I find that the razor example is really a poor one. The blades on a razor are by far the most complex and hardest to manufacture part of the razor. The free part is just a cheap plastic stick that is made to low tolerances. The blades on the other hand are very specific types of steel made extremely sharp and mounted at tight tolerances to each other. This is in contrast with the printer example where the ink is much less expensive than the printer to manufacture.
I don’t do a lot of printing so I find laser printers to be a far better value than ink jet printers. I have gone through several inkjet printers that the ink dries out and clogs the head rendering the printer useless. I have had a laser printer for years and it works great. I have yet to need to replace the toner cartridge.
I have a laser printer somewhat similar to this one (it’s a many years older version). I paid about $150 for it. It looks like the newer ones are even cheaper. I’ve had it for about five years, and I’ve had to replace the toner twice, and I print a fair amount (though I do have two printers, so not all of the load goes to this one). No, it’s not a top of the line printer, but it does a great job for household and home office tasks. Laser printers don’t have to be dramatically more expensive than inkjets.
ETA: This is the exact model I have. I didn’t do an extensive comparison to make sure the one I linked above is comparable, but it looks like it occupies a similar spot in the product lineup…
That issue is what originally inspired me to replace my otherwise perfect DeskJet. Damned print heads kept clogging up. My color cost per page was sometimes $60 each, and so my intention was to move to laser. My current DeskJet Pro supposedly is immune to this. I took it on faith; I’ll let you all know in about a year when I go on the road and come back.
Most inkjets keep their nozzles clear by squirting ink through them - either as part of the preparation process before printing a page, or just routinely on some kind of timed basis.
I’ve seen printers that just spontaneously started running the cleaning cycle without any external provocation - although of course they can’t do it if they’re turned off, so the nozzles can still get clogged.
This can result in a quite astonishing amount of waste ink pooled in various traps and reservoirs in the machine - and depending on the pattern of print usage, can consume a considerable portion of the total ink installed. I wrote an article about it here.
The printer featured is not in any way atypical - I’ve pulled dozens of them apart for their motors (when they became unusable because of full ink reservoirs or clogged jets) - and they were all pretty much this bad, or worse.
In that particular case, the printer had decided not to work any more - there’s no sensor to say that the waste ink reservoir is full, it counts the number of drops it squirts in there and when that clicks past some magic number, refuses to print any more.
I think the waste ink counter is resettable (although not officially), and the reservoir is technically emptyable, but there’s no way I’d have been able to put everything back in the right place after dismantling it to the point where I could access the reservoir.
I think there are some people out there who have hacked their printers by drilling holes in the side to be able to drain off the waste ink.
You know, I really, really want to like the ESP printers simply because of their cheap ink but the terriblereviews have always prevented me from getting one. Do you like yours? (assuming you meant you had an ESP and not a Easyshare)
Yeah, I have the ESP-3 All-in-One. I’ve been very happy with it so far, though I will confess I’m not a super heavy printer. I’ll take a look at the reviews to see how they compare to my experience.