Peter Normington wrote:Phil am not defending them anymore than
any business that wants to make a profit.
When you sell a piece of vinyl that you paid 2quid for, for £50, I'm sure you justify it by the time effort and capital expense you have put into it.
why should any business be any different?
dont like it, dont buy it
but if you sell print at a good price why not expect your supplier to get a good return from their product, the same as you do?
Peter
Point is peter, if you buy a Ford, once it is out of warranty( or even in warranty if you don't mind voiding it), you can use whatever oil, brand of fuel, tyres etc you like. Ford do not bind you into an arrangement that makes you buy Ford goods forever.
Chipped ink sets do. For the unwary, the buyer is not told at purchase that you will be obligated to buy mimaki, in this instance, products for he life of the machine. Your rights have been removed... that is the right to source better, cheaper ink. It also reduces the need for mimaki to be competitive in the market, because you have got, literally, a captive audience and market already locked in.
I've had this argument with Roland for years. Printer manufacturers would get better results if they gave users more options rather than none.
100's of Roland users have changed over to techink bulk systems in oz alone. Thats sales that roland are missing because they don't provide the option.
Thats why Ford started selling the LPG vehicle in oz. They could see the millions 3rd party companies were making converting their cars, so they finally got the message and tapped into that market.
Printer manufacturers should take note.
I have got no problem with any manufacturere making a profit. Roland, Mutoh, Mimaki are selling very well around the world. I can't imagine that they are not making a decent profit on the machines, based on the sales I see in Oz alone.
At our recent sydney sign show, the sales taken for printers and associated equipment was reported to be around $20mil over the 3 days.
One of the busiest stands were the companies selling bulk inks, and techink didn't even bother showing up.
I understand what Phill is saying though.
Imagine how far you got if you made a client sign a document that he had to deal exclusively with you for any sign he got done for the life of his business. It would be deemed illegal, and rightly so.
Only thing I disagree with is Phills comment about the dongle.
I don't have an issue with that at all, but coming from a software industry background, we went the dongle route with our software as it was the only way we could fight software piracy with any success.
We developed one of the first dongles for the C64, after being robbed blind by software pirates out of hong kong. We lost our house because so much money was stolen thru piracy. Once the dongle came into play, the pirates moved on to easier software to steal.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like the idea of a dongle getting fried and I'm at the mercy of the software company to get it replaced, but I also understand it as a necessary evil given the dishonest world we live in.
I have a dongle on my aging sign wizard software. Heaven knows how much it will cost me to get replaced, especially as its an lpt port, which are getting pretty rare on PC's these days....