Digital BW, The Print

Moreno-

Maybe I'm all wet about the dongle, but I don't see any 
software "going large" that requires one.

As to the pricing. There is no question that even PiezoBW is 
expensive...when it was introduced it was REVOLUTIONARY...and still 
is, to some extent. As/if there is comptetition and greater unit 
sales for Piezo the market will bring the price down.

As I think about the pricing, it is the concept of pricing per 
PRINTER rather than CPU that is unique. I gues they will just have to 
see if this works... All the printer manufacturers (and until MIS 
cloned the Piezo ink) practically give away the printer, DO give away 
the software so they can sell us ink and paper. 

In my case, I bought Cone ink for only a couple of months and had 
clogging issues that drove me nuts, so I tried other solutions and 
one was to use different ink. I still buy a lot of my paper from him, 
but not the ink, so I am presently not as profitable for him as I 
might have been... but a lot of people use the inks (I used carts) 
with no problem and I believe that business has grown nicely for him.

I woould be willing to continue to pay premium prices for upgrades 
(there was no mention in the release of a price for BW 6.0 upgrade 
prices). It sounds like he may have started hitting the resistance 
level if other users react to the price as you do...that will also 
trickle down to decreased sales of inks and paper????

We'll see...

Tom O'Connell



--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@y..., "Moreno Polloni" <mp@d...> 
wrote:
> > Wow... I can't imagine more than 10 people buying software that
> > requires a dingle... This is like going back to the earliest 
versions
> > of Lotus 1-2-3. Equally hard to see a parallel port version of
> > anything selling well.
> 
> You'd be surprised at how many RIPS and 3D imaging programs require 
dongles.
> Quite a few of the higher end packages do. And most RIPS run off 
PC's, so
> parallel port dongles are quite common.
> 
> > I guess Jon Cone has just licensed a version of Image Print...I 
only
> > hope he didn't put a lot of development time and/or money into it
> > because this sounds like a loser...and I think that even if the
> > quality is significantly better.
> 
> I think it has the potential to sell quite well. Copy protection 
isn't the
> issue for me, it's the licensing model. The software isn't 
inexpensive. If
> they are marketing to the typical Piezo user, they'll have include 
licensing
> for two printers in the box.
> 
> > This is just not a concept that is going to be received well by 
many
> > people (IMHO). I have been thinking about ditching my 1160s and
> > upgrading to 1280s or 5000s, thinking this new software would be 
the
> > impetus for me...now I'd better find another 1160<g>.
> >
> > What a disappointment. I usually get incredibly excited about even
> > fairly minor improvements in tools I use so much. Hard to 
understand
> > how they could be this far off (at least from my point of
> > view...maybe I'm isolated, but I suspect not.).
> 
> I think they missed the mark on pricing (for the desktop version). 
It's just
> too expensive for the majority of users. If they were to drop the 
price by
> half, they'd sell ten times as much of the software.