The sad part is that inkjets aren’t inherently bad. They’re just a different way to print. They can make some fantastic, deep, high-resolution colors. It just so happens that this type of printing is being ran in such an anti-consumer way that it’s borderline unbelievable.
Ink is cheap. It’s INK. I can go to the art store and find thousands of different types of ink. It’s just water with coloring in it. It’s not special. However, HP sells their ink at a cost that is about 4x the cost of gold by weight. I can understand it being a little more expensive than just ink in a tube, but this is insane.
We should have inkjet printers that have caps on the top of the cartridges to let you add your own ink. No DRM. Buy common ink at the grocery store, and it’ll work with most vendors. Open the lid, add your ink. Dried up? Wash it under the sink. Really dried up? Buy an empty cartridge for $6.
Our society has advanced enough to where this is a solved problem. We have figured out INK of all things. We know what ink is, and we know how to put it on a sheet of paper. Civilization hasn’t been stumped on how to put ink on paper for decades, and it’s not like we’re in a position where only vendors like HP can save us. It’s 100% greed, all of it, and it’s so shameless that it reads like something out of Snow Crash or something.
Imagine if you bought a ketchup bottle from the grocery store, and refilled it with more ketchup when it was almost empty. Then, the ketchup bottle phoned home and figured out that you missed a ketchup subscription payment, so it refused to squirt ketchup. Ain’t it silly when I compare HP’s model to ketchup, yet both circumstances are literally dispensing a liquid?