Printer Markets

The printer market has several overlapping segments.

The home market mainly buys cheap little inkjet printers. People don't print much but since there are huge number of them all those cartridge sales make a huge revenue stream. Printer makers are sometimes said to subsidise printer sales by up to 30% to get end-users on board.

Small businesses and personal printers obviously overlap with home use. Performance might be an issue but the price of cartridges tends to be the main problem. Business quality inkjets tend to have four separate colour cartridges and the better models also have separate printheads. However the Epson piezoelectric printheads also take this approach and Epson's technology tends to be quite well suited to photography.

Large format printers come in many types. Canon and HP use thermal printheads on most machines

Home Print

Home and small office inkjets. These printers sell in huge numbers but they are not much used. Average use of a home printer is apparently about 2 pages per day.

There are huge variations in home printer use. The majority reason for having a printer these days is probably to print out interesting web-pages - for instance if your buying a washing machine but want to look in the shops as well. Holidays and Job-hunting are other reasons. Paper records of transactions are another reason to print - people feel more secure with financial records on paper where they won't dematerialise. These uses are somewhat thrown because web pages often don't print correctly.

Correspondence has declined in favour of e-mail and social networking. It isn't necessary to connect a computer to the Internet but its unusual not to.

At one time it was common for students to submit essays on paper, now they are likely to be sent online.

Many home printers are "multifunction", they have a scanner on top allowing them to act as copiers.

Home printing falls a long way short of the science fiction dream. Visionaries have suggested newspapers and magazines designed for their readers and printed at home. There are few technical reasons why this can't be done and advantages to it in terms of logistics and usefulness as against mass produced printed products.  The problem is the price of ink. It isn't clear why printer ink has to be one of the world's most costly substances.

Business Market

Offices buy inkjet printers as well tend to buy laser printers.

The primary interest here is in the mid range printers, consumer inkjets and business laser printers for instance. We do mention things such as thermal print and wide format machines but they are mainly covered elsewhere.