From the Kodak Wikipedia
spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build up a high-margin printer ink business to replace falling film sales, a move which was widely criticized due to the amount of competition present in the printer market, which would make expansion difficult.[128] Kodak’s ink strategy rejected the razor and blades business model used by dominant market leader Hewlett-Packard by selling expensive printers with cheaper ink cartridges.[129] In 2011, these new lines of inkjet printers were said to be on verge of turning a profit, although some analysts were skeptical as printouts had been replaced gradually by electronic copies on computers, tablets, and smartphones.[129] Inkjet printers continued to be viewed as one of the company’s anchors after it entered bankruptcy proceedings.
wait wait… reading comprehension fail on my part. Both that NBC article and Wikipedia are saying that Kodak went against the grain by selling more expensive printers with cheaper ink.
Eastman Kodak Co. is introducing a line of desktop printers and low cost replacement inks on Tuesday, as the photography company takes on a market dominated by Hewlett-Packard.
Shit i think you’re right
Peffse@lemmy.world 6 days ago
That’s wild!
I had my inkjet from around 2011 to 2015. I think it was a C310 but I can’t find any proof of that. I only know it took the 30B/C cartridges.
They were $25-30 for a bundle on a retailer’s shelf while everything else was closer to $50-70 for a bundle on a retailer’s shelf. There was a 20% yield difference between the two, but that’s no 20% markup! I vaguely recall a 30B double pack that was only $15 total, and that’s what I used to buy once or twice a year. None of that hidden “Cyan mixed in the black to make it blacker” crap that HP did either.
How ironic that Kodak rigged the game to make ink expensive, and then others beat them at it.