Printer

I have an HP Color LaserJet 1600 printer that I bought 3 years ago. Like most electronics, I have in the back of my mind stuff I'd like to get, and then usually buy stuff on a snap, spur of the moment decision one day, usually when I'm fed up with something not working. Prior to this, I had an HP Laserjet 5 (black and white) that I bought in 1996, and had worked perfectly forever and ever, and was only now not as usable because the 4 megs (yes MEGS) of memory it had were not keeping up with today's large-scale documents. (footnote, the PC I had when I bought that printer had 8 MEGs of memory, and the video card had 1 MEG, so 4 meg was a lot then). I also had an HP Color Deskjet that I got free buying a stamp-making program quite awhile back. I hated inkjet printers from day one - ink always ran out, it was expensive, it dried out, sometimes smudged if you didn't wait long enough for it to dry, black always ran out before the rest, etc. Have NEVER liked them!!!! So one day back in Jan 2007 when I couldn't print something on either printer, I stormed over to Staples and bought a color laser (the holy grail of printers to me) for $300. To compare, my HP Laserjet 5L in 1996 was $425 :)

Anyway, to my story - when I bought the printer, I also checked out the costs of replacement toner cartridges. To my dismay I found that to replace all 4 toners (black + 3 colors) was also $300. This seemed odd to me because the printer came with all 4 cartridges and was $300. But I also knew toner lasted a long time (and it did). Yesterday though, it finally came time to replace them, and I compared again to the price of a new printer, and new printers were still $300. It is just hard me to fathom that they're giving away the printer basically "free" so you'll keep buying toner. I'm sure they make a bunch on the toner. Just another artifact of our throw-away society I guess...