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Print This

Our printer has decided after 5 years of service it is taking a rest… permanently. Therefore, as any good american, we are throwing it away. Fixing this thing is far too scary of a proposition, only because the company who manufactured it back in 1998, Apple, doesn’t even make printers anymore. We have no guarantees that after hundreds of dollars of repairs, that the thing will ever work again.

We have opted, instead, for HP’s LaserJet 5100, the industry leader for high-quality laser printers. It features 11″ x 17″ printing, which is standard for the design industry.

The thing about HP which urks me is that if you buy the low-end printer from HP it costs $1,439.00 (MacMall’s price $1,299.00) and if I want to upgrade the memory of the blasted thing by 128MB it costs $869.00 at HP (Kingston’s price $55.00!?). I find this practice of gouging your buyers for memory upgrades completely unethical. A 128MB memory chip shouldn’t ever cost $869! This unreasonable.

What HP is doing is gouging business people for costs which they, unknowingly, pay. Charging 16 times the correct price for a piddley memory chip is ubelivable and should be stopped by such a respected name in the industry.

One reply on “Print This”

Apparently, it's pretty common practice for printer manufacturers to make their money not on the product but the refills, toner catridges and other replenishable accesories. Some of the low end quality printers are amazingly cheap but then you find out that the ink catridges cost double what the printer did.

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