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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 start

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.

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.