By now everyone knows about printer manufacturers giving away cheap inkjets so they can make money on inkjet cartridges. But apparently they are now applying that strategy towards laser printers, specifically color laser printers.

According to this article, a growing trend by laser printer manufacturers is to make no profit or take a slight loss on color laser printers so that they can make a profit in the long run from the toner cartridges. The reason they are doing this now is because the color laser printer market is growing rapidly - it was up 50% last year and up 30% in the first half of this year. Some Lexmark VP said that by 2010, color laser printers could make up 22% of laser printers sold but account for 53% of the total revenue. The simple fact of selling a cyan, magenta and yellow cartridge, instead of just black, is what makes color laser printers so attractive for printer manufacturers. They want to sell to small to medium-sized businesses, their fastest growing market, and they are banking on the fact that people won’t buy a new printer based on sticker shock when it comes time to get the first set of replacement cartridges.

Here’s a graph that we used previously in a post about sticker shock:

Color-laser economics [Kentucky.com]