[skinkestek]

> I've made the delightful discovery that per-page ink pricing schemes, such as HP's "Instant Ink", can be very effectively leveraged to make photo printing as close to free as it's possible to get, with the incremental cost per print being effectively just that of whatever paper you choose to use.

Would you care to add some more details? Is this an all-you-can-print deal with a fixed monthly price or something?

[throwanem]

Just the opposite. It's priced entirely by monthly page count; IIRC the first 100 pages per month are included in the base fee ($3 a month, last I checked), and you pay an extra $1 for every 10 pages in a given month. Since it's a subscription, they just tack on the extra charges after the fact. (I think the extra page rate, at least, depends on plan; trust their pricing info over mine, ofc.)

In exchange for the subscription, your printer automatically requests replacement ink cartridge sets to be shipped whenever the installed set runs low. That doesn't cost extra, and if there's a rate threshold past which it stops happening, I've never hit it.

Ultimately, this works out, by design, as a terrible deal for printing documents, sold entirely on the idea of convenience. But if you're printing photos, in which every sheet that goes into the printer comes out with ink all over it, the deal turns upside down, because the incremental cost of that ink is zero. And, as a nice side benefit, you get fresh cartridges shipped to your door a little before you need them, without having to think about reordering at all.

Last I checked, MSRP for a full CMYK set of first-party cartridges for an Officejet 8610 is $160. At $3 a month for the "Instant Ink" thing, it takes a little over four years to add up to the same cost as one regular replacement set.

The only true drawback I can see here, for the photo printing use case, is that while a printer is enrolled in Instant Ink, it won't take cartridges not provided through that program. That might be a headache if you want to keep an extra backup set handy, but it's never been a problem for me since I set my printer up with the program some time in 2017. It definitely does prevent using remanufactured, refilled, or third-party carts - but, again, that's never been something I felt the need to do while getting first-party ones for ~free, and I doubt I'll change my mind on that as long as HP keeps playing themselves this way.

(For what it's worth, I thought twice about describing all this in such detail, just in case somebody at HP might notice and care enough to make a change. But what the hell, right? This stuff would take five minutes of BI work to find out, given the data they must certainly have for the program to operate as it does at all. That they leave it as it is tells me they don't care, and why would they? Almost all the program's enrollees are no doubt getting the bad end of the deal, and I'm sure it helps them sell printers, so it's no skin off their nose either way.)

[chongli]

I'm pretty sure HP is completely aware of what you're doing and it's not a scheme at all. Professionals using large format inkjet printers are an important market for HP. As for the ink being "basically free", well, ink is pretty much free for HP to manufacture.

At the end of the day, the printers are expensive enough for HP to turn a profit on them. So it makes perfect sense to flip the razorblade model on its head and earn large margins on the printers while selling the ink at barely above cost. Professionals wouldn't have it any other way, as their margins simply would not sustain the exorbitant prices of consumer off-the-shelf ink. If HP doesn't sell them "basically free" ink, they'll get it from somebody else.

[throwanem]

My large-format printer is a Canon. I have no idea whether HP's pro line is eligible for the program, but the HP printer I use with it is a bottom-end office AIO. They're explicitly targeting the consumer and SOHO markets in their promotional material for the program, so I'd be surprised if their pro stuff works with Instant Ink, instead of maybe with a similar program that's adjusted to work out better in the sort of context where a higher-end printer like that will see use.

[bluGill]

Ink is cheap enough that they probably make money anyway and finance people like subscriptions because it is consistent income.

[throwanem]

I guess thinking about it, them knowing they're basically giving away ink as I described would be just another confirmation that ink is basically free to manufacture and sell.

Print heads probably aren't, though. I mean, I was thinking that a $160 MSRP for the four-cart CMYK set from HP seemed absurd, considering that an eight-cart set for my Pixma Pro 100 only runs about a hundred bucks. But then I remembered that that Pixma set is just ink tanks and ink. The print head is a separate part - and it costs $350.

Given the precision manufacturing requirements for a modern inkjet print head, it would not surprise me at all to learn that the economics of the Instant Ink program actually work out as well for HP as they do for me, despite that the way I use the program means I get basically free ink. What I mean by that is, part of the deal I forgot to mention earlier is that you use the packaging from the replacement cartridge set to ship back the cartridges it's replacing - I would not be at all surprised to learn that those carts get refurbished, refilled, and reused, and that the reason it can work so cheaply and no one cares is because (damage and mishandling excepted) it's still saving the manufacturing cost of a new print head.

Likewise, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that if you subtract profit from that $160 MSRP for a fresh set of HP CMYK cartridges, you'd find most of what was left going to pay for the four print heads in those cartridges, not the ink that you'd be running through them.

Does anyone in the "printer ink costs more than gold" discourse ever think about this? I don't recall seeing it mentioned anywhere, and I guess that's fair since it was only thinking about my relatively unusual high-end photo printer that led me to realize it. But I feel like it might be a pretty important point in that whole discussion.

[oh_sigh]

I wonder if you could put a spool of paper in and print "one page" which is actually 8.5"x50' or something along those lines.

[throwanem]

Nope. At best you'd spend a lot of time fiddling with it to get an unreliable result that'd still behave as if printing discrete pages.

Might still be cheaper than a dot-matrix machine and a box of tractor-feed fanfold would run you in 2020, though.