[kossTKR]

I'll always remember when our fairly expensive prosumer all-in-one-printer suddenly wouldn't let me scan pages because there was "no more ink" in the printer right before an important task. A straight up scam.

I'm surprised no one has disrupted the sad state of affairs in the printer industry yet even though it's slowly dying.

[davchana]

Long time ago, in around 2006, a computer shop guy wanted to charge me 3 times more for color scans jpegs than black & white scans, because "color ink" is expensive!! I was like, its a paper to pdf, you are not using any ink at all, but he was like no, how will your pdf get colors from?

[LorenPechtel]

Unfortunately, with ink-jet an out-of-ink can actually do damage, not merely produce a bad print. They have no incentive to make a reliable ink measuring system, though.

[johannbok]

At the lower end of the market the printers are sold below-cost and the profit is in the ink. Above that, there's laser printers, which are far less prone to this.

Are we looking for someone to sell an ink-based printer that will cost more up front than its competitors, and then willingly forego the revenue that comes from market ink prices?

[sgerenser]

Kodak tried that 10+ years ago. The experiment only lasted a year or two before the printers were discontinued for poor sales.