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The Cold War had some singular benefits including of course Darpanet, the precursor of the Internet itself. But few today realise how it was mainly won - if anyone did come out of those bitter and twisted decades a victor.

It did not emerge through military might but by boffins playing games. Some of the most brilliant minds in the West were employed in think tanks to develop game theory and literally outplay the strategists of the Communist bloc.

Starting from simple games such as The Prisoner's Dilemma (plato.stanford.edu/entries/prisoner-dilemma), theoreticians worked out the strategies that prevented mutual nuclear annihilation. That same game theory has since been applied to economics, and the Internet itself.

Try as I might though, I have been unable to find any equivalent analysis of the Printer Game, alias The Uninterruptible Income. It currently runs something like this: you buy a printer with all the bells and whistles at what looks like less than the cost of manufacture only to find that replacement ink (or toner) cartridges are almost as expensive as the unit itself. Next, the software support is discontinued even though the printer is still relatively new and far from worn out. That means you have to buy a new one, which inevitably takes different and even more expensive cartridges, and so the process loops again.

This seems to work whether you bought

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an HP OfficeJet G55 a few years ago or are the proud new owner of an HP Color LaserJet 2840. Although these examples both come from HP, I have had similar emails complaining of problems with Epson and other major manufacturers. The G55, reviewed enthusiastically in MacUser (see 9 March 2001), originally cost £299 VAT included, but even now will set you back £38 or so to replace its two cartridges, the ink costing about £1000 per litre. Its drivers for Mac OS X were last updated in September 2005 to support Tiger but do not work under Leopard. Those who are trying to use their G55s under Leopard are being told by HP that there are no plans to support it.

The 2840 on the other hand is now about £320 including VAT - but a complete set of replacement cartridges costs more than £200, while a new imaging drum will set you back £90. Its drivers were last updated for Tiger in July 2006 and three months after the launch of Leopard, there is no sign of any update to enable scanning or faxing under Leopard.

The cheaper the printer, the more overt the Printer Game becomes. A typical modern inkjet printer at about £70 including VAT is likely to cost you £25 to replace its four cartridges - that is, more than 35% of the original printer cost.

You can, of course, buy third-party consumables - remanufactured cartridges and so on - and though some users I know have successfully economised, I have personal experience of, among other things, remanufactured cartridges that were complete duds and wasted hours trying to get them to work.

In the meantime there is another game waiting for a more innovative printer manufacturer - one with some concern over the carbon footprint of all these printers and their refills. In this, it will offer a range of printers based on open cartridge standards, encouraging third parties to supply competitively priced and high-performance consumables. Also, printer firmware will be standardised so that a single, common open-source driver will be portable between operating systems, and supported long term.