3 ms·

>There is no free lunch--if you make it illegal to sell cheap, restricted printers, manufacturers won't just sell unrestricted printers for the same price. They

>There is no free lunch--if you make it illegal to sell cheap, restricted printers, manufacturers won't just sell unrestricted printers for the same price. They'll sell better printers for more money, and price out the bottom of the market. The EFF isn't just complaining about selling "cheap, restricted printers" though. Epson chose to sell a cheap unrestricted printers, people bought them knowing they were unrestricted, and then Epson restricted them after sale. It'd be like if Tesla had a lower cost car and thought they could make up some costs by charging you a large premium at their Superchargers on road trips. You bought the car knowing that topping it up in your garage overnight was enough for your usual commute. Then a year later they decide they aren't making enough money at the chargers because people haven't been using them. Now they push out a "Security Update" that makes your car refuse to charge anywhere but the Supercharger, which happens to cost 500x the going rate of electricity. Somehow I don't think people would be OK with that.

rayiner 8y ago
I was addressing only this part of OP's statement: > the letter also notes the practice of disallowing third party cartridges in general is nefarious.
- wlesieutre 8y ago
  Gotcha. I have mixed feelings about that; yes it's nice that you can walk into Best Buy and get a printer for $20, but it only comes with 10 pages worth of ink. Makes you wonder what percent of those end up in a dumpster when the owner finds out that a real ink cartridge will cost several times what the printer did. Maybe printer boxes should be required to list the MSRP and page capacity of compatible ink cartridges on the box so you have some idea of what you're getting into. As is, any printer company that tries to avoid this race to the bottom on up-front cost ends up pricing themselves out of the market because it isn't apparent that the running costs are lower.

rayiner 8y ago

I was addressing only this part of OP's statement: > the letter also notes the practice of disallowing third party cartridges in general is nefarious.

wlesieutre 8y ago
Gotcha. I have mixed feelings about that; yes it's nice that you can walk into Best Buy and get a printer for $20, but it only comes with 10 pages worth of ink. Makes you wonder what percent of those end up in a dumpster when the owner finds out that a real ink cartridge will cost several times what the printer did. Maybe printer boxes should be required to list the MSRP and page capacity of compatible ink cartridges on the box so you have some idea of what you're getting into. As is, any printer company that tries to avoid this race to the bottom on up-front cost ends up pricing themselves out of the market because it isn't apparent that the running costs are lower.