printer ink, it costs them like 3 cents to make each cartridge and they sell it for so god damn much.
they also go out of their way to have chips in the cartridges and in the printers that make the printer not function if any ink is even running low, doesn't matter if you want to print something in black and white you had better fucking buy more cyan ink
The whole issue here is that people fall for the trick of buying the cheapest printer available, that is clearly way cheaper than what it costs to build. Then people get cranky for having to buy these proprietary cartridges which are way overpriced to cover the cost of the printer.
The easiest solution is to buy a laser printer (unless you need photo finish on your prints). It's a higher initial cost, but it never dries out. Would it cost me more that an ink printer in the long run? Maybe, but with my infrequent printing, i wouldn't have to replace dried out cartridges every year.
Anyone who buys a color laser printer should be aware that the initial cartridges, at least from HP, are not as full as refills, so you will have to replace them fairly soon and it is expensive. That being said, the refills will last a looooong time.
Also, and the main reason why I purchased one, the printer will just work, even if you don't print anything for a couple of weeks, or months even. I went through a couple of inkjets (not the cheapest ones), which would constantly get dried out, a head clogged, etc, before I said "fuck it," and sprung for a laser. My wallet isn't that happy, but it sure is nice not gambling on whether the damn printer will actually print.
I had an amazing multifunction colour laser printer. It always worked. It scanned straight to OCRd PDF which it placed on an FTP server. It was full duplex, in printing and scanning. It copied ultra-quickly. The toner was endless, or so it seemed. It was everything I needed and wanted in a printer.
But my wife thought it was “ugly” and “too big”. It became a real sticking point, this thing. So eventually it was replaced by a shitty ink-jets so “we could print good photos at home”. Now it’s clogged up to fuck, no amount of head cleaning works and she’s complaining about the shitty quality prints.
Stand your ground on a good printer. Stand. Your. Ground.
We need a law that makes it illegal for someone to cause you to lose your beloved printer, despite the way it may look. We need an anti-discrimination law to protect them because they can't protect themselves. We can call it the Stand Your Ground Act...wait.
Yeah. And we should be able to legally marry our printers too. I'm sick of the fact that nobody recognized my relationship with my printer even though we sleep together every night. In ever sense of that term.