Printing's Not Dead: The $35 Billion Fight Over Ink Cartridges (bloomberg.com) 84
America's onetime innovation icons are wrestling over their biggest remaining piles of money. From a report: The HP 63 Tri-color ink cartridge retails for $28.99 at Staples. Stuffed with foam sponges drenched in a fraction of an ounce of cyan, magenta, and yellow dyes, this bestseller, model No. F6U61AN#140, can spray 36,000 drops per second in the Envy printers made by HP. The 63 Tri-color cartridge may not look like much, but that ink, which needs a refill every 165 pages, is ridiculously valuable. HP's printer supplies business garnered $12.9 billion in sales last year, and the printer division overall represented 63% of the company's profits. Here in the year 2020, proprietary ink cartridges remain important enough to spark a fight worth at least $35 billion.
With backing from Carl Icahn, Xerox has been trying to buy the much larger HP for what the target says is a laughable bid. On Monday, HP Chief Executive Officer Enrique Lores moved to protect his hold on F6U61AN#140 and its toner brethren. During his report on the company's latest quarterly earnings, which met Wall Street's expectations, Lores announced that HP would triple its share buyback program to $15 billion over three years as part of an effort to fend off the hostile takeover. While Lores said he was open to exploring new merger frameworks, he dismissed the size and technology of Xerox Holdings Corp. and stressed that HP already had a winning strategy. "I am pumped up," the CEO tells Bloomberg Businessweek in an interview shortly after the earnings call. "We have a great plan." Lores, who's spent three decades at HP, has survived his share of existential threats. Before he took over as CEO in November, he'd led the printer business to a streak of revenue gains after even his bosses had left it for dead. But last year also saw HP's share price fall by a third from a February high. The company announced thousands of employee layoffs as it struggled to compete with cheaper ink cartridges from Asia. That public floundering has left HP freshly vulnerable to activist investors such as Icahn, who owns 11% of Xerox and 4% of HP.
Icahn snarked in December that HP appears in danger of following "the road to the graveyard." For decades, HP and Xerox ranked among the most powerful forces of invention in Silicon Valley. Now they're arguing over who has the superior vision to acquire competitors, jettison workers, and jealously guard the tech specs of their aging intellectual property. It's unclear whether either company's leaders will be able to repeat the miracle Lores's team managed a few years back. Consumer and office printers still churn out an estimated 3.2 trillion pages a year, according to market researcher IDC, but Toni Sacconaghi, a tech analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, warned in a client note that the "traditional printing and copying business is slowly collapsing." Recalling the image that critics deployed in 2002, when HP tried to acquire its way out of trouble in the PC business by buying Compaq, Sacconaghi wondered if the company is facing another deal that looks an awful lot like "two garbage trucks colliding."
With backing from Carl Icahn, Xerox has been trying to buy the much larger HP for what the target says is a laughable bid. On Monday, HP Chief Executive Officer Enrique Lores moved to protect his hold on F6U61AN#140 and its toner brethren. During his report on the company's latest quarterly earnings, which met Wall Street's expectations, Lores announced that HP would triple its share buyback program to $15 billion over three years as part of an effort to fend off the hostile takeover. While Lores said he was open to exploring new merger frameworks, he dismissed the size and technology of Xerox Holdings Corp. and stressed that HP already had a winning strategy. "I am pumped up," the CEO tells Bloomberg Businessweek in an interview shortly after the earnings call. "We have a great plan." Lores, who's spent three decades at HP, has survived his share of existential threats. Before he took over as CEO in November, he'd led the printer business to a streak of revenue gains after even his bosses had left it for dead. But last year also saw HP's share price fall by a third from a February high. The company announced thousands of employee layoffs as it struggled to compete with cheaper ink cartridges from Asia. That public floundering has left HP freshly vulnerable to activist investors such as Icahn, who owns 11% of Xerox and 4% of HP.
Icahn snarked in December that HP appears in danger of following "the road to the graveyard." For decades, HP and Xerox ranked among the most powerful forces of invention in Silicon Valley. Now they're arguing over who has the superior vision to acquire competitors, jettison workers, and jealously guard the tech specs of their aging intellectual property. It's unclear whether either company's leaders will be able to repeat the miracle Lores's team managed a few years back. Consumer and office printers still churn out an estimated 3.2 trillion pages a year, according to market researcher IDC, but Toni Sacconaghi, a tech analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, warned in a client note that the "traditional printing and copying business is slowly collapsing." Recalling the image that critics deployed in 2002, when HP tried to acquire its way out of trouble in the PC business by buying Compaq, Sacconaghi wondered if the company is facing another deal that looks an awful lot like "two garbage trucks colliding."
I would have guessed printing would have died (Score:4, Interesting)
I would have guessed printing would have died by now. But the thing about printing that all of the "paperless office" predictions missed is that printing has MASSIVELY improved in the last 20 years as well as everything else.
The truth is, people still would rather look at a printed page than a screen for a lot of things.
Re:I would have guessed printing would have died (Score:5, Funny)
Government, legal, and medical are still mostly paper-based.
My favorite government form is the Paperwork Reduction Act compliance form [wikipedia.org], that is stapled to other forms to verify that they comply with the PWRA mandate to reduce paper consumption. Those are used by the truckload.
Re:I would have guessed printing would have died (Score:4, Informative)
The Paperwork Reduction Act has absolutely nothing to do with saving paper. The intention is to reduce the tediousness of paperwork by not asking one to fill out superfluous info except what is needed to do whatever it is the particular form is for exactly.
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I don't know why but suddenly in my head it went something like this: "I need you to fill out this form to indicate that you do not need to fill out this information that you filled out on this form on the other forms that you filled out."
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You don't need to "fill out" the PWRA notice. It is just a simple page that you sign and attach to the original form to affirm adherence to the PWRA. Furthermore, it is legal to duplicate pre-signed copies, so even the signing can be skipped. Just collate and staple, and with a good printer, even that can be automated, with the forms and PWRA notices in separate feed-trays. Then the recipient of the form can quickly tear off and discard the notice assured that paperwork has been reduced.
It is a very stre
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I would have guessed printing would have died by now. But the thing about printing that all of the "paperless office" predictions missed is that printing has MASSIVELY improved in the last 20 years as well as everything else.
The truth is, people still would rather look at a printed page than a screen for a lot of things.
Really? For some reason, whenever I want to print something the printer almost invariable malfunctions and the more important it is that I get the document printed out, the worse and more perplexing the malfunction. I could swear the things are cursed I've tried everything on my various printers over the years except an exorcism, but no luck. Printers at work are even worse than the ones I used to have at home. Much of the time whenever rarely I have to use them somebody has jammed them up so completely in
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Dude, Office Space did not came out 21 years ago... Oh shit, it did [wikipedia.org]. Wait, I'm not that old, am I?
Hey guys! Who are you? Wait, what? Retirement home? What the hell are you talki{#`%${%&`+'${`%&NO CARRIER
Re:I would have guessed printing would have died (Score:4, Insightful)
It's mostly a legal problem now. Storing information tamper-proof electronically is still quite expensive compared to paper.
Re: I would have guessed printing would have died (Score:2)
It isn't really. The primary problem is sharing information quickly and signatures. Not everyone has a tablet with pen (quality products in that area still come to $800+) and even fewer people agree on the exchange technology (Dropbox, Box, Teams, ...).
For signatures it's even worse; a digital signature makes a PDF and other documents worthless to use unless everyone agrees paying for the Adobe or Microsoft or other clouds
I will not be caught dead... (Score:5, Interesting)
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I will not be caught dead with an inkjet printer.
Not many will disagree.
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I finally found an exception to the printer cartrige ripoff rule: Brother DCP-J1100DW, with absolutely huge ink reservoirs that last about three years. No incessant head cleanings whenever you look at it (our old Canon would even clean the print heads before starting a scanning job), and whenever the ink runs out, you can buy a huge cheap refill cartridge that just contains ink (which is sucked into the internal reservoirs).
Yes, the printer is a bit more expensive. Instead of selling the printer at a loss a
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I finally found an exception to the printer cartrige ripoff rule: Brother DCP-J1100DW, with absolutely huge ink reservoirs that last about three years.
I'm concerned about buying these "prepaid ink printers" because I've yet to have an inkjet that didn't fail in less time than the ink supply I'm prepaying for. Maybe the warranty should be as long as the ink is supposed to last?
Re:I will not be caught dead... (Score:4, Insightful)
When my printer stops working, I throw it out and buy a new one.
The ink is $29 and a brand new printer including the ink is $49. So for the extra $20, I don't have to deal with changing cartridges.
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"Including the ink" usually meaning "Including special low capacity cartridges that last about 10 pages".
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including a toner cartridge good for 1000 pages.
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the reason we got rid of the Canon is because it had filled up the ink sponges that store the wasted ink from its ridiculously frequent head cleanings. Once those sponges are full >
Yes, they stopped selling the sponges in 2017. I still have my Canon and a couple of spare sponges, as well as a mono laser printer, so before sending any colour print jobs,
I have to decide if it is sponge-worthy.
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My Canon printer used to use 1/3 of a cartridge of ink just to clean its print head. I got rid of it.
Laser printer for me.
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Maybe in your model the sponges are easy to replace. In mine, they had managed to tuck them away in such an inaccessible spot that you had to take the whole printer apart. One might even think they did it on purpose...
But even if they had been easy to replace, it's still a gigantic waste of ink that had been sent into those sponges.
Makes perfect economic sense for Canon, of course. Reviews are based on number of pages printed with one cartridge, which normally happens in one go without cleaning. But if you
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Maybe in your model the sponges are easy to replace.
Sorry, I thought everyone would get the Seinfeld reference. No soup for me!
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
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need to generate hundreds of pages a day (like in an office) to make it worth while.
You can buy a color laser printer for less, and have much better reliability.
Re:I will not be caught dead... (Score:4, Informative)
After three failed HP inkjet printers, I bought a Brother Color Laser printer.
Zero problems.
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Never look back.
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Well there is always lp0 on fire, so perhaps they feel secure that should it go south, they'll at least be informed?
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Only complaints is it tends to grab 2-3 sheets of paper at a time, and it's super noisy when you first turn it on?
Compare that to this stupid brother inkjet/fax/scanner. Literally the only reason I bought it was the scanner bed su
Re:I will not be caught dead... (Score:4, Interesting)
I find this or other issues are generally more a paper problem than a printer problem.
You might think just buying that box of paper for $10 is the best deal in the world, but it can be one of the worst as it causes no end to paper jams.
It often doesn't matter if the printer is brand new or 30 years old - the cheap paper just doesn't work well.
The reason I know is the office switched from the more expensive Hammermill (not the top end "premium" paper, but still on more expensive side) to Amazon Basics once to save a few bucks, and every printer in the office routinely started jamming up. Didn't take long to figure that it was the paper causing the rise in incidents from a new printer to an old one. Switched back to the Hammermill brand and the printers were once again trouble-free. Cheap paper isn't so cheap if you're having to recycle half of it because it gets jammed up.
Even at home I was always getting into paper jams and I just though it was the printer getting old and the rollers were wearing out. But I too switched over and experienced far fewer problems with misfeeds and such. It just took a lot longer because I had a couple of reams of the old stuff to get through (I use less than a ream of paper a year).
Surprisingly, I didn't care I didn't have a color printer. I print so little that the toner cartridge lasts forever, even on the "home" laser printers (where the toner lasts only 1000 odd pages rather than the 2500+ on office models).
Been using that laser for over 15 years now and other than not getting great network throughput (it was one of the few networking printers back then) I never looked back.
Inkjets simply sucked in every way imaginable - the ink runs when the paper gets even a bit moist being one of the worst. And I don't bother printing photos - I just use a photo service who prints it onto nice photo paper.
Re: I will not be caught dead... (Score:2)
I have seen entire teams of paper glued together at the factory, you could literally pick the whole team up by the corner and it would barely bend. And someone actually put this brick of paper in an MFP and expected it to work.
Iâ(TM)ve been in the printer industry over 30 years, the amount of shit paper Iâ(TM)ve seen could fill a stadium.
And remember kids... you can pay for the best paper in the world, but if itâ(TM)s stored in some manky warehouse with a hole in the roof, itâ(TM)s worse
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I will not be caught dead with an inkjet printer. I still remember late 90s era shenanigans with cartridge pricing, mandatory refills on still-good cartridges because blue was out and so on. So I still print black and white with an old laser printer where I can open cartridge and refill it with black powder myself.
I don't refill the toner myself, but I do agree that nothing beats a laser for fast, consistent, legible text. The last thing I need is my ink cartridge clogging up from non-use the morning of a job interview or when trying to print out event tickets or something similar.
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That's exactly what I do. Black pepper can even be purchased from the grocery store.
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Around 20 years ago, I went into the big chain office supply store and told the man in the printer section that I wanted to buy a laser printer. They had an HP LaserJet that I liked the price of. The salesman tried so hard to sell me an inkjet that I finally had to threaten to walk out with nothing if he didn't sell me the printer I wanted.
I used that printer for almost 15 years, and put maybe 3 new toner cartridges in it during that time. I'd probably still be using it, but someone gave me a newer, faster
Re: I will not be caught dead... (Score:2)
I now have an Epson all in one with huge ink bags, cheaper per page prices than all affordable laser printers and decent quality. For photos I have an older Epson photo printer (860x?), which indeed has very expensive ink. But, fantastic Linux compati
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..where I can open cartridge and refill it with black powder myself
That must have a very dramatic, dare I say explosive effect when that black powder comes in contact with the corona wire near the imaging drum. xD
I think it was back in the '90s, the last time I bothered with ridiculous inkjet printers. It got to the point where it was actually cheaper to buy a whole new printer than it was to buy a gods-be-damned black ink cartridge for the damned thing.
I've had a Brother laser printer for 10 years now. Never going back, not falling for the inkjet meme again. If I nee
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That happened 20 years ago. A lot of thing where different 20 years ago - there were no smart phones for example. Maybe it's time to take another look?
If you do take another look, you will find there are continuous ink printers now. They are cheaper to run than a laser, and produce better colour. For example, the Epson ET-3750 [epson.com] comes with enough ink to print 11,000 colour pages in the box. They cost $300. You
Re: I will not be caught dead... (Score:2)
The few times I have needed to print something (Score:3)
I just head to the library. It's maybe a couple times a year, and about $.50 a page. My bill for the year is maybe $2.50.
If I bought ink, I'd have to replace the cartridges because between printings it would have dried out.
If it was more than that, I'd just buy a cheap laser printer.
Unlike some people I know, dumping a web page or whatever to an epub file lets me view it on a tablet.
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Sure, but if you only print a few pages every year, owning our own printer is a losing game.
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Sure, but if you only print a few pages every year, owning our own printer is a losing game.
How so? I print maybe 200-300 pages/year.
I paid $50 for my Brother HL-L2320D about 4.5 years back. The starter cartridge (Brother claims a yield of 700 pages) which I replaced in Spring '19 allowed me to print close to 2 reams worth of paper (1 ream = 500 sheets). That's less than $0.07 per page.
Generic replacement cartridges (TN-660) can be had on Amazon and eBay for around $10 and are suppose to yield about 2,600 pages. Based on what I print and the number of pages I got out of the starter cartridge, I ex
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Typo above. It should have been "that will allow me to print rough 4,500 pages."
But the math is still correct.
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And since you print more than a few pages a year, my comment does not apply to you.
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Sure, but if you only print a few pages every year, owning our own printer is a losing game.
I have an Epson workforce multifunction printer.
I use the duplex ADF scanner a lot to scan both sides of multipage documents to a pdf.
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Sure, but if you only print a few pages every year, owning our own printer is a losing game.
Only if you don't value your time. I'd much rather print a handful of documents a month at home on my stupid inkjet printer than hump over to the library or Staples to do the same thing. The relative convenience of the printer in my house is worth the aggravation and expense. Barely.
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Same here, I still have a Laserjet 1100 from like 20 years ago. It's the oldest bit of equipment I still have in mostly regular use. And it still works. Yes, the paper feed requires me to put paper in one at a time because else it digests all of them at once, but considering that I print maybe 100 sheets a year, that's acceptable.
And considering that a toner cartridge is pretty much infinitely storable (unlike ink, where you print a page and a week later when you want to print something again the ink has dr
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Sometimes just cleaning the rollers with alcohol will be enough.
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True, but frankly, the time it takes to dismantle the printer and then hope that I can reassemble it (because I won't get another dirt cheap printer that will actually use all the toner in the cartridge instead of pretending it's empty when the allotted amount of pages has been printed) ain't worth the maybe 100 single pages I print per year.
I'm happy with what it does. The nonzero chance that it's fubar afterwards and I have to find a new printer that plays nice with my printer server and where the driver
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We had an HP LaserJet II that I brought home from work because the executive whose desk it sat on wanted to reclaim most of that space with a little Canon inkjet (marketing guy, so not that bright). We used that printer for the next 15 years and since it used the same toner cartridges that the LJ4 printers my subsequent job tossed we never bought toner ever.
We have a color laser now because it came free with something else my nephew bought when he lived with us.
Old Faithful (Score:2)
Because of its age, Epson has stopped making (the large) ink cartridges for it, and no third-party manufacturers have stepped up either. So, I'm stuck buying 20-year old, new-old stock off of eBay. I'm surprised they still work (go Japan!), and I get them for less than several dolla
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Our Brother DCP-J1100DW works the same way as your old Epson, so maybe that's worth looking into. Huge reservoirs, fair price for the printer itself (not sold at a loss like others), cheap refills (only need them every 3 years or so). It doesn't clean heads like crazy, so it does need a manual cleaning cycle every now and then if you haven't used it for a while. I much prefer it that way, never buying those Canon/HP cartridge sucking monsters again.
Printer ink is not "ridiculously valuable" (Score:3)
Don't buy it a fraction of an ounce at a time, folks. I buy large bottles to put into the set of refillable cartridges that I bought years ago.
A HALF-LITER of the stuff is only $11, including shipping. https://www.ebay.com/itm/32397... [ebay.com]
Re:Printer ink is not "ridiculously valuable" (Score:5, Interesting)
I bought a Canon printer with "MegaTank (https://shop.usa.canon.com/shop/en/catalog/printers-all-in-ones/g-series-megatank-inkjet-printers)" -- 6000 pages is like $20 on the refill. Epson has a similar printer now called EcoTank (https://epson.com/ecotank-ink-tank-printers). I'm never buying an HP printer again with their stupid ink prices.
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But why? (Score:2)
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They're better at printing color photographs in comparison to laser printers.
However, I can just upload my photos to Costco, Walmart or a popular drug store and have them print them for me at about a nickel a print.
I don't print photos much except for Christmas time though or some volunteer stuff.
I haven't owned a printer in nearly 20 years (Score:2)
I used to have an old HP Laserjet II from the 80s, came out of Boeing Surplus in the mid-1990s
.... about twice a year. In this case it's totally worth it to go down to my local fedex/print and ship location and have them print it for me, for $
When that thing died (or the world moved to USB?) it got dumped. Once you could get yahoo maps (and later Google Maps) on your phone there was no reason to print out driving instructions.
Periodically I need to print out an invitation or resume, or ____
This has nothing to do with consumer printers. (Score:5, Interesting)
Consumer printers has almost nothing to do with what's going on here. For the last 20 years the entire EBPP industry has been consolidating - that the Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment industry. Basically, the statement folks. Anyone and everyone from your local water department to major printers such as Aon Hewitt (now Alight, which is dumb because they are pretty dim) - printed 300M+ pages/year. Allstate, who is big enough to have a 1M+ sq.ft. print and fulfillment center, and the likes of Fidelity, BoA, etc.
The printer equipment they purchase from Xerox, HP, Oce, among others, runs in the millions of dollars per engine, prints well over a thousand impressions (one side of one page) per minute (some are up to 5,000 impressions/minute), with the paper wheeled in on 4-5' diameter, 18" wide rolls with 80,000+ pages each. 3-4 rolls are run through in an 8-hr shift.and causes the customer to incur a 'click charge' on every page that is run through it. Yes, a charge on every page - whether you put a mark on it or not. This 'tax' is on top of your maintenance and supply charges. There is no moving to another vendor as all of them do it.
The big money is made in the clicks.
What Carl Icahn is saying is that Xerox has a better handle on this market than HP. Which, strangely after Xerox's imploding stupidity over the last 20 years, is actually true. HP tries to sell their equipment as an extension of their home and business departmental/workgroup (MFP) market. Which is NOT how operators of this industry want to be serviced. It's 1pm and I have 20,000 #10 letters I need to get out the door by 5 to make it to the postal facility by 7 to ensure it goes out in tonight's mail. And I have a clogged print head, seeing streaking, or the printer just won't come on line. I need someone on the phone now getting parts into their truck because if I can get the machine back up by 3 I can make the deadline. If I have a big enough shop I want someone on-site keeping my equipment nice and happy during normal down windows and can fix it in an emergency.
And before someone starts talking about backup, off site, etc. just the printer is $1M per engine for B&W. $3-5M for color - with two engines needed for double sided - not including another $750K for your pre and post equipment. Unwinders, accumulators, slitter/cutter/stacker, etc. At $3-10M per installation - that's a lot of capital sitting idle "just for backup".
Ink jet is bad tech (Score:2)
I bought a Brother L3210CW color laser for under 200 bucks and it works great.
It's fast enough, has never jammed and its prints look great.
The toner-per-page is super cheap and I don't have to worry about the print heads drying out.
I've gone thru maybe a half dozen ink jets and they've all died in a year or two.
There are always corner cases where some other tech works better, dye sublimation for
photo printing etc., but in general this printer has been perfect for out needs.
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Same story except with the Canon LBP612Cdw for $200.
I love my color laser printer but you need to use the printer / medium to its strengths.
i.e.
Photos / Portraits and HDR suck on a laser printer.
HP Instant Ink provides 15 pages per month free (Score:1)
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Yet you still have to buy a printer that only lasts a few months before breaking. I would need a new printer every time I printed something.
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The 45 billion refrigerator water filter market (Score:3)
Unfortunately, the printer ink cartridge market now pales in comparison to the refrigerator water filter market. I mean, there are now companies giving refrigerators for the price of an Amazon Fire tablet hoping that consumers will buy 50 dollar water filter every 160 days. This is huge.
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My fridge is at least smart enough that without any water filter in place everything still works properly (and if I'm ok drinking tap water, which I am, I don't need an extra filter to drink the same from the fridge).
My fridge's problem is that it needs a new $200 icemaker every 6 months. I've given up replacing them, I have no problem doing it once or twice, but the time between failures is just way too low.
Refillable Ink Cartridges (Score:3)
I own an Epson Artisan 1430 inkjet wide-format printer and long converted it to refillable pigment ink cartridges. While it can be a little tricky to deal with at time, I haven't had to buy a single cartridge for it in ages now and I have about 1/2 litre of bulk ink to last almost a lifetime for me. A few things I learned about traditional inkjet printers, not only is the ink ridiculously expensive but all the waste ink from cleaning cycles is dumped into a felt pad inside your printer meaning that at some point it will reach end of life unless you modify your printer. I also own a color laser printer but for photos lasers do not approach the quality of an inkjet. My only other tip would be to find a printer that can use pigment (not dye) ink. Dye ink (especially third party ink and paper) tends to fade.
Epson EcoTank printers (Score:3)
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I've heard about Epson EcoTank printers too, they're pretty good from what I've heard. A modified Epson Artisan 1430 however is a 6 colour ink printer and wide-format (19x13) inch prints so it's a lot better for photographic prints. But for your average home user Ecotanks are a good option.
Psst. Hey Carl. Wanna make Xerox rule? (Score:1)
My mum (Score:2)
My mum's printer stopped working again (when she calls me it used to be 1/2 "printer not working", 1/3 "Internet not working" and 1/6 something else) and I got fed up with it. So I told her to throw her printer away and bought her a decent colour laser printer. This thing came with expletiveing huge toner cartridges which will probably last years. Knowing just how hard it can be to buy supplies for a printer that's a few years old, I also bought a spare set of toner cartridges.
My mum now phones me half as o
HP's dead (Score:2)
HP has been drawn and quartered. Management has been replaced with cronies. Quality is abysmal. They don't make any of their PCs. They also don't design them (they're all ODM). They've been sucking off of the ink teat for decades.
It would serve us well if Xerox bought them and removed the HP name as it's an insult to its founders and is no longer what was once "Hewlett Packard Company".
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Ghost of Carly is still there. Man she made some whoppers of bad decisions.
I'd like to say Hurd made bad decisions, however I think they were intentionally bad so they'd ditch him with his golden parachute. The whole tablet thing was that. Spend billion or so on a tablet. Do a really weak advertising campaign and a week after release - kill it. OMG, it might succeed... kill it!
I know HP employees that bought as many as they could. Loaded it with other software and sold them.
A long time HP employee told me i
I did the math, and it's absurd (Score:3)
Having recently got into 3D printing, i can get 1kg of filament for $20. Not only is that far more useful than a print out, it turns out it's cheaper too. You see, to 3D print text on your 3D printer at 0.1mm layer height, your spool is far cheaper and last longer and you'll get more sheets than any ink cartridge.
Ink comes in at 2.25 cents per page. .75 cents per page.
Filament comes in at
Staining words on paper is ridiculously expensive compared to giving them physical embodiment. That just seems wrong.
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you could 3D print offset plates to do old timey printing.
There's a good reason toner is expensive (Score:1)
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-a... [quora.com]