14 Aug 2006
I'd Rather be Chasing Chickens

but instead I'm chasing printers: our Canon i950 printer died this morning, with a "bad printhead". The replacement printhead costs $130. The HP 6890 I bought today to replace the whole printer cost me $134. But wait ...

I have over $60 worth of Canon ink carts installed in the now dead printer, all but one of them nearly brand new. Of course, HP uses their own ink cart, and the ones that came with the printer were "samples". So add $58 to the tally for the new printer (buying real ink carts), and add $60 to my loss on the old one.

Companies go to great pains to deny planning obsolescence into their products. Then they pull shit like this. Same thing happened to me three years ago with an Epson printer which is why I bought the Canon then. Now I've got the HP. I'm sure I'll run out of printer manufacturers someday, but in the meantime, I'm not going to do business with any company that treats me like this. If the same consumables aren't available when this new HP dies, then lookout Lexmark, here I come!

18:31 /Home | 7 comments | permanent link