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What's really at stake here is is the business model of selling printers below cost and making profit on the cartridges. Epson was the first major printer manu

• emodendroket 11y ago
  The article is talking about toner; is that really also true for laser printers?
  • jackgavigan 11y ago
    Well, if it wasn't, I doubt Lexmark would care whether Impression refilled its tone cartridges...
  • dikaiosune 11y ago
    Seems to be. Maybe I'm buying cheap printers, but the last two I've bought had anemic toner cartridges along with a catalog and order form for direct sale of the cartridges that were actually full. Notably the manufacturer toner cartridges were close to the price of the printer itself, while the third-party knockoffs on Amazon were a fraction of the price. I'm no industry insider, but their packaging behavior says to me that their real money is in getting you to buy their toner, and the stark price difference between first and third party replacements indicates the likely markups on the first party option.
    • jsprogrammer 11y ago
      There is MRR in ink, not so much in printers. If you naively optimize for MRR, your business will operate around extracting profit from ink selling schemes, not printer selling schemes.
  • fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
    Definitely
• strictnein 11y ago
  Didn't know about the EcoTank series. My next printer (if I ever need to buy another one) will be one of those.
• wyldfire 11y ago
  > ditch that business model I think it's great that they're branching out but they didn't stop production on their other models, right? If business doesn't pan out for EcoTank, they won't keep it around.