Why are inkjet printer ink replacement rackets tolerated by mankind?

Printer ink is nothing but greed, and they know people will pay so they charge what they can legally get away with.
Seems stupid that most times replacement cartridges cost more than the damn printer.
That’s why we simply went to a black and white laser printer,and never looked back, and for simple documents works perfect.
And we never worry about the ink drying out,even if we go months between printing something.

Laser printer is the best.. inkjet is pain in the a*s!!

Because there are after market suppliers that offer ink (cartridges) that are sometimes more than half price of the original manufacturers’..?
But yeah, sometimes I wonder if investing in ink, rather than in gold, is a good idea…

Lol. Mine doesn’t stop printing like that. It just will say low ink, and I can click ok and it keeps going.

Inkjet printer manufacturers are definitely the trolls of consumer electronics. I’m convinced the only reason my printer spends 5 minutes moving the print head back and forth before printing out something is to screw with me. 90% of murderous rage in the population can be traced back to interactions with inkjet printers.

One idea, that unfortunately contributes to waste, is instead of buying a set of cartidges, just buy a new printer on sale. You get all the ink catridges for a lot less. You can get an on-sale printer for $45, while replacement ink might be $70 or more.

I don’t allow myself to become enraged over something as simple as ink in my printer. I save my rage for important things in my life!!! Before buying my current printer, I kept an eye on my ink usage & when any particular color began to get low, I’d make a point of buying a spare so I would have it when needed.

With my current printer, I pay a monthly fee of $3.00 & HP monitors my cartridge usage & automatically mails me a cartridge when they can see that the current cartridges are getting low. So, it cost me $36/year to always have the needed cartridge available. I don’t print a whole lot so I get a really good price on my particular usage. They have different prices for different levels of printing. Might not work for everybody but it has worked great for me!!!

And which marketing/lobbying tactic got every school in the United States, from the lower grades through university level, to stop using blackboards and, instead, install whiteboards? Blackboards used inexpensive chalk and generated nothing more than dust. Whiteboards needs special, plastic markers that run out of ink daily and need to be replaced; all of those empty tubes end up in landfills or floating in oceans.

Capitalism at it’s finest.^^^

I used to have one of those printers that would refuse to print anything if one of the inks was low, even if I wanted to print in black and white. Piece of shit. I gave that one the Office Space treatment.

I now have an HP printer that will print no matter what the ink level, but it still seems to guzzle ink. I barely print more than a few pages a month and yet it seemed that the black ink was all out in just a few months. Not to mention the numerous issues I’ve had with connecting it to my computer.

Printers are the worst. I can’t believe the technology still sucks as much now as it did years ago.

They’ve got us by the gonads.

I am laughing so hard at your details!!

Yeah, printing any more, especially printing in color, is as precious as old 35 mm film was. You don’t do it recklessly.

My favorite is my printer is a scanner/printer thing. If one of the ink cartridges goes out the scanner refuses to work. 99% of what I do is scanning.

The work around is to use The Gimp to scan. That ignores the blocking scanning thing.

Maybe you could have a small amount of reusable ink stored in each page of printer paper. Like a reusable etch – a – sketch

Yeah, not only is my printer guzzling ink and refusing to print black & white unless all the color modules are full enough, it also seems like it must be using all the color inks to make black ink to print black? I rarely print things in color, so why else would I be burning through the color modules?

@johnpowell Wow! That is priceless! “No ink – can’t SCAN!” Wow…

@Zaku Check your settings on the printer & see IF it’s set to print in “draft”. The draft setting uses considerably less ink than the other settings!!!

@LadyMarissa Thanks. I will, and also see if I can figure out a way to get it to use black ink for non-color printing.