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Yep. Can anyone explain why this is?
Basically the business model is that if they can sell you a cheap printer at a loss, you won't consider a less cheap model from a company that isn't as shitty. Then they can lock you into years of buying their ink, which is overpriced deliberately.
Last I checked, if you need an inkjet printer, get a Brother or an Epson. All the rest will rip you off in various ways.
Even better, get a laser printer if you can afford it (or don't mind forgoing colour with a b&w model). For these, the above two brands, plus Ricoh, Xerox & Canon have a pretty good reputation last I looked into it
Never ever buy HP anything
On top of this, the starter cartridges that come with the printer are often sized smaller than the refills.
This didn't used to be the case, starter cartridges used to be the same size if not a little bigger than standard cartridges because the expectation was they wanted you to buy the printer be impressed with how efficient it was and buy more ink.
The problem with that was, printers were too reliable, people weren't buying new printers anymore they were only buying the ink so what they did in return was lowered the price of the printers to try to incentivize buying a new printer.
But then people realized well the ink is so expensive that I can just buy a whole new printer which would be the upgraded form and not have to worry about buying ink, which meant no one was buying their ink anymore
So as such they made it so starter cartridges have Jack crap for ink to try to disincentivize the same thing that they incentivized in the first place.
Then of course like every good thing in the world, some executive realize that they could just lower the reliability of the printer and make it a piece of junk, which will accomplish the same effects. But by that time the consumers were used to having nothing for ink and printers anyway so why would they go out of their way to add more ink in the starter cartridges when people were buying it with little to no ink in the starter cartridges, which is how we got to where we are today. Thankfully the laser printer company is while our starting to go in that direction haven't quite become as bad.
TLDR? ; inkjet companies are greedy cash hogs, and was willing to lose a little bit of face in order to make some money. Buy a laser printer, the base cost is quite a bit more, but the toner cartridges last forever and they are significantly more reliable
Also, seriously consider if a library might be a better choice than owning a printer for your use case
I am onboard with the Canon lasers. I got a color mfp/scanner. Off brand toner is less than half the price, and even the Canon toner is less than other brands.
A caveat to the HP thing, they split off their enterprise hardware division years ago, and it's actually a decent company.
Because printer manufactures are money grubbing bastards.
The amount of ink that comes with an inkjet printer is tiny. So a new printer comes with 10mL of ink, and the refills are 35mL or more. You quite literally get what you pay for.
The other reason is that inkjet printers need to be used on a regular basis, or the ink can dry out. But manufacturers have handled this by having the printer drip out tiny bits of ink all the time, so it's literally using the ink even when you aren't using it.
For the vast majority of people, a cheap laser printer is the far better option. Unless you want to produce art prints, but at that point you're looking at spending a ton of money anyways.