Well yea, that’s like buying a car and tossing the whole thing out if the fuel injectors go out because you can buy the whole car for almost the cost of the fuel injectors. It’s bizarre.
Besides the horrible environmental consequences of throwing away all this expensive massive tech, that is still like new, and having to move the damn things, which is enough in and of itself, there is no real incentive for Epson to be producing all these “disposable” printers. They never made a profit selling big printers. It’s all in the ink and media. They could sell you a design of piezo head that is user replaceable, as Roland did with Seiko heads for about 15 years. They were super easy to replace as were the pumps and dampers and easy to get to. And much of the improvements of the next series could be done with firmware improvements or modular part improvements that they sell you in a kit. Canon would have never captured that level of market share if they had thought this way. Really as long as the 9900s were out there, very little parts were changed for the P9000 series. I think even the heads are the same.
For some reason Epson just does not want any end user replacing anything on their machines, and I doubt that will change.
This makes sense.
In any case, I think the real reason why extended warranties don't extend beyond three years is that the statistical risk of repair increases with age, so the longer they are extended the more expensive they would be and there is probably some limit to the market for that kind of insurance. I would count on them to have evaluated this, but perhaps they've been less imaginative than the auto manufacturers who have offered different warranty periods on different components.
