this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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Why isn't there any competition in the printer space except for Brother? Are printers really that hard to make?
Epson?
This. Ecotank printers are great and even let you print non-standard inks like photo-resist.
Wow, I've never heard of them.
I have an ET-8550 that we bought for printing family photos to scrapbook. It eats ink from bottles instead of cartridges and is happily printing anything I can give it for 2 years now. I print 5-10 coloured pages every 1–2 weeks for a hobby, plus two full photo albums came out of it, and we're still on the first set of ink bottles.
I don't need any wonky software either, it's on the WLAN and Windows just automatically notices it, installs drivers and prints from the OS prompt. Maybe my better half uses their software for the photo printing, IDK.
Well their Ecotank printers are pretty popular and in every Walmart.
Got one (WF-2810) at our favorite online retailer monopoly and am pretty happy. The software is ugly and in some places unintuitive but works well, and it allows off-brand inks but "warns" you about them. It also prints relatively slowly (compared to printers of other people) but it really isn't bad and I've had the current cartridges in for the past two years and they still work perfectly after a quick (automatic) refresh. The scanner is ridiculously slow though - I don't mind but I can imagine it annoying some.
Can recommend if you don't print a lot or something!
I'm pretty sure your scanner is scanning at a ridiculously high DPI or something, had this problem with some Epsons and it could be fixed in the software, there are two softwares too, one is scan smart and one is scan 2
Ohhh, really interesting! I'll check that out, thank you very much!
The problem is profit.
They're selling you the printers at a pretty substantial loss and are making their money back on the consumables.
In a market where people aren't printing very much this turns out to be a lousy business plan.
School's going full digital and businesses going work from home has pushed everyone to stop using paper for everything.
To compete with the current printer manufacturers you'd need to be able to make a printer for about the same price, which means they too would have to make their money back on consumables but the money just isn't there.
I honestly think this is probably the beginning of the end for HP's line of consumer printers. It could also possibly be the end of their line of commercial multifunction printers. They're going to have to give up and walk away from those sectors. If it turns out you don't need to print for school and you don't need to put for work and you don't need to print passes for events, what are we printing for at this point to sign a document and send it back? The market's drying up and honestly no one new wants in
Canon, Epson, Xerox?
Lexmark
I'm really surprised that someone didn't jump into this space to basically make "the final printer you'll ever want to buy for home/office use".
Sell the printer to make a small profit, support refillable ink, and you'll basically capture 90% of the market. It's not a billion dollar idea, but for a small company it could make millions, even as a Kickstarter type thing between some hardware and device software folks.
Canon? I have one and it was supposedly the cheapest per page in the long run.
cannon and brother are both decent printer companies
Apparently it took so much time and effort to make high DPI print nozzles that it's much more attractive for a company to go and make a 3d printer rather than battle it out in a dying market that's remained a stable distribution of HP, Brother and Epson (and partially Canon).
What are you guys printing?
Crafts projects, often papercraft, handouts for presentations, custom stickers, often shipping labels, etc