Is there a reason consumer printers haven't been disrupted by some bored billionaire? Obviously some brands are better than others, but none stand out as a name everyone knows as a disrupting force (ala Uber, OnePlus, Tesla, etc; ignoring whether they are or not).
I'm just being cynical here but there is probably some element of truth that there's just nothing to disrupt -- printer manufacturers had the billionaire disruption playbook mastered before billionaire disruption was really a thing.
I'll acknowledge that disruption can sometimes bring consumer benefits, but inevitably it's short lived benefits or benefits that are just to hook you and then gouge you later. Printers have been good for decades, and only the limitations built in by manufacturers make them bad†. I think even well into 2010 a friend of mine was using an old Apple laser printer and it was pretty darn reliable for getting text out fast.
Think about all the ways manufacturers have tried/still are monetizing printers:
- DRM on cartridges
- Forcing all cartridges to have ink even to print in black and white
- Per-page subscription models that deliver ink and cap monthly prints
I'm sure I've missed some of the other really sick ways, but I'm not really sure there are that many ways that could've been missed.
Combine that with the fact that increasingly there are more online forms and digital signing has some traction, it's not really that lucrative I think to get into. I don't know the full situation in the US, but when I was last there, the common copy shops were either Kinkos or (sometimes) USPS/UPS/FedEx stores that offered printing services. Outside of the US, copy/print centers are extremely common and fairly cheap/convenient; checking maps, there are 5 within walking distance ( > 500 meters) from my apartment and they're convenient services (+ cheap).
All in all, what is the future to disrupt with consumer printers? The cost of ownership exceeds the number of times _I as an individual_ need to print every year/the cost of just using a copy center. For those with above-average printing needs, a professional printer setup is a better investment than a consumer printer.
>Printers have been good for decades, and only the limitations built in by manufacturers make them bad
This is what I was referring to, maybe using the word disrupt incorrectly. I meant to ask, is there anything stopping someone, like a bored billionaire, from coming in with a consumer friendly line of consumer printers, and capturing the market completely? In my mind, and I could be wrong, printers aren't sophisticated in a way that make it near impossible for new players (like high end semiconductor manufacturing, for example -- like you say, printers have been good for decades) and the software doesn't seem too out there either.
In my mind, I envision something like what Raptor Computing [1] is trying to do for workstations and servers, but unlike Raptor, 1) the problem appears to be far simpler, and 2) the market for printers is larger and to consumers appears more directly beneficial. It's far harder to sell someone on (expensive!) hardware freedom than that the official ink refill isn't a complete rort, the ink is environmentally friendly, no annoying DRM, etc.
Of course, that market is shrinking. I think the anecdotes you and others point out are not uncommon, and your last point about a professional setup makes sense, but then... who's buying these things? The office supply stores near me still dedicate a decent chunk of space to printers and ink cartridges.
I'd imagine such a venture would be mostly marketing. No real innovation, which HN will point out, but lots of hype and your friend who doesn't know tech will buy one and tell you about the great new innovations and how they're disrupting the old monopoly.
Right, that's what I mean (I had understood the term disruption incorrectly). Is there a reason this is not a lucrative venture, to produce something clean and user-friendly that captures the goodwill of customers and force competitors to play nice?
I'd imagine a business would be over the moon with the scenario you're describing.
My guess is mainly that it's not sexy, it's a fairly niche thing. VC will look at it and say "what's your moat" until someone bites and decides that you do have a moat, at which point you'll be like Transfer Wise (now called Wise), basically an old product pretending to be innovative.
I bet it could be done, just needs someone to take a punt.
One could imagine a load of such niches. Come in, act like you're doing something new, get investment, capture market.
I think anyone who has ever tried to get any process optimizations pushed through in a large company, knows that the idea of "the market will automatically do whatever is most profitable" is mostly an ideologically convenient pipedream.
Absolutely. But I think that in the specific case -- if every firm in an entire market is abusing customers -- it implies that the abuse is profitable, and the market success shows consumers are abuse-tolerant. Really it's showing something about the demand side of the market.
To talk about ideological pipedreams the "perfect information" consumer is the other side of it.
Ah, that's why I led of with me being cynical because I am; I absolutely get what you meant and traditionally that is what disruption would be; a new player entering the market and disrupting the incumbents due to the player innovating where the incumbents stalled out trying to maintain their position.
My coy interpretation/version is that frequently this ends up less about innovation and more about shifting consumer bases by simply making a flashy product with a superficially cheaper barrier of entry while introducing other means of having recurring revenue from consumers.
My take is just that with physical office stores in particular, printers are just the sort of thing that people who go to physical stores to buy electronics still want, but I would wager it's dwindling, and a quick search seems to suggest this also [0], while another [1] suggests it's a slow but steadily growing market (note: this report mentions a bit on 3D printers, but the full report is behind paywall so it's not clear if that factors in at all)
I've never heard of Raptor Computing until you mentioned it, and it looks like they have a niche with Power9 processors and that they allow you to get basically kits or prebuilts? I kind of feel that's the "unique" niche that differentiates Raptor Computing from someone who might try to disrupt printers, in that Power9 does have a uniqueness to it, where as the technology for most consumer printers is just the same, it's just the vendor lockdown that differs.
You might get a dedicated following of privacy conscious persons who would like a completely unlocked and non-aggressive home printer that just prints, but I just find myself wondering if the cost of ownership is _really_ worth it for the right to own a printer. As another poster commented on the privacy concerns of copy shops, I'm starting to wonder if maybe that's the next direction that can be done to consolidate the options to professional printing units that make a proper effort to secure the process of printing end to end and make ubiquitous "utility-like" printers that can be placed anywhere to offer scanning/printing/signing services.
But I don't think the answer for this is home-office use anymore, and I don't see it as a market that too many are interested in trying to upset, but instead just making sure everyone gets their cut as the market transitions.
> the common copy shops were either Kinkos or (sometimes) USPS/UPS/FedEx stores that offered printing services. Outside of the US, copy/print centers are extremely common and fairly cheap/convenient; checking maps, there are 5 within walking distance ( > 500 meters) from my apartment and they're convenient services (+ cheap).
The problem is that copy shops are hotbeds of identity theft. What kind of documents do people need to print out nowadays that they would bother going to a copy shop for if they don't have a home printer? For important financial, bureaucratic, etc. ones. This then leaves the risk that the low-paid staff now has a copy of your sensitive files, and if the printer caches jobs, anyone else accessing it may too.
Mmm, I get your point but with government orgs, I see it two ways:
1. Form online you fill out
2. They only accept hand-filled (e.g., with pen) documents
So I'm not really sure which forms you're thinking of; not doubting they exist, but there just doesn't seem to be a lot of crossover on forms that are required to be printed. The only thing I can really think of that is sensitive would be just identity documents, but I think a copy shop scanner caching the job is the _least_ of the worries (the offices/businesses that require such documents really do not have secure practices at all...)
I get what you're saying I just don't think the threat factor is that big compared to the rest of the chain of custody threats with private documents, regardless of where it's printed.
"Is there a reason consumer printers haven't been disrupted.."
Xerox used to sell colour ink printers using solid ink blocks (not ink cartridges). The printer heats the solid ink blocks turning them into a viscous liquid. In case it's not obvious, the solid ink blocks don't require any cartridge encasing. They are simply slotted into ink compartments inside the printer. Here is a short video demo: https://youtu.be/cnd37wYLo-Q?t=104
The cost of the printers were high but the ink blocks worked out to be cheaper (cost-per-page) than traditional ink cartridges. The printers were aimed at business users and are no longer sold by Xerox. The reviews for these types of printer were mixed.
Do solid-ink blocks count as "disruption" to colour ink printers? Not sure, but it's the only example I know where a company attempted try something different to the colour ink cartridge model. There is simply no incentive for inkjet printer manufacturers to think afresh about cartridges, cost-per-page, refills etc.
My own review is mixed. Those wax-block printers (Xerox Phaser) gave good color rendering and resolution even 20 years ago, but at the cost of waxy-feeling pages and poor thermal stability - leave a stack of printed sheets in a hot car for an hour and you'd come back to find them stuck together, and peeling them apart would leave half a given sheet's impression stuck to the back of the one on top of it. Too bad if you find this out after the client visit right before the pitch meeting where you need to hand those printouts around, and without enough time to run back to the office and make more.
I believe this is the same technique (dye sublimation) that Canon uses in their small photo printer range (Selphy line). Those printers work with ink sheets where the ink is transferred one color at a time (yellow, red and blue). After that, a fourth sheet containing some fixing material is printed over the photo which makes it durable.
Quality is much better than comparable inkjet+photo paper solutions. But it's really expensive...
>but it's the only example I know where a company attempted try something different to the colour ink cartridge model.
Epson does sell printers without cartridges (I guess the cartridge is "built-in"), and you just buy bottles and pour them into the machine. That's not innovative though, just what any sane printer manufacturer should have been doing and third parties have been doing. Kind of like selling food from a bulk bin vs. prepackaging tiny quantities in plastic.
With respect to disruption, I was using the term disruption wrong. Moreso I was thinking as to why does no one come in with something normal and consumer friendly and shake things up, force the others to play nice.
They are not new. Xerox bought that technology from Tektronix when they bought their printer division. They date back to the 80s and predate widespread adoption of inkjets by a few years.
I have one. Unfortunately mine dries out like crazy. I had it for a year and already had a major nozzle issue. And that despite being judicious about printing at least a couple of full color pages every week.
More interesting to me is how many people build their own 3D printers, but nobody ever builds their own 2D printer. (Though I guess pen plotters are similar mechanically to 3D printers and serve to produce 2D documents, and people do build those, so maybe that's the state of the art. Can't complain too much about true vector graphics!)
> More interesting to me is how many people build their own 3D printers, but nobody ever builds their own 2D printer.
The cheapest commercial 3D printers sell for hundreds of dolars, while you can buy a cheap printer with wifi and bluetooth and a scanner and mobile phone app to boot for about 50 dollars brand new. Used ones can't even be given away for free.
Furthermore, you can print whatever you want in printer stores for a few cents a page.
Also, 3D printers are much more forgiving regarding low resolution output.
Actually, the cheapest consumer 3d printers are now like $100. They pretty crappy, but so are a lot of the low-end printers. (My mom actually just went through that and had to return a 2d printer that was hot garbage.)
The cheapest business 3d printer are about $1000 pre-built ($750 as a kit), and I think 2d printers of the same quality are about half that. So things are coming down nicely. There's still innovation going on in the 3d printer industry, too, so I expect them to keep getting better and more reliable and cheaper.
People do build their own 2D printers. Why? Because you can guarantee there will be no watermarking or identifying information printed into documents, which is very important if you are planning to do illegal things or some kind of counterfeiting. This is also why you never hear about it.
Because nobody needs to. There’s plenty of non-shitty printers without the shitty cartridges.
Epson Ecotank just accepts ink. Like, you pour ink into a reservoir, and it uses that to print. The ink is really cheap, even cheaper than toner for laser printer, and printed photos on photo paper look like any other decent inkjet printing photos
Back in the twentieth century, laser printing used to be the exclusive realm of high volume shared printers in offices, but that price cliff quickly disappeared in the twentyfirst. But somehow, the printing cartridge industry managed to keep the illusion of "I don't print enough to warrant a printing method that isn't plagued by drying it when not in use" alive even while offering laser printers for tens of dollars right next to them. Apparently the lure of pretty colors is that strong. I suspect that even people too young to be born when it was still true regularly fall for "I don't print enough to warrant a printing method that isn't plagued by drying it when not in use"
Well most of the time I print something myself it's some graphics thing that needs colours. Though yeah some people just print black and white text, even though that hardly makes sense anymore. If you need to get text somewhere just send a PDF. Maybe for signing contracts or something, but for that there's adobe acrobat reader.
Colour lasers remain quite expensive and usually don't include the extra scanner which is handy to have at times. Though lasers do have the benefit of being able to print onto clear transparent sheets which inkjets straight up can't unless you get those special roughened ones.
> Colour lasers remain quite expensive and usually don't include the extra scanner which is handy to have at times.
Looking around it seems like most brands have variants of the cheaper models that also have scanners. The last time I bought a laser printer, both color and black and white, it was a simple choice to have a scanner or not. And $330 at office depot is only 50% more than an inkjet.
I mean, looking at what my local stores have on offer you can get a multifunctional inkjet for $90, cheapest colour laser for $340. But realistically are you going to buy the cheapest possible one? You can probably get a very decent inkjet for $150 but for a decent laser you'll probably need to go into the $500 range. It's a roughly 3X price difference.
Still this does surprise me, last I checked they were all over $600 at the very least, so the prices have come down in recent years I guess.
Given that a full set of replacement ink cartridges can cost $70 or more, it doesn't take very many instances of replacing dried-out but otherwise barely used cartridges to make up the difference in up-front cost.
If you regularly print full-color photos, by all means get an inkjet. (Perhaps consider one of the tank-based models, though.) Otherwise, a laser printer will generally be more economical for home printing in the long run, especially if you can settle for a black-and-white model, and you can always take the rare exceptions requiring full color to a print shop or photo kiosk.
There's nothing to disrupt. Anyone who wants to pay more initially and get cheaper ink/toner can do so. Most home users just go look for a super-cheap printer with a good name and buy it. They don't even do proper review checking.
And if you hate the price of ink cartridges, but still don't want toner, there are multiple printers from at least 2 manufacturers on the market that have ink bottles that you refill reservoirs instead of having cartridges. Canon and Epson both make them, and there are probably others that I didn't find. I think "megatank" was the search I ended up with to find some.
Sure, a few years back maybe someone could have disrupted the market... But it's already been done by the incumbents.
Can nobody do anything about the crunchy mechanics of printers? My printer goes through the most incredible warmup routine, running the motors seemingly at random or about a minute and then twists the paper through a maze of rollers. Can we not make these things more 'solid state'?
Photolithography could work. The trick is to avoid waste and keep speed up, which are both really, really good properties of the drum/roller setup of a normal LED printer. So you'd probably have to use photosensitive paper rolling over a dense row of LEDs (kind of a reverse scanner). Which is basically what an LED printer is, except the paper is electrostatically charged and runs through a fuser to adhere the attracted toner.
I was just recently talking to someone about this and what we realized was that printers are such a specific device the only companies making printer components are the ones making printers and they're probably not going to sell components to a startup clearly trying to compete with them (or at least not for a low price). And since printers and scanners use a lot of very specialised parts, you'd basically have to develop and manufacture them from scratch. High costs->low margins->low return->nobody wants to invest. Plus you'd get destroyed by the incumbents immediately because they'd just lower the prices for a year until you went bankrupt and then raise them again.
>>Is there a reason consumer printers haven't been disrupted by some bored billionaire?
Because it is dying technology where innovation resources are put into paperless conversation of things that still require paper today.
Personally I believe we are already there, a person and business can be 100% paperless today if they choose to, many have chosen not do for some reason.
However people choosing to keep their horse and buggy does not mean a billionaire should invest money on making a better buggy
There will always be some demand for printing, even if it is reduced over time. For example I and several my teammates routinely print research papers so that we can take pens/highlighters and mark them up or put a post-it note on some page of interest. Sure, you can theoretically do all the above on a computer, but even with the highest-end tablets I still find it cumbersome to do something as simple as drawing a big circle around a paragraph of text.
That said, printers are certainly a mature technology at this point and I doubt there is much room for disruption.
But here you have even indicated that you have a personal preference for the "horse and buggy" vs the "car" in this analogy the Paper would be the buggy, where as the car would be something like a Remarkable, SuperNote, or iPAD...
So the paperless technology is there, people just choose not to use it, so if I was a billionaire looking to invest in something I would choose to invest in making this technology better, more appealable, and more accessible to more people than I would in disruption of the printer market
Paperless tech is not there. If it was there it would not be so inconvenient to do simple things like underlining some text or crossing out a word. I have tried all the above and it is still too cumbersome to really be comfortable. It's not just me; despite the widespread availability of these devices and the technology generally, people have not really made the switch.
When cars first came out their technical advantages over draft animals were so obvious and undeniable that the world rapidly switched from animals to machines and has never looked back. We have had tablets with styluses and other paper-replacing technology for decades now, but thus far the advantages compared to just using paper have not clearly outweighed the disadvantages and the world has not rapidly switched. To put that in perspective, I have not had a desk phone for more than a decade now, because cell phones are clearly a better thing to give employees; at the same time my desk is within 100ft of a heavily-used printer/scanner/copier.
I have no problems using paperless tech to mark up documents, I do it every day. Highlighting, scratching out text, making notes, etc all on Manuals, Specs sheets, maps, etc. I use (or have used) Android Tablets, Windows 2n1 systems, Remarkable, Remarkable2, and Supernote's for these tasks
Similarly you talk about cell phones being better than desk phones yet thousands of desk phones are still sold every day and when new communications platforms come out targeted to business there is a clear drive to have "certified" desk phones in additional to mobile clients and other soft phones (see MS Teams Certified Deskphones)
So you say the technology is not there to switch to paperless tech but thousands have done just that, and you claim the technology is there to move away from Deskphones yet thousands have not...
I also rely on a printed copy for making sense of dense research papers and it’s not an affectation. Rather, it’s just that the electronic alternatives are not as good: the markup isn’t as flexible, they’re harder to share, they take up screen real estate I need for other things, etc.
Kodak tried once. They sold pigment based printers which had a very good quality and were way cheaper than regular ink to refill. Then they killed it after they filed for bankruptcy in 2013.
The printer I owned saw a lot of use printing in a business setting and it had some build quality issues requiring a replacement every 9 months or so but they always replaced it under warranty with no major hassle.
That kind of sucks but I’d still take that over any regular inkjet now.
