selling consumables for that product. google "loss leader" for more info.

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