Same is happening with laser printers as inkjet printers. I think I have last laser printer ever, where you can add color powder from an Ebay bottle. Samsung CLP-315 was manufactured in 2007.
The more expensive the printer, the amortized cheaper the cost per page and the more repairable it is. I worked at nuclear engineering firm and a Pac10 university in IT on the budgetary side. The cheap laser printers were almost always unrepairable. I remember this one laser printer, an HP 5si, that had a page count over 1 million pages.
At home, I had an HP LaserJet 4 from mid 90's that worked for around 25 years. I think I changed the toner cartridge once from Laser Monks.
People who buy inkjet printers keep throwing them away because they dry up or their cheap displays stop working, and end up buying another cheap throw-away printer and set of cartridges. The razor-blade economy is in the cartridges and almost giving away the printers. And they never last, and people keep throwing the old ones and buying new ones.
ProTip: home gamers should buy a repo big name corporate laser printer, preferably black&white or maybe the medium/higher-end color mopiers. Never the entry model because they're cheaply made.
The detail that people forget is that printers are mechanical and therefore suffer from mechanical wear.
With laser printers that go on forever the toner cartridge includes a fair heft of the parts that would wear out. With ink jet printers this is not the same. Also, are you changing just the ink or the nozzles too?
Regulation could have rigged this market to have avoided the race to the bottom that went on. The razor blade sales model is okay for razor blades, you are spending tops $10 on the razor and it is clear in the box that you are not getting the full complement of replacement blades that cost $20 and are next to it in the store.
With inkjet printers it was a deceptive practice. Only after you were back buying ink did you clock the start pack inks.
Some of the printers did not include a black ink.
In the EU the regulation of USB power charging worked out well for everyone, we no longer have drawers full of 'wall warts'.
Had printers been regulated so that there was a minimum amount of pages that a new printer would print without running out of ink with the ink not running dry during the 2 year warranty period then the market would have been more sensible. Oh, and no proprietary replacement inks.
The price of a new printer would have been higher however there would have also been a secondary market in second hand printers. With the razor model there is no secondary market, at best you are giving a printer away rather than charging for it because it costs more to put ink in it than it costs for someone to just buy a new one.
The original inkjet printers were a wonder of fine engineering. I particularly liked the way the original ones held the freshly printed page to dry before dropping it into the tray. In 1990 you needed an expensive dye sublimation printer with mega expensive consumables to print colour. The inkjets came along and made colour something to take for granted. This was wonderful.
But the razor model made it impossible for the inkjet to keep the awe it truly deserved. In time the printers got nastier and nastier, e.g. the Lexmark efforts that are landfilled rather than cherished. Had there been just the smallest bit of regulation in the EU then that would have affected how these things were sold globally and there wouldn't have been such a wasteful race to the bottom.
Ah the loud sound of 24-pins hitting a ribbon onto a continuous sheet of paper! The sound of my upcoming birthday party's banner coming out of the printer...
Inkjet are far better for photographs. Laser-printed photographs lack any kind of vibrancy. Put photo paper through a laser printer and chances are it'll melt into the rollers.
The article did not address this use case enough, but it was addressed in part.
> Reproducing colors in photographs accurately demands a lot more than just some barrels of color ink; it demands a high-resolution printer and special, treated paper that can hold colors better than plain old printer paper can. You can buy that stuff too, of course, but doing so expensive and complicated, which makes it hard to recommend when you could alternately just send your photos to a photo printing service and get much better results than you’d get at home for a fraction of the price.
I don't think you get both higher quality and lower price.
I like large prints (A2) of my photos. I print them at home, after disappointing results from a service. I bought a Canon imageprograf 1000 - the cartridges are very big and the print costs are somewhat reasonable. When using expensive paper, the quality is impressive. It's not a cheap hobby, whenever I change cartridges, it's about 500, which hurts. Luckily they last a while. At larger sizes, I still send them to a printing service, those printers would be too expensive and used very rarely.
Many home users print less than a page a week on average. Just the occasional concert ticket or homemade sign/postcard.
If you print a page a week, that means a $25 cheapest Inkjet, plus $20 of fake inks will let you have a working printer for 4 years for $45. Always turn the printer off to prevent ink drying up.
No laser solution can give me the ability to print for $11/year.
There's only been a couple times recently that I've bought an online ticket for something, but in each case I'd have the gate agent at the venue just scan the QR code on my phone. Are online tickets that must be printed a common thing, and I just haven't run across it yet?
'Many home users print less than a page a week on average.'
I am a one-man business and home user, printing on average less than this. I've used the sama canon inkjet printer for several years and changed the ink maybe twice in this time.
Recently though, while staying with my dad, I bought another cheap inkjet partly because he needed a printer too and it would be useful for when ever I was there.
I made the mistake of buying a 'Google Cloud-print' compatible printer since my dad uses a Chromebook. I have to say that thing has put us both through hell and is the worst purchase I have ever made.
Pardon the rage, but this blog is simply a rant masquerading as technical opinion.
Laser printers do NOT have better quality to a comparable inkjet printer. This is what happens when individuals with expertise in a specialized area (such as programming), think that gives them some right to pass off opinion as fact in other fields, such as printing economics or procurement.
For those curious about the details, the industry has been more or less disrupted with the new generation of tank printers. Epson and HP even have begun offering printers with massive ink tanks that bring down the cost of prints to much lower than a US cent. You can do even better than that with bulk buys or sourcing the ink from discount stores, better sources than open retail.
Also, you “absolutely don’t” need to print every page in color, but it makes it a whole lot better if you do. Once you’re used to the difference in quality, there’s very little else that will feel as good. This is personal preference of course and if your requirements at present are only black and white documents, those will look a lot better with the higher dpi prints too.
There’s another thing to be said about titles such as “no good reason to ever do x” ; Just because one person in a narrow minded existence sees no reason to, that doesn’t mean there’s never a good reason to. This toxic BS is what makes the tech industry so hard to have constructive conversations in.
I think you're overblowing things here. It's not "toxic BS", it's just a piece he put out on his blog with his opinion.
Your mention of tank printers is helpful but given his article is from 2016 the trend may not have been so obvious back then as it is now (to you; I don't bother following the printer market).
Interesting. You're saying that one mustn't take the writings in a blog seriously, because . . its a blog? Here are a few choice quotes from the blog:
> Which gives me, as your nerd friend who gets asked about this stuff all the time, an opportunity to pre-emptively pass along to you a little bit of purchasing advice.
> because literally the only thing that inkjets had going for them was the fact that they were massively cheaper than lasers. They lose on every other front.
> And then there is the big problem with inkjets, which is that ink for them is just ludicrously expensive.
1. There's no premise of "hey, i might be wrong here, this is what i think", in fact the first quote begins with the premise that, as a "nerd friend who gets asked about this stuff all the time", somehow this writer is an expert. Personally ,this seems as presumptive as the manufacturers "gouging" on peoples novice understanding of printing economics and technical ability, thus charging a premium for the abstraction of the details and upfront subsidy in the form of hardware discounts to later charge for supplies, that the author rallies against in the entire blog.
2. The 2nd and 3rd comments are just plain wrong. Writing them in a blog or anywhere with the conviction that they're right will do nothing to further ones reputation as someone who knows what they're talking about or has done a reasonable job searching the internet or any other source for details that may disgree with ones view before putting it out there.
3. The blogpost is from 2016, but tank printers and the economics that the blog covers have been around for much longer than that (>5 years now)
The issue i take with this whole opinion isn't the fact that it is wrong. Again, debate on ideas is a very healthy exercise and must be encouraged. It's the presentation of an opinion as unquestionable and absolute fact that reduces the whole piece to one that's not in good taste. This writing style is more and more prevalent in tech where authors tend to cling to their POV with absolutes rather than approach an engineering problem/statement with an open mind and present ideas/opinion as what they are . . Ideas and opinions. Not absolute fact that cannot be questioned under any circumstance.
Have they fixed the problem that inkjet printers dry up if you print infrequently yet? Some months I only use my laser once. Can a modern inkjet survive that?
There're (relatively cheap) lasers with scanners. I have a Brother L3510CDW color laser, scanner and copier, for about $300. Then you have things like the L1610, laser B/W and scaner, for $100.
One thing the article does't mention is that the ink cartridges get clogged and dry if the printer was left idle for some time. I had lost a significant amount of money to this before changing to lasers and never looking back.
Also Epson, Canon and HP were so bad actors in the 90's and 00's that I would never buy a printer from them again. Fool me once...
Yep. We have one partly for this, and partly because so we had a printer that wasn't in my office. It cost $19 and hasn't run out of ink yet, we figure when it does we can buy another three $19 multifunction printers instead of spending $60whatever on ink.
I agree, laser printers these days are an interesting option to consider (one advantage he didn't mention is the speed of printing, which makes life significantly easier when you often have to print large stacks of documents)
However, what I don't like is his treatment of colour printers. He somehow concludes that the only use-case for consumers to print in colour would be photos and then goes on that printing photos at home produces crappy results, so you shouldn't do it anyway. Therefore, consumers do not need to print in colour. QED.
I'm always wary of "tell me one reason you're gonna use it for" type arguments, where the asker then goes on to treat the answer as an exhaustive list of use-cases. Only because I cannot think of a use-case in that very moment does not mean a use-case doesn't exist.
For colours, additional use-cases would be colour-coded diagrams or documents that for various reasons, you just want to look pretty.
I'd argue "these days", this advice isn't as true anymore as it was some years ago. Office inkjets now beat many laser printers on printing costs again, you can buy inkjet printers you refill with an ink bottle, ...
I wasn't quite clear: I'm not talking about refilling used cartridges, but printers that have tanks and are designed for that. Those aren't that messy in my experience.
>I'm always wary of "tell me one reason you're gonna use it for" type arguments, where the asker then goes on to treat the answer as an exhaustive list of use-cases.
In the original article author's defense, I think his argument does scale out properly to large portion of the population, who have no need to print anything more than documents. On the off chance (once a year?) something needs to be printed in high quality paper with colour, I'd jog down to the local Kinkos/Staples instead.
If you print colour-coded diagrams regularly, then the cost-benefit analysis falls apart, but I would argue that you might be a smaller part of the general population than you expect.
I maintain a single Brother household MFC, had it for nearly a decade, changed the toner twice, drum never. We print notes, documents, and legal contracts for work, etc... even the occasional diagram that gets put in the print queue doesn't _need_ to be in colour. It'd certainly be nice, but it's not a dealbreaker either.
I print color documents all of the time on my home (Dell C1710nw) laser printer. The necessity of color is heavily dependent upon which type of documents are being printed. Life isn't monochromatic for me.
Now at work there are only rare occasions that I print anything at all, preferring electronic copies of everything. When I do print, most everything is monochrome.
It's also worth nothing that these days there are many LED printers, which use the same kind of tech as laser printers, but substitute expensive lasers with LEDs. They typically have a bit lower DPI, but are also significantly cheaper while still keeping cost-per-page down.
My OKI color LED printer cost about 150$ and has network printing support, duplex unit and contains pretty large toners.
Actually, I had a hell of time clearing a paper jam just the other day. Had to completely rip apart the duplexer. First malfunction in years. Definitely one of my better tech investment. Colors are better than I expected. Output is so much more professional looking compared to inkjet.
I don’t think the OP has children. Mine are the primary users of our printer, and never print in black and white, since “regular” essays are mailed in. They print out photos, colored shapes, game maps, etc.
I probably print out something twice a year, and quite often only so I can move it to the scanner tray and fax it in to some government office (because nothing else in the house but our printer has a modem, and Portuguese post office/customs/etc. still operate in the Middle Ages).
And even then the main reason I do that is that I prefer to use the printer menus than install HP’s utterly hideous Mac software.
yeah. A pack of toner costs $300 then, but hey "the print won't wash away" (modern ink won't either) and you have a little bit of microdust for your lungs...
HP's pagewide inkjets have print heads wide enough to print the entire page in one pass and compare pretty well to medium end small business laser printers on cost and speed.
They're still not a good option for light home users though.
I print rarely enough (quarterly? twice a year?) that I just go to 7-11 and use their multicopier when I need to print. It has a color laser and photo printer, as well as being stocked with postcards so you can print those for Xmas.
The only downside is you just know all your files are being cached indefinitely on the internal harddisk and will end up god knows where when it's been decommissioned.
I am in Sapporo, the cost of a black and white print is 10 yen, a color print is 50 yen. My print needs are very low. I recently printed 36 color prints, and 30 bw prints. (Less than $20 USD) It's been more than a year since my last need to print anything. Store was 3 minute walk from apartment.
I know in USA there are many print shops with comparable prices, but the time required to use the services is a larger factor.
I'm glad for the convenience, and for my low print needs. Space and cost of a printer would be annoying.
I speculate there are large numbers of people that don't fully utilize their printers and could be served by a print service better.
These are inkjet printers but no cartridge. Rather you buy ink in bottles and fill the tanks up. 4 bottles cost $4 for a fill up. And I finish more than three 500 packs of papers before ink ends.
Plus most of these printers have scanners on top. So you can use it also as a color photocopier.
In this specific case it’s about margins. They sell the razors (and starter packs) at cost then make all the money selling high margin blades. Quantity of engineering isn’t relevant, they’ve got their production lines well and truly set up, now they just hit “run” and "overcharge" you. That’s why dollar shave club exists. Even Harry’s bought an existing maker of blades in Germany.
This is evidenced by the fact that safety razors sell in 100-packs for $15 on Amazon ($0.15 each) while a 15-pack of Mach 3 cartridges (the simplest/oldest variety AFAIK) sells on Amazon for $22 ($1.45 each). Unless you're suggesting that the "engineering" it took for them to sell you 1.5 safety razors in a piece of plastic is worth 10X the price of the blades alone, I'd posit that's where the margin is.
Theres also plenty of modification kit available to install those tanks on regular cartridge printers. That way you can still get the cheap printers, though it is considered an "unauthorized modification", so you can forget about warranties and such..
There is no catch, if you define a catch is something you learn after you've paid for the product.
But at first I was so skeptical that I went down to the local stationery supplier to price a bottle of ink for the Epson EcoTank before purchasing the printer. It really was $14 for bottle rated at 6K pages. The print nozzles were guaranteed not to dry out if unused for 2 years - and the printer came with a 3 year warranty so I guess that's real.
I owned a Brother Colour laser before this. It was a lovely printer. It cost the same as the EcoTank and was a bit faster, but a set of genuine toner cartridges cost almost as much as the printer. And the inkjet is lighter, smaller and uses far less power.
The only down side is Epson's Linux drivers truly suck. They looked to provide source but it turns out that's just the front end - the rendering engine is shipped as pre-built libraries that get linked in at the end. And of course those libraries get SIGSEGV's, yielding only a bank page. Looking for the reason is how I found out there was no source for them. The scanner software their download centre offers didn't work at all. When I chased that down I found it was open source, provided presumably for free by kind person from Norway and Seiko rebranded it and made it available in their download section for my printer. That kind person did list the hardware it worked with, and my printer wasn't in the list so I don't know why Seiko put it there. Finally the PWG/Raster protocol, aka cups internal raster format, aka "cups driverless", aka cloud print didn't work at all. Way to go, Epson.
What did work is CUP's native escpr drivers. So I can print, and even with these old drivers the colour quality is better than the laser. So I'm happy. But brickbats to Seiko/Epson for their godawful software nonetheless.
my father recently bought and returned an Epson WorkForce ET-3750 which he had purchased to replace his older WF. It required two updates out of the box just to get it to work remotely on par with the older WF printer. It was still much slower afterward. Scanning was also a step back in that it cannot scan both sides on its own. However the biggest problem was that it was much noisier.
So do a lot of research before jumping into the pool. The printer manufactures are not giving away their premium on cartridges at similar price points.
Me, I got a WF2650 for less than thirty bucks from Epson over the holidays on clearance with free shipping. For me they are disposable at that price and I have done that more than once. Fortunately the local waste site has a separate section for small electronics like these
They’ll be shipped on an aging vessel to an unknown poor African country to be disassembled by unlicensed, unprotected children, often under near slavery conditions to extract any precious metals. Just so you know for the next Gilette razor you buy.
You’re trying to make people disgusted by this situation but I’m just not because the only thing even more disgusting is the alternative : those African children having no job and starving. Brb, Off to buy some Gillette razors to keep them employed !
You can only make that statement when the following statements are also true:
1. The children are rational economic citizens
1a. They have a complete view of the job market
1b. They take into account the cost of the number of healthy years lost
1c. They are informed on the health implications of their line of profession
2. The market of metal salvaging is not substituting another market (for example farming or fishing)
3. The children are not coerced or enslaved
All of these statements are most likely false. By promoting the development of the metal salvaging market, you are preventing a third alternative: the development of new markets (or the sustenance of healthier markets).
...which is what people that use a lot of ink have been often doing anyway with other models: buying the ink in bottles, injecting it into old cartridges and resetting the gauge chip.
Back when I was studying, I bought a $50 black-and-white laser printer for printing out my school work. It was fantastic to use, but when the toner cartridge ran out, the cheapest replacement I could find was $150.
It turned out to be more economical to buy a new printer rather than replace the cartridge.
Not the op but I used to do that. Now I buy fake cartridges on aliexpress or ebay. Toner can make such a mess that is hard to clean up. Just not worth the hassle.
Perhaps I've been lucky enough to buy laser printers with easy to empty and refill toner cartridges (brother)... The only problems I've had with messiness are when cleaning the roller, which, I do like, once every year or two maybe?
I got a HP LaserJet Pro P1102W I bought several years ago. The replacement toner cartridge costs about 40% of what I paid for the printer.
However, the cartridge that came with the printer lasted for about a hundred or so pages, while the replacement cartridge lasts for about 1500 pages, so about 10x longer.
Laser printers can produce ozone[1] which, while nice high up in the atmosphere, is not very nice to breathe. That said, it seems for casual printing this shouldn't be an issue, especially with newer models[2].
If you require an A3-capable multi-functional color printer that doesn't cost more than a decent car and fits on a desk, it seems you're stuck with quite cheap inkjet varieties.
At least here I can only find Epson and Brother varieties which have a predictable quality given their price point. And the ink is quite expensive.
Actually the infamous HP printers (Officejet 86x and up) had/have pretty good per page costs (color <10€cts/page, b/w <5€cts) even with the "expensive" original cartridges AND they work superbly with GNU/Linux. Brother and Epson also have some models with an attractive per page cost, with the former even not hindering the use of 3rd party-cartridges/refilling.
And sincerely, once you want (other question is if you need it) a color printer, most of the points of this guy are just plainly wrong if not FUD:
- color prints with lasers are horribly expensive if you buy a <1000€ machine. Also refill-cartridges are the same thing as with inkjets.
- if you buy a used +1000€-machine be prepared to replace the drum (~300€) and set aside a hefty pile of cash for toner cartridges – while they may last 10k-15k pages, 300€ per color cartridge is not so much fun...
even for basic b/w he just talks a lot of BS
- as mentioned above, you easily find a 200€-class inkjet with HP/Epson/Brother, where you pay 30-40€ for a cartridge worth ~2000 pages of b/w. You'll have a hard time finding a (new) b/w laser with reccurring costs as low as this at the price point (and you're limited to b/w)
- at least the HP ink doesn't care for getting wet (just soaked a paper once, when a friend explained to me, why he still pays around 300€ for a set of toner worth 1000 pages...)
- if you really print a lot, you most certainly want things in color. Or at least I did during school (which is probably the only place to privately print anymore), sorry Jason. And for absolutely lowest operating cost (w/o power) buy a parallel adapter card and hook up your dad's old needle printer (if you don't care for power it also will do remotely untamperable logging for you!)
Laserjet printers like the 4700 and 5500 series are very cost effective to buy now. Maybe $250 on eBay and if you hunt toners go for $80 each on eBay and you'll get thousands of pages. Drum needs replacing very rarely - if you buy one with 75%+ left doubt it will ever be used in a residential or small office setting ime.
well, I specifically mentioned the possibility to buy used ones. And while you can certainly buy 10-20 y.o. machines I guess in most cases you are probably better off with a nwe 200$ "business-class" inkjet, which sips power, includes a copy machine and won't need a dedicated print-server...
I’d like a printer with FOSS firmware/drivers that will reliably work over wifi.
I’d like a printer that I can used just once or twice a year without the ink drying up, when I really have to print something.
I'd also like one that doesn’t leak any toxic gasses. I’ve always been put off home lasers because of worrying about that. Is that a real problem or am I misinformed?
Raspberry Pi + Needle-Printer of vintage provenance? (might consume too much power and the parallel port might bug sometimes though)
And it's not gases, but dust, but yeah (and inkjet's probably also have their problems with ink-fog)...
Concerning the first 2 points I've always been very happy with the Kyocera FS-C5150DN that I bought maaany years ago.
It's best if you check beforehand on their download page the availability of drivers for your OS and device (e.g. PPD for Linux & CUPS for mine is listed here: https://www.kyoceradocumentsolutions.ch/de/index/service_sup... ). Mine is connected over LAN.
I print very rarely and so far it always worked fine (I'm still using the provided cartriges - I guess that so far I printed with them ~400 pages, usually duplex).
I didn't worry much about the gases because I use the printer too rarely.
I've not had a personal printer for something like ~15 years now… I've spent around 200€ once on a decent quality (except black and white) ebook reader and spend an additional ~10€ a year at most for high quality prints (photos and labels).
So I'd argue that for some people, there's no good reason to buy a personal printer at all: not for price, not for quality and not even for convenience (buying compatible cartridges is not something I remember as being easy).
1) Laser printers are notorious for particulates. You don't want such a printer on the same area as your office. In The Netherlands this is why printers are normally near the coffee machine in offices. In a small home, where would you put it? I find it convenient to have my inkjet near my computer.
2) You don't have to buy official cartridges. Just buy refill (which I'm doing with my Brother printer). You need to do some research on which printer gives a good price on the refill cartridges.
Nobody has yet mentioned HP “InstantInk” plans, where they charge for ink by the page, and send cartridges as they anticipate you’ll need them (so big brother is indeed watching your usage via the internet; the fun advantage of being connected is that you can send print jobs home while you’re on the road).
Works on many of their newer models; we have the OfficeJet Pro 8740. Cheapest plan is $3/month for up to 50 pages; higher volume plans get down to 3 cents per page (side).
I came to the same conclusion after throwing away three bricked inkjet printers in a row. All different brands. None of them lasted more than 400 printed pages. They're shit. Laser from now on.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadThe more expensive the printer, the amortized cheaper the cost per page and the more repairable it is. I worked at nuclear engineering firm and a Pac10 university in IT on the budgetary side. The cheap laser printers were almost always unrepairable. I remember this one laser printer, an HP 5si, that had a page count over 1 million pages.
At home, I had an HP LaserJet 4 from mid 90's that worked for around 25 years. I think I changed the toner cartridge once from Laser Monks.
People who buy inkjet printers keep throwing them away because they dry up or their cheap displays stop working, and end up buying another cheap throw-away printer and set of cartridges. The razor-blade economy is in the cartridges and almost giving away the printers. And they never last, and people keep throwing the old ones and buying new ones.
ProTip: home gamers should buy a repo big name corporate laser printer, preferably black&white or maybe the medium/higher-end color mopiers. Never the entry model because they're cheaply made.
And print them out with their Game Boy Printer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy_Printer
Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1z2_af1vfJM
With laser printers that go on forever the toner cartridge includes a fair heft of the parts that would wear out. With ink jet printers this is not the same. Also, are you changing just the ink or the nozzles too?
Regulation could have rigged this market to have avoided the race to the bottom that went on. The razor blade sales model is okay for razor blades, you are spending tops $10 on the razor and it is clear in the box that you are not getting the full complement of replacement blades that cost $20 and are next to it in the store.
With inkjet printers it was a deceptive practice. Only after you were back buying ink did you clock the start pack inks.
Some of the printers did not include a black ink.
In the EU the regulation of USB power charging worked out well for everyone, we no longer have drawers full of 'wall warts'.
Had printers been regulated so that there was a minimum amount of pages that a new printer would print without running out of ink with the ink not running dry during the 2 year warranty period then the market would have been more sensible. Oh, and no proprietary replacement inks.
The price of a new printer would have been higher however there would have also been a secondary market in second hand printers. With the razor model there is no secondary market, at best you are giving a printer away rather than charging for it because it costs more to put ink in it than it costs for someone to just buy a new one.
The original inkjet printers were a wonder of fine engineering. I particularly liked the way the original ones held the freshly printed page to dry before dropping it into the tray. In 1990 you needed an expensive dye sublimation printer with mega expensive consumables to print colour. The inkjets came along and made colour something to take for granted. This was wonderful.
But the razor model made it impossible for the inkjet to keep the awe it truly deserved. In time the printers got nastier and nastier, e.g. the Lexmark efforts that are landfilled rather than cherished. Had there been just the smallest bit of regulation in the EU then that would have affected how these things were sold globally and there wouldn't have been such a wasteful race to the bottom.
Not so, four-color ribbons for impact printers were a thing.
Good memories.
> Reproducing colors in photographs accurately demands a lot more than just some barrels of color ink; it demands a high-resolution printer and special, treated paper that can hold colors better than plain old printer paper can. You can buy that stuff too, of course, but doing so expensive and complicated, which makes it hard to recommend when you could alternately just send your photos to a photo printing service and get much better results than you’d get at home for a fraction of the price.
Many home users print less than a page a week on average. Just the occasional concert ticket or homemade sign/postcard.
If you print a page a week, that means a $25 cheapest Inkjet, plus $20 of fake inks will let you have a working printer for 4 years for $45. Always turn the printer off to prevent ink drying up.
No laser solution can give me the ability to print for $11/year.
I guess they're too cheap or to encumbered by beauracracy to issue the drivers with a smartphone app.
I am a one-man business and home user, printing on average less than this. I've used the sama canon inkjet printer for several years and changed the ink maybe twice in this time.
Recently though, while staying with my dad, I bought another cheap inkjet partly because he needed a printer too and it would be useful for when ever I was there.
I made the mistake of buying a 'Google Cloud-print' compatible printer since my dad uses a Chromebook. I have to say that thing has put us both through hell and is the worst purchase I have ever made.
You have cheap lasers for $80 that would last 8 years with the 'ink' fresh. $10/year and still another 500 pages in the toner left.
Laser printers do NOT have better quality to a comparable inkjet printer. This is what happens when individuals with expertise in a specialized area (such as programming), think that gives them some right to pass off opinion as fact in other fields, such as printing economics or procurement.
For those curious about the details, the industry has been more or less disrupted with the new generation of tank printers. Epson and HP even have begun offering printers with massive ink tanks that bring down the cost of prints to much lower than a US cent. You can do even better than that with bulk buys or sourcing the ink from discount stores, better sources than open retail.
Also, you “absolutely don’t” need to print every page in color, but it makes it a whole lot better if you do. Once you’re used to the difference in quality, there’s very little else that will feel as good. This is personal preference of course and if your requirements at present are only black and white documents, those will look a lot better with the higher dpi prints too.
There’s another thing to be said about titles such as “no good reason to ever do x” ; Just because one person in a narrow minded existence sees no reason to, that doesn’t mean there’s never a good reason to. This toxic BS is what makes the tech industry so hard to have constructive conversations in.
Your mention of tank printers is helpful but given his article is from 2016 the trend may not have been so obvious back then as it is now (to you; I don't bother following the printer market).
> Which gives me, as your nerd friend who gets asked about this stuff all the time, an opportunity to pre-emptively pass along to you a little bit of purchasing advice.
> because literally the only thing that inkjets had going for them was the fact that they were massively cheaper than lasers. They lose on every other front.
> And then there is the big problem with inkjets, which is that ink for them is just ludicrously expensive.
1. There's no premise of "hey, i might be wrong here, this is what i think", in fact the first quote begins with the premise that, as a "nerd friend who gets asked about this stuff all the time", somehow this writer is an expert. Personally ,this seems as presumptive as the manufacturers "gouging" on peoples novice understanding of printing economics and technical ability, thus charging a premium for the abstraction of the details and upfront subsidy in the form of hardware discounts to later charge for supplies, that the author rallies against in the entire blog.
2. The 2nd and 3rd comments are just plain wrong. Writing them in a blog or anywhere with the conviction that they're right will do nothing to further ones reputation as someone who knows what they're talking about or has done a reasonable job searching the internet or any other source for details that may disgree with ones view before putting it out there.
3. The blogpost is from 2016, but tank printers and the economics that the blog covers have been around for much longer than that (>5 years now)
The issue i take with this whole opinion isn't the fact that it is wrong. Again, debate on ideas is a very healthy exercise and must be encouraged. It's the presentation of an opinion as unquestionable and absolute fact that reduces the whole piece to one that's not in good taste. This writing style is more and more prevalent in tech where authors tend to cling to their POV with absolutes rather than approach an engineering problem/statement with an open mind and present ideas/opinion as what they are . . Ideas and opinions. Not absolute fact that cannot be questioned under any circumstance.
One thing the article does't mention is that the ink cartridges get clogged and dry if the printer was left idle for some time. I had lost a significant amount of money to this before changing to lasers and never looking back.
Also Epson, Canon and HP were so bad actors in the 90's and 00's that I would never buy a printer from them again. Fool me once...
However, what I don't like is his treatment of colour printers. He somehow concludes that the only use-case for consumers to print in colour would be photos and then goes on that printing photos at home produces crappy results, so you shouldn't do it anyway. Therefore, consumers do not need to print in colour. QED.
I'm always wary of "tell me one reason you're gonna use it for" type arguments, where the asker then goes on to treat the answer as an exhaustive list of use-cases. Only because I cannot think of a use-case in that very moment does not mean a use-case doesn't exist.
For colours, additional use-cases would be colour-coded diagrams or documents that for various reasons, you just want to look pretty.
In my experience, this is messy and not worth the trouble.
Sounds like an "On the spot fallacy" - https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/On_the_spot_fallacy
If you print colour-coded diagrams regularly, then the cost-benefit analysis falls apart, but I would argue that you might be a smaller part of the general population than you expect.
I maintain a single Brother household MFC, had it for nearly a decade, changed the toner twice, drum never. We print notes, documents, and legal contracts for work, etc... even the occasional diagram that gets put in the print queue doesn't _need_ to be in colour. It'd certainly be nice, but it's not a dealbreaker either.
Now at work there are only rare occasions that I print anything at all, preferring electronic copies of everything. When I do print, most everything is monochrome.
My OKI color LED printer cost about 150$ and has network printing support, duplex unit and contains pretty large toners.
On the upside, the huge size means they're easy to service - pretty removing the fixer unit or transfer belt is very easy and needs no screws.
If you only print occasionally, most of the ink does not end up on paper, but in some collecting tank.
I probably print out something twice a year, and quite often only so I can move it to the scanner tray and fax it in to some government office (because nothing else in the house but our printer has a modem, and Portuguese post office/customs/etc. still operate in the Middle Ages).
And even then the main reason I do that is that I prefer to use the printer menus than install HP’s utterly hideous Mac software.
They're still not a good option for light home users though.
The only downside is you just know all your files are being cached indefinitely on the internal harddisk and will end up god knows where when it's been decommissioned.
If you print a lot, it’s probably cheaper to buy a printer, but I only print a couple times per year so I find it more convenient to use this.
I know in USA there are many print shops with comparable prices, but the time required to use the services is a larger factor.
I'm glad for the convenience, and for my low print needs. Space and cost of a printer would be annoying.
I speculate there are large numbers of people that don't fully utilize their printers and could be served by a print service better.
Actually, at the risk of being pedantic: It's a win/win.
https://www.ldproducts.com/blog/best-ink-tank-printers-of-20...
These are inkjet printers but no cartridge. Rather you buy ink in bottles and fill the tanks up. 4 bottles cost $4 for a fill up. And I finish more than three 500 packs of papers before ink ends.
Plus most of these printers have scanners on top. So you can use it also as a color photocopier.
Have been using these for over 5 years.
Rediculosly low cost per page.
If there is no catch I might pick one up next week!
A razor without the blade is just a handle. All the engineering is in the blades. Of course the handle is cheap and the blades are expensive.
This is evidenced by the fact that safety razors sell in 100-packs for $15 on Amazon ($0.15 each) while a 15-pack of Mach 3 cartridges (the simplest/oldest variety AFAIK) sells on Amazon for $22 ($1.45 each). Unless you're suggesting that the "engineering" it took for them to sell you 1.5 safety razors in a piece of plastic is worth 10X the price of the blades alone, I'd posit that's where the margin is.
But at first I was so skeptical that I went down to the local stationery supplier to price a bottle of ink for the Epson EcoTank before purchasing the printer. It really was $14 for bottle rated at 6K pages. The print nozzles were guaranteed not to dry out if unused for 2 years - and the printer came with a 3 year warranty so I guess that's real.
I owned a Brother Colour laser before this. It was a lovely printer. It cost the same as the EcoTank and was a bit faster, but a set of genuine toner cartridges cost almost as much as the printer. And the inkjet is lighter, smaller and uses far less power.
The only down side is Epson's Linux drivers truly suck. They looked to provide source but it turns out that's just the front end - the rendering engine is shipped as pre-built libraries that get linked in at the end. And of course those libraries get SIGSEGV's, yielding only a bank page. Looking for the reason is how I found out there was no source for them. The scanner software their download centre offers didn't work at all. When I chased that down I found it was open source, provided presumably for free by kind person from Norway and Seiko rebranded it and made it available in their download section for my printer. That kind person did list the hardware it worked with, and my printer wasn't in the list so I don't know why Seiko put it there. Finally the PWG/Raster protocol, aka cups internal raster format, aka "cups driverless", aka cloud print didn't work at all. Way to go, Epson.
What did work is CUP's native escpr drivers. So I can print, and even with these old drivers the colour quality is better than the laser. So I'm happy. But brickbats to Seiko/Epson for their godawful software nonetheless.
my father recently bought and returned an Epson WorkForce ET-3750 which he had purchased to replace his older WF. It required two updates out of the box just to get it to work remotely on par with the older WF printer. It was still much slower afterward. Scanning was also a step back in that it cannot scan both sides on its own. However the biggest problem was that it was much noisier.
So do a lot of research before jumping into the pool. The printer manufactures are not giving away their premium on cartridges at similar price points.
Me, I got a WF2650 for less than thirty bucks from Epson over the holidays on clearance with free shipping. For me they are disposable at that price and I have done that more than once. Fortunately the local waste site has a separate section for small electronics like these
1. The children are rational economic citizens
1a. They have a complete view of the job market
1b. They take into account the cost of the number of healthy years lost
1c. They are informed on the health implications of their line of profession
2. The market of metal salvaging is not substituting another market (for example farming or fishing)
3. The children are not coerced or enslaved
All of these statements are most likely false. By promoting the development of the metal salvaging market, you are preventing a third alternative: the development of new markets (or the sustenance of healthier markets).
https://www.usa.canon.com/internet/portal/us/home/products/l...
It turned out to be more economical to buy a new printer rather than replace the cartridge.
However, the cartridge that came with the printer lasted for about a hundred or so pages, while the replacement cartridge lasts for about 1500 pages, so about 10x longer.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_printing#Ozone_hazards
[2]: https://www.dguv.de/medien/ifa/en/pub/ada/pdf_en/aifa0276e.p...
At least here I can only find Epson and Brother varieties which have a predictable quality given their price point. And the ink is quite expensive.
And sincerely, once you want (other question is if you need it) a color printer, most of the points of this guy are just plainly wrong if not FUD:
- color prints with lasers are horribly expensive if you buy a <1000€ machine. Also refill-cartridges are the same thing as with inkjets.
- if you buy a used +1000€-machine be prepared to replace the drum (~300€) and set aside a hefty pile of cash for toner cartridges – while they may last 10k-15k pages, 300€ per color cartridge is not so much fun...
even for basic b/w he just talks a lot of BS
- as mentioned above, you easily find a 200€-class inkjet with HP/Epson/Brother, where you pay 30-40€ for a cartridge worth ~2000 pages of b/w. You'll have a hard time finding a (new) b/w laser with reccurring costs as low as this at the price point (and you're limited to b/w)
- at least the HP ink doesn't care for getting wet (just soaked a paper once, when a friend explained to me, why he still pays around 300€ for a set of toner worth 1000 pages...)
- if you really print a lot, you most certainly want things in color. Or at least I did during school (which is probably the only place to privately print anymore), sorry Jason. And for absolutely lowest operating cost (w/o power) buy a parallel adapter card and hook up your dad's old needle printer (if you don't care for power it also will do remotely untamperable logging for you!)
I’d like a printer that I can used just once or twice a year without the ink drying up, when I really have to print something.
I'd also like one that doesn’t leak any toxic gasses. I’ve always been put off home lasers because of worrying about that. Is that a real problem or am I misinformed?
It's best if you check beforehand on their download page the availability of drivers for your OS and device (e.g. PPD for Linux & CUPS for mine is listed here: https://www.kyoceradocumentsolutions.ch/de/index/service_sup... ). Mine is connected over LAN.
I print very rarely and so far it always worked fine (I'm still using the provided cartriges - I guess that so far I printed with them ~400 pages, usually duplex).
I didn't worry much about the gases because I use the printer too rarely.
So I'd argue that for some people, there's no good reason to buy a personal printer at all: not for price, not for quality and not even for convenience (buying compatible cartridges is not something I remember as being easy).
2) You don't have to buy official cartridges. Just buy refill (which I'm doing with my Brother printer). You need to do some research on which printer gives a good price on the refill cartridges.
Works on many of their newer models; we have the OfficeJet Pro 8740. Cheapest plan is $3/month for up to 50 pages; higher volume plans get down to 3 cents per page (side).