system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How do newspaper companies print so many coloured newspapers, selling them dirt cheap, and yet if I printed a single newspapers-worth, I'd easily spend 20x the price of a newspaper on ink.

I hear all the time that we are often paying for the ink, rather than the printer, but how much of a scam is it and are there cheaper alternatives?
gpt
Not all printing methods are created equal. Your personal inkjet printer is a marvel of technology (and the cost heavily weighted toward tiny capacity consumables) but it is not the least expensive method of printing. Most high capacity printing is going to be done by what is called "offset printers", a method where metal plates are etched with a pattern that conveys ink to a rubber blanket and from there to the paper.

Using an offset printer requires significant expense and lead time to make the metal plates and set up the run, but once going it is an extremely inexpensive method to make printed media in huge quantities. A high upfront cost spread across hundreds of thousands of pages becomes trivial. The limitations of this method are obvious though, it cannot deal with variable data (you want to print different things) and the machine itself will fill a large room rather than sit on your desk.