I’m in the market for a new printer and the one that’s looking mighty attractive to me is the one that advertises $5.99 replacement cartridges. Considering that my current printer cartridges are around $40 each that’s a nice savings. I definitely consider cartridge cost when purchasing. Maybe I’m the exception.
I was implying that there is a already a lower cost means of printing than inkjets, which you could have found out by doing some research. And if you didn’t catch on yet, toner is cheaper than ink, and laser printers have lower maintenance costs and longer lives than inkjets.
LOL. This whole thread is all about laser printers. And in your post http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=13851418&postcount=12 you apparently used word “laser” while meaning to say “inkjet”. Your mistake 
ETA: sorry about my use of the word “ink” in some of the posts. I should have said “toner”. Which, while less overpriced than ink for inkjets, still seems to be overpriced.
Well it turns out we’re just confusing each other then. The whole conversation seemed to be about inkjets not lasers, so I took the initial reference to lasers as the mistake.
I don’t think in reference to laser printers this discussion pertains. The market is more competitive for lasers based on the cost per page over the life of the printer, as opposed to the inkjet market which is based on the low initial price. Toner costs less than ink, and I don’t think is really overpriced, but I haven’t been the purchaser for toner for a while, so maybe that;s not true anymore. Do you have any evidence to support the idea that toner is overpriced, or that laser printers could be more economical on a cost-per-page-over-the-life-of-the-printer basis?
your Honor, I have lots of hearsay… I would say my evidence is the existence of toner refills and remanufactured toner cartridges industry. Unless this industry is a giant scam piggybacking off the reputation of the non-OEM ink for inkjets industry, one has to assume that there is some overpricing going on.
Well I’m kind of stuck at the hearsay level on this issue as well, but I find that toner refills are even worse than ink cartridge refills. Remanufactured cartridges is just recycling, and wouldn’t indicate a rip off.
I manage a small office. We have a serious printer/scanner/fax–2-sided printing, 2-sided scanning, etc. We lease it, and I would guess that a lot of small businesses would also lease.
I think that the cheap printer/expensive ink is mostly found in the small personal printer market.
ETA I was too slow.
Second what Reno Nevada said.
The small company I work for has 4 printer / copiers, and one large format color plotter. All leased.
Some historical and technical perspective.
The first laser printer I used was a Canon LBP-10. This was in the early 80’s. It was a large, very expensive (close to $20,000 from memory) machine. It was one of the very first commercially available laser printers. Toner was a wet slurry, and we bought it bottles. Price of toner was about a couple of cents per page, and was close to the cost of the cheapest paper the printer would work with per page. There was at the time a specialty paper that was significantly more expensive, but gave better results. Now of course the specialty paper is the norm.
The next printer, and probably the printer that broke the whole idea of laser printers in the market was an Apple Laserwriter. This was a Canon engine wrapped in an Apple case with an Apple interface and driver board. They cost many thousands of dollars ($7k in the US, about $8k AUS with edu pricing) , and the toner/drum cartridges were about $200 (very hazy memory on this.) These were unitary drum/toner units, and clearly cost quite a bit to make. The idea was that the drum would degrade so much that it needed replacing at about the time the toner ran out. Even back then these toner/drum units had use by dates on them. But it wasn’t long before there was a backyard industry drilling holes in the cartridges and filling them with photocopy toner.
At the same time we had a large evil beast of a photocopier, again cost in the tens of thousands, and capable of an astonishing ability and speed. The input system was filled with about 10 reams of paper, and it could eat that in about an hour. Toner came in large boxes, and there was a hopper on the machine that one engaged the box into and then pulled a tag on the side of the box to open the box, allowing what was about two litres of toner to fall into the hopper.
There is nothing special about toner for photocopiers and laser printers. It only comes in cartridges for small machines. Large machines use so much of it that it comes in bulk. There is really no difference between toner for photocopiers and laser printers. There might be technical tweaks, but it is, at base, the same stuff. Toner for the very high end Xerox Nuvera print engine comes in 9 pound bottles. It won’t be much (if any) different to the toner used in a domestic desktop machine.
would I be correct in assuming that when toner sells in bulk there would be no way to overcharge for it? Or does the OEM claim that the toner they sell in bulk is somehow really superior to the competing 3rd party toner that we could buy in bulk instead?
Also, can we expect the price of toner to drop in the future due to some known trends in the technology, or is it believed to be now as low as it could possibly get given the cost of the substances used in manufacture? I guess from my naive reading of the wikipedia article on toner composition it is not clear why it shouldn’t cost a few dollars per kilogram, presumably making toner cost trivially small compared to the cost of paper.
code_grey has started 139 threads in GQ since the first of the year, most of them about economic issues like this one. For the record, I have posted in all of six of them.
There are a variety of different markets that are being talked about in this thread, so no one answer can be sufficient. “Small businesses” are still a huge and diverse market. Their needs can be met by anything from an inkjet printer to a massive document-maker device that practically thinks for itself. The smaller and cheaper end of the market has the price point sensitivity that I already talked about. The high-end market is almost exclusively served by leasing and long-term contracts. I’m having troubles trying to identify the intermediate market and its needs. The OP needs to identify who this is to get better answers.
Color document printing is becoming almost ubiquitous, though. That raises some interesting use/pricing issues since colors are produced by combining cartridge output. That almost sets up triple the use with each document. B&w laser printers are far more economical per page and the printing speed in far higher for any price point. But that’s not what people want. Glossy color is preferred. You can tell people you have really cheap VHS tapes to sell on really cheap players. But who’s going to buy them?
As per the other thread on costs, 21 pounds of OEM Xerox toner for a Docuprint 128 series is $170, and yields 220,000 pages at 5% coverage. That is $18 per kilo, which is pretty close to what you want. After that, well you are back to economics, not technology. The printer however starts at about quarter of a million. You might guess that this price isn’t subsidised 
My answer is: because the smart, longsighted people will buy the cheap, subsidised printer, then refill it, getting the best of both worlds.
220K pages for $170 adds up to $0.0007 per page - probably trivial compared to paper cost as I suggested as the ideal. This sounds like an interesting data point, thank you.
Now let’s try parsing this. If a printer costs $250K, it probably isn’t just because it uses this toner or that toner. Perhaps the main cost driver is other wonderful features of this printer?
Is this toner very different from toner used for cheaper laser printers and copiers in the first place? Or is it the same basic toner just sold in a different package?
Even if it is different from toner for cheaper printers, could it be used there anyway, warranty be damned? Or do printers really not work with mismatched toner? Let’s say, what is the cheapest printer or copier that allows us to put in toner as powder rather than in a fancy cartridge? Or am I incorrect in assuming that Docuprint does not have a cartridge?
There are many different types of toners. Particle size varies, composition varies, ionic charge can be positive or negative, etc. When you get into colors, different formulation will result in different colors printing on the paper.
If you have a machine that you just open a hatch and pour a bottle of toner in periodically, you’ll need a maintenance contract, or you’ll need to spend a lot of money as internal components fail on a regular basis and have to be replaced.
When you replace a toner cartridge, you’re replacing a number of critical components of the print engine. It’s all contained, so you don’t have to have a technician come out and disassemble the machine to replace these parts.
There are still parts on any printer that require disassembly, but those parts are designed to last a long time.
They do. Right now, I have 4 different razor handles that have been sent to me in the mail as a marketing promo. They’re under the sink. If I ever break the Trac II handle that I have been using for donkey’s years now, I’ll grab one of them.
Plug “HP cartridge refill kits” into Google. There are tons of them.
They do give the handles away. At least Gillette does, don’t know about Schick. Every time Gillette comes out with a new kind of handle, I get a free sample in the mail. I have four different Gillette handles and didn’t pay for any of them except maybe the Trac-II. It’s been so long since that came out that I can’t remember if I bought it or not – I think I did buy it though. Schick doesn’t send them out, or perhaps I’m just not on their mailing list, but I’ve never received any of theirs. So when I (extremely price-conscious blade customer) am buying blades, and I find equally over-priced blades by both companies in the store, which do you think I buy?
This reminds me of the time when it was actually cheaper to buy a new HP inkjet printer (which came with a cartridge) than to buy a replacement cartridge. The difference was only a few dollars, but still…
interesting, thank you. So it sounds like it isn’t toner that is expensive per page, it’s the printer spare parts that keep needing replacement :smack:
Can anybody elaborate on what parts of an industrial laser printer need to be routinely replaced as part of its regular heavy-printing mode of operation?
Yup. And I bought my home printer partly due to the cost of replacement ink cartridges, even though I don’t actually print a lot. When shopping around for printers, the sites often mentioned the cost of replacement cartridges. My printer cost about a tenner more than a Dell printer, which isn’t a lot.
That’s in the UK, but the PCWorld site in the US actually publicises printers that have low ink replacement costs too.
So the answer to the OP is ‘there are machines with easy-to refill cartridges,’ but they’re not necessarily newcomers to the market.
This is from the standpoint of remanufactured toner cartridges (which I’ve been doing for 20 years now):
Specifically in most HP and Canon toner cartridges, the drum, the wiper blade that cleans the drum, the primary charging roller, the magnetic developer roller (the toner has a magnetic component that is attracted to a roller with a stationary magnetic core), the doctor blade that regulates the amount of toner on the magnetic roller. There are also electrical contacts that provide charges to all of these rollers that can wear out or need lubrication or cleaning.
Additionally, the toner cartridge has a waste bin behind the wiper blade that catches all of the unused waste toner that gets wiped off the drum. This container has a limited capacity, which is why you can’t just drill a hole in the toner hopper and fill it up and put a plug in it. Eventually the waste bin will overflow and you’ll have a mess.