It might not seem important, but if you look carefully at the Epson SX215 printer you’ll see the problems facing the printer companies. It’s not obvious at first, just seems a bargain all in one printer, gets loads of decent reviews and a fraction of the cost you’d have paid for something like this a few years ago.

Epson Stylus SX215

The reason that Epson are selling these printers at such a low price is because their business model depends on it.     In the UK its currently about £50, which is very cheap in my opinion but no great surprise.

You see Epson and all the major printer manufacturers don’t make the majority of their profits on selling printers like the Epson Stylus SX215 at that low price.   They actually make very little, in some cases I suspect virtually nothing on the hardware cost themselves.

The model requires that they make money on consumables, which when you think about it makes a lot more sense from a profit point of view.    The paper and printer costs of the average ink jet printers is much more than the costs if the printer itself.

Why is the Epson SX215 so interesting?

I’ll tell you why, simply because it perfectly illustrates the dilemma facing the printing companies.  They are locked into this business model which is crumbling around them.  You see forcing you to buy something like consumables is fraught with dangers – here’s just a few of them.

• It’s not Environmentally Friendly – this is probably of least concern to the companies, who can always spin their approach into a green looking one.  The most environmentally friendly way to keep a printer running is to produce high quality toner and ink cartridges which can be easily and cheaply refilled by the user – unfortunately although entirely possible this massively cuts back potential profits.
• How to force consumers to buy your refills (legislation) – from a legal point of view this is actually quite difficult.  Many countries have legislation which stops you doing things like saying the a guarantee is invalid  if you don’t use their refills
• Technical Enforcement – like many printers the cartridges on the Epson Stylus SX215 have little chips on them to force you to use only Epson Inks, however these are actually very easy to copy and are being copied in cheap replaceable ink cartridges

Juts  looking at these three issue you can see companies like Epson have a problem from many sides with this business model, from environmental, legal and the technical sides they are under attack.  Let’s just look at the comparative costs to better illustrate -

I’m using the amazon costs for this printer just to illustrate properly

• Printer Cost at Amazon UK  - Listed at £49.99 here
• Epson replacement Cartridge Cost – 26.74 for four here – so that’s about £6.68 each.
• But freely available and actually pushed by Amazon are these inks 10.99 for 12 here – which is about £0.91 each.

That makes the cost of the Epson cartridges 700% more expensive than buying compatible inks with a built in chip, that’s one heck of a price difference !

There will of course the usual nonsensical arguments about printer damage and print quality of course. But let’s take print quality first – lets assume the Epson ink produces slightly better prints (which is by no means guaranteed) on the Epson SX215. But most people are not that bothered about fantastic print quality for every print out, in fact it could be argued that the average buyer of a cheap multipurpose printer like this just wants a simple printer that makes decent copies – are they prepared to pay 700% more for a possible slight quality boost?

The printer companies will have to make a decision soon, the problems of sustaining this environmentally unfriendly business model are mounting. The free market is hitting this rip off model used to overcharge buyers of their printers.

I hope they see sense and start making these printers refillable – stop wasting time and resources in producing killer chips in printers and cartridges just to make more money. If they did this and supplied quality refills at a reasonable price they might actually do rather well from it, people might stop refilling with compatible toner and use theirs instead.

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