Digital BW, The Print

On 7/13/02 2:00 AM, "Editor P.O.V. Image Service" <editor@...>
wrote:

> 
> 
> Robert Morrison wrote:
> 
>> \
>> And on the R&D front...it takes a hell of a lot of money to lead in
>> technology...I used to make polymer inks for a living
>> 
> 
> EPSON doesn't make the pigments or hadn't ever done so AFAIK Robert..

No, but they pay for it...that's how it happens...the person making the ink
needs to do the R&D and protect it...whoever uses it, pays for it...in this
case Epson...and then the people buying the ink.

 
> They simply design the carrier and printer engine, etc..
> 
> So, they are padding the costs for the parts they don't really make and
> working hard to prevent consumers from using those same consumables
> direct from the original manufacturer or other 3rd parties..

That is their business model...and they have every rite to do it that way if
they like.
 
> I'm not saying they don't have a right to make money.  I'm just saying
> that it would be MORE upfront, more honest, and less anti-competitive
> if the costs lay where they fell..  Cost-shifting, BTW, or moving
> decrementing entries from one column to another is EXACTLY the practice
> WorldCom  and other large firms have gotten caught doing.  The moving of
> costs from periodical to capital expenses doesn't change revenue, it
> just boosts perceived profits...

> Not much different ethically from
> making a printer appear much cheaper than it is by artificially
> depressing the initial purchase price and artificially increasing
> consumable costs (certainly though EPSON does not hurt as many interests
> as our new Robber Barons have - EPSON just soaks users for costs that
> most never even dreamt of)..

This is a completely ridiculous charge.  There is absolutely no cost
shifting here in the Worldcom or Enron sense.  Those cases involved actually
accounting fraud (saying things were capital when they were just expenses).
Epson sells two products: printers and inks...they decide which way they can
best make money...its a simple as that...an incredibly common and LEGAL
practice in business.

> AND the current EU investigation into
> pricing and anti-competitive practices by EPSON,  HP, and Lexmark proves
> that others (some with a lot of legal and market clout) agree..
> EPSON makes great products which I use happily.  They have driven the
> digital printing prosumer market. That doesn't make every move, even if
> justifiable, the best ethical choice.
> 
Of course in the end this is kind of a ridiculous charge because in the end
most of on these lists regularly use 3rd party inks with our Epson
printers...I guess the the EU investigators don't know about  us.   The chip
in the end is just an attempt to buy some time to make some money before
they are ripped off.

If they shifted their pricing structure to the printers...my guess is that
none of us would be doing quad printing because a 9000 class printer would
be in the Iris price range and we would be stuck trying to use service
bureaus to do our printing...I did that for 8 years and I'm really happy
that Epson decided to use the pricing structure that they did so that I
could afford to put quad inks in a cheap printer.

Robert