Ink is cheap for the company to make. They make a cartridge for 3 dollars and sell it for 30 dollars. A printer costs more to build and they don't make as much money on it because they can only mark it up so high. Plus it will last for years. So it is much easier for them to make 20, 30, 40, dollars every time they sell a cartridge . So if you sell a million printers and make 30 dollars that's 30 million dollars... But then you sell the 1 million people just 4 cartridges over the life of their printer (way conservative) and you have made 80 million dollars if the profit is 20 dollars a cartridge...