Traveller Vignette 044

“Technology and economics can interact in some very unexpected ways. The ubiquitous LSP OP-500 office printer is a good example – it's a pretty decent office printer, and Ling sell millions each year at Cr 500 a time, making a good margin on each.

But not everybody wants to spend that much on a full-spec printer, so LSP wanted a cheaper printer for the home market, and set out to design one to sell for around Cr 250 each. Thing is, it turned out that making a completely new design with a new production line would actually cost more per unit than simply running off extra OP-500s on the existing production line. LSP would still make a small profit on each OP-500 it sold at that price, but it'd obviously crash sales of the same printer in the office market at a higher price – nobody would pay Cr 500 if they knew people were getting the same thing for Cr 250.

So they thought a bit, added a memory buffer to the cheap version, which did nothing but slow the printing speed down, and packaged it in a cheaper box as the OP-250. Everybody was happy – the home market got a slow printer for Cr 250, and the office market got a fast printer for Cr 500. The fact that the “cheap” printer actually cost slightly more to make than the expensive one – since it had one extra component – didn't bother LSP, as they were making margin over cost on both sales. And I was happy because I could buy OP-250s, pull the memory buffers and re-sell them as “reconditioned-like-new” OP-500s for Cr 350 a time”


(Author's note - This is intended as extra colour for an item or cargo consignment, with the possibility of PCs with the appropriate skills making a little extra money on the side. If it seems implausible, it's actually exactly the situation with the HP Laserwriter and its cheaper cousin the Laserwriter-E. A lot of modern digital cameras work similarly – cheap ones are just expensive ones with some functionality disabled)


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