There were days when dad gave me a gleaming new HP DESKJET 500C inkjet Printer in the early90s, I had marveled at the fact that I could print text in brilliant color. I even had pages of multi colored text with each alphabet in different colors. Our family even made greeting cards to each other using the very first version of Hallmark's Print shop pro. Of course those were days when we couldn't get all our family photos into the gargantuan 700MB HDD I had. Well we finished our first ink cartridge soon enough and went to the local store to buy another one, that's when the reality hit us. Printers are sold using the razor blade business model—the printers are dirt cheap, but you have to keep buying ink for eternity. And wouldn't you know it turns out that printer ink, especially for photos, is probably the most expensive substance per volume you'll ever buy—more expensive than gold, oil, perfume, even blood in most cases. If you're buying name-brand ink cartridges, which typically hold a few milliliters of ink, you're shelling out the equivalent of between $3,000 and $5,000 per gallon. (Suddenly, spending $45 to fill your car's gas tank doesn't seem so extravagant, eh?) Just as an idea of how valuable this particular golden goose is, more than 40 percent of HP's $2.63 billion operating profits from last quarter came from its imaging and printing group alone. In other words, ink keeps printer companies in the black. No surprise, then, that to stave off competition from low-cost generic refill cartridges, the industry giants circled their wagons and began putting chips into their printers and cartridges to make it so that you had to buy their brand. Lawsuits on both sides have since raged fast and free: Canon sued (and won) to keep refilled cartridges from being sold in Japan without Canon ink; HP sued and won for patent infringement against a company that made replacement cartridges. Epson, however, settled a lawsuit claiming their cartridges intentionally signaled they needed replacement when they still had ink left. And more recently one man filed a class-action suit claiming that HP illegally colluded with Staples by giving them a $100 million "bribe" not to carry low-cost replacement ink. Even at barebones prices, it's now far cheaper to order prints through Flickr, Shutterfly or iPhoto, or if you need them in a hurry, from your local Wal-Mart, Walgreens or even mom-and-pop photo store. At my local drugstore, a small chain, if you order more than 100 prints, they're 15 cents each and available in a couple hours on archival paper with archival ink. And I can put my order through online.

Compare that with the cost of photo paper, ink (which in my case, by the way, has to be used at least once every couple weeks or it dries out) and the time involved, and my venerable i70 simply can't compete. So I've put my printer out to pasture for a couple years now, and I haven't looked back.

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