But between Consumer Reports, Wirecutter, the 18 million review websites, Costco, I feel like such an obviously superior brand and product should have had its reputation widely known by now, like Toyota/Honda.
I think you highly overestimate the amount of research the average person does on a printer purchase. Yes, some people will buy a CR magazine or ask their friends/relatives opinion for a $30k car, but will they do that before buying a $60 printer?
You are right. I remember in particular when the company I was with sold the Panasonic home printer. For a student is was great, but ALL the parts were made of the type of plastic that could not take heat in the long run.
The user manual clearly said no more than 100 pages at a time and less than a 1000 a day, no problem for a student.
Yet time after time someone would come in and want one for office work. We would point them to the better printers that have hard metal parts in all the key areas and would print all day nonstop if needed. Yet time after time they insisted on the cheap home Panasonic printer.
Then a few months later they would show up screaming and yelling that we sold them a piece of junk. Shame that the printer kept track of how many pages it printed. And the manual clearly stated the limits. We never saw the court cases they threaten us with. :)
Yep. Duty cycle, as an engineering concept, is notoriously misunderstood by the general public.
It seems every day that there's some sort of outrage in a blog or article: "Did you know that [large organization] spends $[x] for their [equipment]? Wow, you can buy [consumer version] at Walmart for 1/100th of that price!"
No, outraged taxpayer, your school district isn't wasting money by purchasing a $10,000 copier. Your HP all-in-one can't replace their use-case, despite how you imagine it could.
I am still skeptic, honestly, are some metal gears worth the 20x-10x cost increase? Yes, you can make it more suited for long term use for _some_ cost, but that much? At what point is is actually fleecing customers? Some products surely are just fleecing, but how can you tell? Usually, you can't.
All three of those are machines with fundamentally different functions and capabilities.
I have (long ago) supported consumer grade printers in an enterprise environment. They're so bad as to be unusable. You spend way more than the $10,000 on the nice copier in lost productivity due to poor reliability and additional IT labor required to fix a fleet of inkjets.
With a $10,000 copier, you push out an group policy to install it on everyone's PC and it runs pretty smoothly and can take the load. If you put $100 inkjets on 80 different desks, you end up having to hire another FTE just to manage the cartridge replacements, driver installations, head cleanings, paper jams, etc. And the experience is worse for the end users too. If they need 250 handouts printed in the next 10 minutes, they simply can't do it.
There is obviously a difference between the three, but is it that much? And how much is it really because of underlying technology and how much is it because of artificial market segmenting?
I also take offense with he fact that the 3rd example does not even have a listed price - that is a BIG red flag for the habit of making the customer pay as much as possible.
And the HW cost is justified, the SW cost is NOT, the interface should be simple and clean. Why is it not? No, here vendors are to blame.
Yes, the functional difference between those items is staggering.
The difference in capacity alone between the HP all-in-one and the Xerox copier is literally the same in magnitude (60-80x) as the difference in capacity between a semi truck and a passenger vehicle.
These are different tools that literally do different things. You can't print 250 handouts with that HP all-in-one, and you can't transport 25,000 lbs of freight in a Camry.
A routine use-case for one of those large copiers is something like a person needing to give a 25 page document to 10 people on short notice. Not only is it not practical, it's not even possible with a consumer inkjet. A high end workgroup copier will spit them out in a short moment, already stapled (or bound!) and ready to go. Do you realize how silly it would be to make 10 people with 6-figure salaries stand around waiting for a consumer inkjet, even just one time? You'd be wasting thousands of dollars to save pennies.... and that's assuming you don't consequentially impact your ability to generate revenue. I certainly wouldn't want to be responsible for a b2b sales team relying on a consumer inkjet to submit proposals on time.
> And the HW cost is justified, the SW cost is NOT
These aren't separate itemized costs when you buy a printer. You either get the Xerox printer with the Xerox software, or you get the HP Deskjet with the Deskjet software. You don't get to choose to use the DeskJet Printer with the Kerberos integration from the Xerox software. The teenager working at Best Buy is not going to be able to help you find a copier with software that is HIPAA compliant.
> I also take offense with he fact that the 3rd example does not even have a listed price - that is a BIG red flag for the habit of making the customer pay as much as possible.
It's an example of a ~$10000 copier. The price isn't listed because customers don't buy this type of machine directly through Xerox anyway. These types of purchases are done through formal proposals through Xerox vendors.
Large businesses don't buy things the way you do. They submit RFP/RFQs to vendors.
25 page X 10 is a total of just 250 pages, a desktop Inkjet printer (the kind that uses ink tanks, not cartridges) can handle it no sweat, if a bit slower. Probably takes half an hour to complete.
When you hit 100 pages for 20 people though... ;-)
But I agree with the general gist of your post. Desktop personal printers are simply not built for _regular_ high load.
The DeskJet I linked wouldn't be able to complete that print job, under any circumstance. Besides running out of paper, and overflowing the output tray -- the cartridges would run out before you finished the print job. The newer consumer inkjets with tanks will have enough ink, but likely won't have the tray capacity either. Most consumer printers are made to max-out around the length of a long school paper or a family's tax return.
It isn’t that the metal gears alone are worth 10-20x. It is that if you do the math over a long period of time, use it somewhat often, and include things like your time (at any reasonable labor rate) fixing issues, tracking down replacements, etc. it almost always makes sense to have something that will have fewer issues, last longer, and is designed to be more durable even at greater expense. In things with moving parts, that may mean metal gears and reinforcement in wear areas, but not always.
This of course depends on how frequently you are going to use it, how hard, for what, and how severe or expensive the consequences of it breaking on you unexpectedly are.
‘Commercial’ or ‘pro grade’ is usually more durable and expensive because the market demands it - employees are often harder on equipment than someone who bought it directly, it gets used at a much higher duty cycle, maintenance is often neglected at least as much as a residential user, etc. and the market is willing to pay more because it breaking stops them from making money, or requires them to spend more money on labor getting it fixed.
They also tend to have horrible UX or require specific steps to work, since they know it is being bought for it’s utility not because it is pretty (most of the time), and someone will have to figure out how to use it or get figured after the company is already paid.
They still do get scammed sometimes of course.
The printer equivalent of harbor freight tools has a place if you’re going to toss it in a year anyway due to a move, or need it for a single job and then never again, as long as it isn’t a safety/critical path item anyway.
True, but I would have figured that by now, so many people would have had bad experiences with inkjet printers from HP/epson/canon that they would have sought out that information. Or maybe even retailers would promote it so people are more satisfied with their purchases.
Yup, though those tend to be purchased by large corps in bulk via industrial channels, so the companies still make good money.
Most large corps have done the math and know their TCO all in is much lower (since they have the scale that they need to hire staff and explicitly account for dealing with issues like printer problems).
The printer companies have also done their market research and math, and know how much they can squeeze out of these corps while still having the math clearly make sense for them.
Can you imagine the logistical and end user support nightmare if they gave everyone their own cheap inkjets? Lolz.
It’s bad enough as it is, and per-page the problems are way less frequent.
Reviews and anecdotes can be misleading in some cases. I bought a cheap secondhand Xerox Phaser printer, which has some horrible reviews online, and its previous owner was getting rid of it because of network connection issues. The network connectivity issue was fixed with a firmware update, and I've found it to be an excellent printer - useful documentation, supports every printing protocol under the sun, and the cost of aftermarket drum/toner replacements work out to less than half a cent per page.
If the average consumer can't be bothered to read a review before making a purchase, they're certainly not reading about firmware updates, or buying a secondhand Phaser.
Regular people go to a big box store, look at the items on the shelf, read the marketing material on the box, and fork out $79.99.
Meh. Knowing about “the scam” is not enough to avoid it. People already know ink cartridges are expensive.
To get a good deal you have to calculate TCO which requires understanding consumable prices, yields, and print volumes, and doing the math to figure out all of your options.
Being mad is easy. Being analytical requires work.
I don't think it's that complicated in that case as you just need to know how many pages you are going to print. If the amount is greater than the one provided for in your inkjet starter pack, go buy Brother. Any other option will make you suffer as these cheap laser printers are disposable pieces of junk designed only to sell ink.
> need to know how many pages you are going to print. If the amount is greater than the one provided for in your inkjet starter pack
aka print volumes and cartridge yields, as I said.
In any case, if you're not calculating TCO, then you're not calculating TCO. Brand loyalty is just brand loyalty, even when tech savvy people do it. There are economical and uneconomical printers from nearly any brand depending on use-case.
It's not a bad idea. Prepare a few memes about this and post it to anti-vaxx and conspiracy groups - they will take care of the rest. And they will do it well - making sure the message gets right through to your parents and grandparents.
Plenty of folks still buying GM, Ford, and a hundred other brands based on the market data though right?
If it takes a decade for someone to figure this out, and most people are buying things like this in the late teens to early thirties, then no matter what you’re going to have ~2/3 of the market who hasn’t figured it out.
Also, a lot of folks get drawn like a magnet to new and shiny, or whatever the latest marketing spiel is and don’t even think of the long term impact. Like the vast majority.
