I think this is an industry problem with digital printers right now. There seem to be several unhealthy conditions which are not only common but across the board.
A monopoly on consumables makes the retail price for toner, drums, etc. very very high for the small percentage who don't have a service contract on larger machines. Can you imagine if you had to fill up your chevy at a chevy-owned gas station only each time? I can see why techs wouldn't want to have a service contract on a machine running some unknown toner fouling developer and such. But the price for consumables seems fixed right now for all practical purposes.
Maybe it simply is not humanly possible to manufacture toner at a reasonable price. The lack of competition in the market may give weight to this. But it's hard to fathom that the cheapest we can produce toner is for $150 per pound for this fine colored plastic powder. The extremely limited to no competition in the market makes the sparse to lone non-oem suppliers like katun price theirs only slightly under the oem price rather than a fair price being set it seems. It sure would be a game changer if consumers had a choice of 3 or 4 different toner manufacturers.
In addition to the monopoly on toner and parts for all practical purposes, we have machines that seem to lose 75% of their value within 5 years which is extremely short.
It seems that contracts across the board have language in them that does not represent what salesman assure customers to sell the machine leases. As you say, some customers can in fact make a much higher profit per print, but I'd bet a very large percentage of printers are sold on the basis of salesman and past experience on fulfillment assuring customers that these printers can be much more cost competitive than the letter of the contract insures. What is the real cost of toner to canon or other oems is the big question?
It's tricky too because it seems sometimes the machine lease is thought of separately from the service. But with only one real source of supplies, this doesn't cut it for me. The machine's value, as wonderful as each new machine is, is only valuable if the supplies and service can be provided at the promised competitive rate. Is a digital printer really worth $50k to $250k if it turns out it can't deliver the click rate it's leased under but instead will cost the printshop $50 to $250k more than running the same jobs on a DI press? So then (with the service rates including toner rates set by the oem practical monopoly on manufacturing the toner) we may have the real-world situation where the service may not be profitable, but without the service the oem would not have leased or continue to lease the machines and made that profit at all.
To make things even more complicated, I do believe a number of customers probably can make a great deal more profit per print and would be happy to pay more. But probably a lot of the cost of the machine itself is R&D to perfect the design. So if you knock out all the shops who use the machines for longer runs based on the current click rates, and they no longer buy the oem's current or future printers, what does that do to the cost of the equipment itself if the sales volume is cut by half or two thirds to those who can afford to run it for the jobs with a much higher price per print?
