I think the biggest scam going in the tech world isn’t the Nigerian email con – it’s ink jet printers. You can buy a new printer for about the cost to replace the ink. No, I’m not kidding. To replace the two cartridges in my Epson printer will cost me $48.00. The price of a low end HP color printer is $49.99. Apples and oranges, you say? True, the HP replacements would be less. They would only come to $40.00, but that’s still about eighty percent of the cost of the printer. OUCH! Maybe they’ll sell me just the printer for nine bucks? The printer I have now is the king of the con. The documentation says I should get hundreds of prints, even at the highest quality. Yet I couldn’t even get through my Christmas cards without having to change cartridges (at less than the highest quality and only 80 pages of output). Doh!

Any way you look at it, they’ve got me.

I’ll show them… I’ll stop printing things! Yeah, that’s what I said two months ago. Now I find my self pacing the isles of CompUSA like someone granted early release from the coo-coo’ nest, doing the single player debate to it’s full effect. It’s the age old question that has plagued mankind since the advent of “instant credit”: do I try to milk more value out of a product that I’m unhappy with, or do I bite the bullet and try something else?

I wonder what stone tablets go for nowadays?