Ever wonder why cables, which used to be part of the peripheral purchase
disappeared in most cases, especially in things like printers?
It's really pretty simple. Although it saves the printer manufacturers
something under a buck, and that probably adds up, and it relieves them
of responsibility to warrant the cable, which I suppose has some small
advantage, in the end, it doesn't make a lot of sense for the peripheral
manufacturers to do it, because it annoys clients, and may even
encourage people to use potentially old or damaged cables to save money,
which may lead to more calls and false warranty returns, etc.
So, why have they done it? This is my theory, but it seems logical...
The retailers, as it is, make no money on selling printers, per se, and
probably true of many peripherals. The money comes from the money the
companies pay for shelf space and advertising, ink sales, extended
warranty sales, and... yep... cable sales.
In fact, it is likely the retailer makes more profit (real profit, not
just by percentage) on the sale of a cable than they do on a printer,
especially low cost printers.
While a USB cable often will sell for $10-15 at a electronics store the
retailer typically might pay $2-4 for a gold plated warranted one, and
literally under $1 for a more generic type.
So, what's my suggestion if you want to save money? Go to your
neighborhood dollar store. Here in Canada, they cost between $1.50 and
$2 for a 6' USB '2.0' unit with a 5 year warranty, so I imagine they
cost about $1 in the US. Even gold plated ones (if you feel that is
required) are about $3-4 in the dollar stores here.
Now, one caveat. Some scanners require more specialized USB cables.
Scanners can require better shielding and require iron cored toroids to
prevent either interference to other peripherals or external appliances,
or to reduce noise to maintain integrity of the data to the computer,
due to the speed it is delivered at. In these cases, a higher quality
cable may be required, but often in this case, the cable will be
included with the peripheral.
Bottom line, try a $1 cable first, if it doesn't do the job, consider
something better. Look for the cable being described as USB 2.0 high
speed... even the cheap ones often are.
The actual spec for the USB cables did not change between USB v1.1 and
v2.0, however, ones that were good enough for the relatively slow speed
USB 1.1 data transfer may not be adequate for error-free high speed USB
2.0 transfers.
Art
