Paul's Comments

I decided to split this entry off from the one about the Office Max catalog as I realized this is really a totally separate article.

Looking at the Office Max catalog, I see that they are selling Lexmark laser printers, basically at the typical full price of a printer, around $400-800 depending on features. Based on what Lexmark cartridges cost, they should be giving the printers away. Let's see what a Lexmark cartridge costs. The C543dn is a color laser, costs $399.99, will do a 35,000 page per month duty cycle, has 128mb of memory, and uses the 21724528 black cartridge, which I am having trouble finding. That number is an Office Max SKU and I can't find the cartridge for the C543dn, which frightens me even worse about what it would cost. I'll go to their website - or someone's - and see if I can find the cartridges for the Lexmark C543dn. Well, something is wrong because Office Max's website doesn't even list a cartridge for a C543dn. And the printer itself is there on the catalog and web pages.

Their website doesn't have the cartridge when I tried that SKU. So this is amazing; Office Max will sell me a $400 color laser printer that as soon as I run out of toner, it's a boat anchor! This is so funny as to be absolutely tragic. So I'll try Lexmark's own website. Oh, Lexmark will sell me this printer directly at the same price as Office Max, $399.99.

Well, I am surprised to find that the cartridges sold by Lexmark are the C540 series, which is $44.99 for black and $58.99 for each of cyan, magenta or yellow. I am really surprised that they're not as expensive as I expected. Oh yeah, they're the "prebate" cartridges where you're only supposed to use them once, then send them back to Lexmark for remanufacture. Yeah, right, if I buy your cartridge, it's mine; once it's empty, it's going to Staples or whoever else is offering the best return deal. You want it back that bad, pony up some rebate cash. Staples offers $3 apiece in store credit for all ink cartridges, up to $30 a month. Or that might just be inkjet, maybe they offer a little more for laser cartridges.

One time I had my brother go in and turn in a cartridge for the - what I thought was - cash rebate, but they weren't offering that. What they were offering was a free package of paper. Oh, let's see, a $3 cash refund or a package of paper - which I can use and will still eventually need anyway - that will cost me $4 to buy? Hmm, okay, I'll be happy to take that instead.

It doesn't tell me the estimated page count for the C540 cartridge. Oh, the specs page does: 2,500. But the color is only estimated for about 1,000 pages. Okay. Now let me try a comparison to a competitor.

Brother HL4040CN, same $399 price, but their cartridge price is actually more than the Lexmark at $59.49 for black and $69.49 for each of the three colors. Estimate 2500 black/1500 color pages.

So Lexmark's price per page is 1.7c for black, 5.9c for color; Brother's price is 2.3c for black, 4.6c for color. So it basically means that you're still better off with Brother over Lexmark as presumably you purchase a color laser because you regularly use color in your documents more than just occasional spot color.

So maybe Lexmark has realized that they can't be the high-price leader, and have become more reasonable on printer pricing. Or maybe it's just on inkjet printing that they're outrageously expensive. Hmmm, Office Max does not have any injet printers from Lexmark, maybe it means they realize they can't be competitive in that market and they've moved on to laser exclusively.