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Why aren’t startups trying to disrupt the printer industry? It’s been a racket for a long time. The only reason I can think of is that gouging customers must b

Why aren’t startups trying to disrupt the printer industry? It’s been a racket for a long time. The only reason I can think of is that gouging customers must be the only real way to make money in that industry.

mepian 4y ago
The margins in the printer industry must be razor-thin, that's why.
- AndrewKemendo 4y ago
  Which is why they do this junk, they are trying to squeeze every penny out
- genocidicbunny 4y ago
  They are, and in this age of paperless everything, less and less useful to the average consumer. Anyone who still does a lot of printing is going to go with something that can better handle the volume, like a laser printer.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  Also, the technology is pretty hairy, lots of patents (enforceable ones, too), and a very demanding customer base. I used to work for a company that made a very nice, but expensive, dye-sub printer. They decided not to continue the line, which disappointed a lot of folks, as the printers actually had some of the best tech, in them, but it wasn't worth it.
  - someweirdperson 4y ago
    > lots of patents Printers from 20 years ago were pretty ok, so patents shouldn't matter much by simply building old-fashioned ones.
    - kmeisthax 4y ago
      I would not be surprised if newer parents shadow the public domain stuff. Patent evergreening is the term of art if you wanna know more.
- mrjin 4y ago
  Oh well, the margin for the printers is mostly negative. For consumables, the margin is actually super high. But you simply cannot get into the market without a popular printer, isn't it?
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    In consumables, they are competing with third-party ink/toner - which is pretty much the reason for most of their nasty behavior. Still, it's their choice to sell hard to replicate printers at cost, and recoup losses on selling much easier to replicate ink/toner. They could do it the other way, but they don't, and I'm not clear exactly why. At this point, I suspect there may be a rule in economics that says roughly: it's better if your customers have to spend less money with you, but more often, than more money but less frequently. I.e. it's better to have them spend $1 every month with you than $12 every year. And I feel it could hold even if you correct for time value of money - it seems the businesses see some value in the frequency of repeat interactions with a customer itself.
colejohnson66 4y ago
Unfortunately, consumers are price sensitive beings even if it doesn’t make sense. We prefer cheaper upfront costs even if it costs more in the long term. For example, a decent toner printer can cost $300 plus $75/cartridge later on. But the $50 printer works “just as well” and has “only” $50 cartridges, so it’s “cheaper” (ignoring pages/cartridge). This leads to a big race-to-the-bottom (like airline seat prices[a]) that makes margins razor-thin. As such, the manufacturers price gouge you on the ink. [a]: Everyone complains about airline seat spacing, but nothing short of regulation will fix it because the margins are too thin to not pack everyone like sardines. If you have more leg room on your planes, you make less per flight, and that could put you in the negative.
- pxx 4y ago
  You know you can buy premium seats on most airlines, right? The revealed customer preference is the cheaper ticket. This is a good thing, not a bad thing. For printers, it's getting hard to even be able to buy something at a premium that will let you refill the toner yourself. But jumping to regulation to fix it is a bit of a leap, especially if your argument relies on the airline ticket thing.
  - blagie 4y ago
    From an economic perspective, regulation is the right thing here. Free markets work well with 100% transparency. That's the assumption in Adam Smith's models. If I buy a printer, and have complete awareness of the pain it will cause me and the long-term costs, and choose to spend $50 over $100, the free market is working fine. If I go into a store and can't buy a printer without spending hours reading web pages (thousands of dollars of my time), and buy an inferior option due to intentional opacity, we need regulation. This is very much the latter and not the former. Airlines have better transparency than printer makers, by far. I might get ripped off on luggage, but I usually know that buying the ticket. I have no way to know a printer will disable itself in 6 months unless I pay HP off. I blame Carly Fiorina for cannibalizing HP. Before her, it was a brand you could trust. After her, it's scam after scam. Before her, it had solid and unique R&D and brilliant people wanted to go there. After her, not a single competent engineer will work there. In the meantime, HP stock has not kept up with inflation. HP was just above $20 in 2007, and now it's just below $30. It has no fundamentals or competitive advantage in any real way.
Gigachad 4y ago
It would be as viable as disrupting the cassette industry. A printer is quickly becoming a thing the average person doesn’t own.
- reaperducer 4y ago
  A printer is quickly becoming a thing the average person doesn’t own. Even the U.S. Postal Service has noticed this. When shipping a package, you can buy the postage online, then use a QR code on your phone to print the paid label at the Post Office and drop off the package at the same time.
  - onetokeoverthe 4y ago
    That is easier than handing a clerk a banknote?
    - macintux 4y ago
      Easier than waiting in line for 20 minutes with who knows what virii circulating.
      - pezezin 4y ago
        "Virii" means "men": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vir#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vir#Latin
        gjm11 4y ago
        Actually, the plural of "vir" is "viri"; Latin "virus" doesn't really have a plural but if it did it might be "via"; "virii" isn't the plural of anything; if it were, it would be of "virius" which I'm pretty sure isn't a Latin word at all. (If there were an adjective "virus" its comparative would have "virius" as one of its forms, but it wouldn't become "virii" in the plural, and in any case I don't think there is any such adjective.)
baumgarn 4y ago
I've had absolutely excellent experience with my Brother black and white laser printer, cost 100 €, with casual printing I only had to replace the toner cartridge once in about 5 years for 25 €
mtmail 4y ago
> Why aren’t startups trying to disrupt the printer industry? Related question "Ask HN: Why are there no open source 2d printers?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786721 with the top comment from somebody who worked at HP printer division (hint: patents)
gorbachev 4y ago
Because the big manufacturers sell a billion printers and trillion units of ink every year and can make enough money due to volume of their sales. A small startup can't and will have to sell their printers and/or ink at a much higher price. Unless someone comes up with a phenomenally cheaper way of manufacturing printers and the ink, there's not a chance a startup will succeed. I don't think that's gonna happen.
- hakfoo 4y ago
  One way to reduce manufacturing costs would be to reduce model churn, so all the tooling is amortized over a longer lifespan. In terms of actual functionality, what's that different between a SOHO laser or home-inkjet printer you buy today, and one made 5 or 10 years ago? Resolution sort of plateaus because beyond 600, maybe 1200dpi, you're seeing diminishing returns. Output speed is capped by dry-time on inkjet (you don't want pages landing in the output tray and smearing the one below) and by power consumption of the fuser on laser. And I suspect that most of the rasterization smarts have been moved to the host, so it's not like there's that much there left to upgrade. The one thing I could say is "maybe duplexers" but they're also established tech, just cheaper and more common. With a sensible design, they could be using the same basic chassis-- mechanism and cartridge designs-- for 10 years or more, and if they had to design a new control board with some new wireless doodad or USB type Q, that's one small part that can be plugged into an established design. I'd be perfectly happy with a new HP Laserjet 5. Hell, I'd probably be happy with a new version of the Panasonic dot-matrix I had in high school, if it had Ethernet connectivity.
- mrjin 4y ago
  There is virtually no way. Most if not all printer on the market are sold at loss, even at massive scale. The possibilities to lower the cost have been exhausted. There is absolutely no chance a startup can get around that hard limit.
mrjin 4y ago
The answer is simple. There is not enough margin. Most if not all printers are sold at loss then the vendors will recoup via consumables.
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
  This one trick Venture Capitalists don't want you to know.
toast0 4y ago
It's a dieing market. How are you going to get VC money to build into a market that is saturated and has negative growth. May as well pitch them on manufacturing floppy disks while you're at it. That's a better market because the only competition is new old stock and used disks. Ink jet is terrible unless you print at least a few times a month, better if you print a couple times a week. Even then, it's not great. Laser is decent, but you have to actually pay for the equipment; once you do, they do scale down to very occasional printing, toner doesn't dry out, etc. I'm sure some of the rubber pieces will fail over time, used or not, that's just how rubber is, but in most climates, that's stil going to take a while.
TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
Funny, when I read "startup disrupting the industry" I translate that to "new ways to screwing customers just like the old ways".
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  It is, but often for a very brief moment, it's the consumers that come up ahead - quality is high for an MVP) and prices are low (or free), as long as the startup is burning VC money as if it was hydrazine in a rocket. Of course the money eventually runs out, and those startups are forced to do some nasty things to the customers, who may now find themselves with no one to jump to, as competitors are long dead. But hey, we're talking about printer market here. The incumbents are the leaders in nasty, underhanded, abusive business practices (as well as planned obsolescence, wastefulness, destroying the environment and the climate...) for the entire tech sector. I just can't imagine a startup making this market worse when it runs out of VC subsidies and has to actually make money. Even if it ends up killing the whole market... well, this is printers we're talking about, it's a dying market already, isn't it? So in this one, rare case, I think it would actually work out great in the end. Of course this is also why no sane investor will fund such startups...
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Only after IPO or acquisition though :-)
frereubu 4y ago
As I understand it, it's also pretty hard to get right: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/why-paper-jams-persist https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/why-paper-jams... / https://archive.vn/SJlAS https://archive.vn/SJlAS “The tolerances are very tight,” Ruiz said. “When you’re moving a box from here to there, if you’re off an inch it’s probably fine. But our images cannot be off by more than eighty-five microns”—a third of a thousandth of an inch—“or else they’ll be fuzzy.”
andrewflnr 4y ago
Classic disruption starts at the low end of the market and moves up. Actually good printers need to start out more expensive. Whatever process might eventually result in commercially viable good printers, it wouldn't be a "disruption", not in the good ol' Innovator's Dilemma sense. :(

mepian 4y ago

The margins in the printer industry must be razor-thin, that's why.

AndrewKemendo 4y ago
Which is why they do this junk, they are trying to squeeze every penny out
genocidicbunny 4y ago
They are, and in this age of paperless everything, less and less useful to the average consumer. Anyone who still does a lot of printing is going to go with something that can better handle the volume, like a laser printer.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
Also, the technology is pretty hairy, lots of patents (enforceable ones, too), and a very demanding customer base. I used to work for a company that made a very nice, but expensive, dye-sub printer. They decided not to continue the line, which disappointed a lot of folks, as the printers actually had some of the best tech, in them, but it wasn't worth it.
- someweirdperson 4y ago
  > lots of patents Printers from 20 years ago were pretty ok, so patents shouldn't matter much by simply building old-fashioned ones.
  - kmeisthax 4y ago
    I would not be surprised if newer parents shadow the public domain stuff. Patent evergreening is the term of art if you wanna know more.
mrjin 4y ago
Oh well, the margin for the printers is mostly negative. For consumables, the margin is actually super high. But you simply cannot get into the market without a popular printer, isn't it?
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  In consumables, they are competing with third-party ink/toner - which is pretty much the reason for most of their nasty behavior. Still, it's their choice to sell hard to replicate printers at cost, and recoup losses on selling much easier to replicate ink/toner. They could do it the other way, but they don't, and I'm not clear exactly why. At this point, I suspect there may be a rule in economics that says roughly: it's better if your customers have to spend less money with you, but more often, than more money but less frequently. I.e. it's better to have them spend $1 every month with you than $12 every year. And I feel it could hold even if you correct for time value of money - it seems the businesses see some value in the frequency of repeat interactions with a customer itself.

colejohnson66 4y ago

Unfortunately, consumers are price sensitive beings even if it doesn’t make sense. We prefer cheaper upfront costs even if it costs more in the long term. For example, a decent toner printer can cost $300 plus $75/cartridge later on. But the $50 printer works “just as well” and has “only” $50 cartridges, so it’s “cheaper” (ignoring pages/cartridge). This leads to a big race-to-the-bottom (like airline seat prices[a]) that makes margins razor-thin. As such, the manufacturers price gouge you on the ink. [a]: Everyone complains about airline seat spacing, but nothing short of regulation will fix it because the margins are too thin to not pack everyone like sardines. If you have more leg room on your planes, you make less per flight, and that could put you in the negative.

pxx 4y ago
You know you can buy premium seats on most airlines, right? The revealed customer preference is the cheaper ticket. This is a good thing, not a bad thing. For printers, it's getting hard to even be able to buy something at a premium that will let you refill the toner yourself. But jumping to regulation to fix it is a bit of a leap, especially if your argument relies on the airline ticket thing.
- blagie 4y ago
  From an economic perspective, regulation is the right thing here. Free markets work well with 100% transparency. That's the assumption in Adam Smith's models. If I buy a printer, and have complete awareness of the pain it will cause me and the long-term costs, and choose to spend $50 over $100, the free market is working fine. If I go into a store and can't buy a printer without spending hours reading web pages (thousands of dollars of my time), and buy an inferior option due to intentional opacity, we need regulation. This is very much the latter and not the former. Airlines have better transparency than printer makers, by far. I might get ripped off on luggage, but I usually know that buying the ticket. I have no way to know a printer will disable itself in 6 months unless I pay HP off. I blame Carly Fiorina for cannibalizing HP. Before her, it was a brand you could trust. After her, it's scam after scam. Before her, it had solid and unique R&D and brilliant people wanted to go there. After her, not a single competent engineer will work there. In the meantime, HP stock has not kept up with inflation. HP was just above $20 in 2007, and now it's just below $30. It has no fundamentals or competitive advantage in any real way.

Gigachad 4y ago

It would be as viable as disrupting the cassette industry. A printer is quickly becoming a thing the average person doesn’t own.

reaperducer 4y ago
A printer is quickly becoming a thing the average person doesn’t own. Even the U.S. Postal Service has noticed this. When shipping a package, you can buy the postage online, then use a QR code on your phone to print the paid label at the Post Office and drop off the package at the same time.
- onetokeoverthe 4y ago
  That is easier than handing a clerk a banknote?
  - macintux 4y ago
    Easier than waiting in line for 20 minutes with who knows what virii circulating.
    - pezezin 4y ago
      "Virii" means "men": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vir#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vir#Latin
      - gjm11 4y ago
        Actually, the plural of "vir" is "viri"; Latin "virus" doesn't really have a plural but if it did it might be "via"; "virii" isn't the plural of anything; if it were, it would be of "virius" which I'm pretty sure isn't a Latin word at all. (If there were an adjective "virus" its comparative would have "virius" as one of its forms, but it wouldn't become "virii" in the plural, and in any case I don't think there is any such adjective.)

baumgarn 4y ago

I've had absolutely excellent experience with my Brother black and white laser printer, cost 100 €, with casual printing I only had to replace the toner cartridge once in about 5 years for 25 €

mtmail 4y ago

> Why aren’t startups trying to disrupt the printer industry? Related question "Ask HN: Why are there no open source 2d printers?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786721 with the top comment from somebody who worked at HP printer division (hint: patents)

gorbachev 4y ago

Because the big manufacturers sell a billion printers and trillion units of ink every year and can make enough money due to volume of their sales. A small startup can't and will have to sell their printers and/or ink at a much higher price. Unless someone comes up with a phenomenally cheaper way of manufacturing printers and the ink, there's not a chance a startup will succeed. I don't think that's gonna happen.

hakfoo 4y ago
One way to reduce manufacturing costs would be to reduce model churn, so all the tooling is amortized over a longer lifespan. In terms of actual functionality, what's that different between a SOHO laser or home-inkjet printer you buy today, and one made 5 or 10 years ago? Resolution sort of plateaus because beyond 600, maybe 1200dpi, you're seeing diminishing returns. Output speed is capped by dry-time on inkjet (you don't want pages landing in the output tray and smearing the one below) and by power consumption of the fuser on laser. And I suspect that most of the rasterization smarts have been moved to the host, so it's not like there's that much there left to upgrade. The one thing I could say is "maybe duplexers" but they're also established tech, just cheaper and more common. With a sensible design, they could be using the same basic chassis-- mechanism and cartridge designs-- for 10 years or more, and if they had to design a new control board with some new wireless doodad or USB type Q, that's one small part that can be plugged into an established design. I'd be perfectly happy with a new HP Laserjet 5. Hell, I'd probably be happy with a new version of the Panasonic dot-matrix I had in high school, if it had Ethernet connectivity.
mrjin 4y ago
There is virtually no way. Most if not all printer on the market are sold at loss, even at massive scale. The possibilities to lower the cost have been exhausted. There is absolutely no chance a startup can get around that hard limit.

mrjin 4y ago

The answer is simple. There is not enough margin. Most if not all printers are sold at loss then the vendors will recoup via consumables.

TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
This one trick Venture Capitalists don't want you to know.

toast0 4y ago

It's a dieing market. How are you going to get VC money to build into a market that is saturated and has negative growth. May as well pitch them on manufacturing floppy disks while you're at it. That's a better market because the only competition is new old stock and used disks. Ink jet is terrible unless you print at least a few times a month, better if you print a couple times a week. Even then, it's not great. Laser is decent, but you have to actually pay for the equipment; once you do, they do scale down to very occasional printing, toner doesn't dry out, etc. I'm sure some of the rubber pieces will fail over time, used or not, that's just how rubber is, but in most climates, that's stil going to take a while.

TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago

Funny, when I read "startup disrupting the industry" I translate that to "new ways to screwing customers just like the old ways".

TeMPOraL 4y ago
It is, but often for a very brief moment, it's the consumers that come up ahead - quality is high for an MVP) and prices are low (or free), as long as the startup is burning VC money as if it was hydrazine in a rocket. Of course the money eventually runs out, and those startups are forced to do some nasty things to the customers, who may now find themselves with no one to jump to, as competitors are long dead. But hey, we're talking about printer market here. The incumbents are the leaders in nasty, underhanded, abusive business practices (as well as planned obsolescence, wastefulness, destroying the environment and the climate...) for the entire tech sector. I just can't imagine a startup making this market worse when it runs out of VC subsidies and has to actually make money. Even if it ends up killing the whole market... well, this is printers we're talking about, it's a dying market already, isn't it? So in this one, rare case, I think it would actually work out great in the end. Of course this is also why no sane investor will fund such startups...
quickthrower2 4y ago
Only after IPO or acquisition though :-)

frereubu 4y ago

As I understand it, it's also pretty hard to get right: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/why-paper-jams-persist https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/why-paper-jams... / https://archive.vn/SJlAS https://archive.vn/SJlAS “The tolerances are very tight,” Ruiz said. “When you’re moving a box from here to there, if you’re off an inch it’s probably fine. But our images cannot be off by more than eighty-five microns”—a third of a thousandth of an inch—“or else they’ll be fuzzy.”

andrewflnr 4y ago

Classic disruption starts at the low end of the market and moves up. Actually good printers need to start out more expensive. Whatever process might eventually result in commercially viable good printers, it wouldn't be a "disruption", not in the good ol' Innovator's Dilemma sense. :(