The punchline to the joke is that I ended up buying a printer. The joke, in the form of a Jeopardy answer, is: What did I NOT go out to buy?
I’ve increased my need for printing lately, and going to Kinkos every time something needs to be printed is a bit of a pain in the ass. I have an old All-In-One jobby that had been serviceable in the past, but has long since been drained of its ink. My plan was to simply go out and purchase some ink for it and start the printing party. Finding the ink was easy enough, the price however, left much to be desired. I know this is a topic that has been beaten to death, and with email/dropbox/thumbdrives, the need for a physical copy has dwindled, but that doesn’t mean it’s completely gone. Printer manufacturers subscribe to the razor/blade business model, which is something that is easy to understand. Yay capitalism and all.
It would also be much easier to understand if the ink for my printer wasn’t 65 goddam dollars.
65 dollars for ink? Are you kidding me? That’s a lot of razor blades. The store I was at had 3 printers for under 100 dollars that came with full ink cartridges, in addition to a new printer; with one model ringing in at 75 bucks. So what do I do? I buy the damn 75 dollar printer because A) it’s better than my old printer by a long shot, and B) I refuse to bend over and take it from Epson to the tune of 65 bucks.
This printer should last until I run out of ink, at which point the viscous cycle will spring anew.