Printer Manufacturers Are Having A Rough Time - Lexmark Stops Production Of Printers

The Demise of Lexmark Printers

Lexmark announced in August that it would no longer be manufacturing inkjet printers. For much of Lexmark’s history they have made cheap, subpar equipment that, as one industry professional put it, struggled to print text much less good color prints. However, in the last five or six years they had upgraded their design and manufacturing capabilities and had started to turn out some really good printers.

Lexmark OfficeEdge Pro5500

They are not the only company which is having trouble in the consumer printing market, but one area of long standing concern was the exorbitant amount of money which the company was charging for OEM printer cartridges. It was not unusual for a set of replacement cartridges to cost more than the printer itself, and this was one of the reasons for the demise of Lexmark as an inkjet manufacturer.

There has been an increase across the board in raw materials and some other costs, especially anything associated with petro chemicals. This includes almost all plastics as well as transportation costs, and these rising costs are putting the squeeze on many manufacturers. Lexmark was close enough to the edge that they simply decided to abandon the consumer inkjet market completely.

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Many other printers are also re-aligning their companies to concentrate more on the industrial and professional printing portion of the industry, but the end of Lexmark’s efforts in this area of consumer printing is a blow. They say that the machines out currently will still have warranty and supplies made available, but it is a question as to how long the OEM cartridges will be on the market.

Of course, the high cost of the Lexmark OEM cartridges was one of the reasons that many consumers sought alternatives to the OEM cartridges - after all, who wants to spend more on the ink cartridges than it took to buy the printer itself?

Fortunately, even after Lexmark stops production of the OEM cartridges there will be viable alternatives to the OEM cartridges. As many people have already discovered, high quality remanufactured and compatible cartridges work just as good as the original equipment, and do so at a drastically lower price. One of the reasons that Lexmark is shutting the doors on its inkjet printer line is because the quality of the cartridges is indistinguishable from the OEM cartridges at a price which is much easier to afford.

This is in part due to a strategic decision that Lexmark and other consumer printer companies have made. Rather than charging a fair price for the printer which allows them to make a decent profit, they made the calculation that it would be better to almost give the printer away (and ins some cases there was no ‘almost’ about it - if you bought a new computer you got a printer).

The problem with that was, the compatible ink cartridge industry is very good at what they do. Their manufacturing facilities are modernized and up to date, and their ink formulations are indistinguishable from the OEM inks. And, as mentioned above, Lexmark and other printer manufacturers have decided that they wanted to make most of their money through the sale of OEM cartridges, leaving the remanufactured and compatible ink cartridge companies a huge opening for high quality, low cost products.