from Amazon
Monday, October 10, 2011
When to replace a printer?
Non-sports post.
Every time I have to re-order ink, I ask myself if I should just buy a new printer. There’s two reasons:
1. The ink cartridges costs me about 65$ to replace. My all-in-one cost under 100$, and comparable models can be had on sale for that low price.
2. I just know that, at some point, my printer is going to breakdown, in which case, I wasted money on ink. Since I always “buy ahead”, the eventual breakdown cost is going to be my inventory, plus half of the unused ink when it breaks down. That’s almost 100$ thrown away. (Let’s face it, I’m not going to resell the unused ink, and I’ll miss the 30-day window Amazon allows for returns.)
Basically, if I replenish the ink 3 times (almost 200$) plus my inventory cost (100$), that’s 300$ to reuse my printer 3 extra refills. Instead, if I just buy a new printer each time (!!), that’s 300$ spent.
What do you guys do? Do you replace your printer pretty quickly, or do you just keep forking over for ink?
(The other option is to not use OEM ink, but I’ve never tried that.)