… and how they make their money

A colleague and I were talking the other day about printer cartridges. Cause in case you’ve not noticed, they’re EXPENSIVE. A full set of toner cartridges in cyan, magenta, yellow and black can often cost more than the printer itself!

I wanna know, can someone please please PLEASE tell me – WHY are printer cartridges SO expensive? What’s so special about printer ink, that it costs the price of a mini-break to Paris to buy a set of four? Is it because they underprice the actual printer units and then try to recoup costs by making the ink cartridge prices astronomical?

Even if you go to places which tout themselves as “cheap”, the price still boggles my mind! Sometimes you can buy generic ink cartridges for most printers but even those are expensive! For our work printer, a Samsung CLP 550n, to buy a set of 4 cartridges costs more than £308!! And that’s almost what we paid for the printer!

Though to be fair, we got the printer 6 months ago and it’s been doing a pretty heavy job, and we’ve not had to replace any cartridges yet…