> While laser printers do the big printing jobs in commercial settings, the inkjet printer has become the printer most of us use at home and at the office.
I don't know who "most of us" is, but I had to check the year it was published because this is so wrong for everyone I know, home or office.
Black and white laser printers are price competitive with color inkjet printers in the short and long term for home or small office use. Most people don't need color, or if they do, inkjet is slow and low quality and more expensive than retail print shops for things like photos or full page flyers.
I splurged on a color laser. It's brilliant and cheap for printing color documents. It's also really bad at printing photos.
Know what's great for printing photos? The Walgreens up the block. It prints them waaaaayyyy more cheaply and nicely than any inkjet I've ever owned. The 2 times a year I want to frame and hang up a nice photo, I upload it to them and then walk over an hour later to pick it up.
There's no plausible reason I'd ever buy an inkjet again.
If you found Walgreens quality satisfactory, I'd definitely recommend checking out dedicated Photo Print websites (eg. bayphoto.com). They are much better than Walgreens and only slightly more expensive.
Thanks for the link. The main thing going for Walgreens for me is that there’s one a quick walk around the block away from me. If it were less convenient I’d be more exploratory.
If you need same day/local service, I’ve found our local Walmart to be cheaper and much higher quality than the Kodak kiosk inside the local CVS stores. Not sure how Walgreens compares.
Is it? Soho color laser printers are calibrated and designed to print color documents, not photos. They use CMYK (4) colors and inkjets designed for photos use 6 or more. It's possible to do photos with it but generally the laser printers most people have are not really designed for high quality photo (where a cheaper inkjet would be), they will show banding and be less color accurate.
Yeah, I sort of swore a blood oath that I would never buy another ink jet printer 10 years ago because one of my color cartridges dried up, and it wouldn't let me even print black and white, despite the fact that the black and white cartridge appeared to be fine.
Replacing the color cartridge was like $70. Instead of fixing this problem, I threw the ink jet away, and found a used Samsung ML-2010 on ebay for $60. It prints documents just fine, the only things I ever bother printing are forms that I have to sign.
Now I have a 15 year old HP office printer, also only black and white, and I genuinely like it. If I ever need to print color for whatever reason, I'll walk to one of the print shops a few blocks from me. It's not worth keeping a full color printer in my house that will work exactly once.
After avoiding inkjet printers for some 30 years, I purchased a colour inkjet printer after comparing the cost per page to a colour laser. Granted, I went for a tank based (rather than cartridge based) printer. Will I be happy with the decision 10 years down the road (which is the age of my current laser printer)? I have no idea. But the point is that you can avoid the cartridge based inkjets and get something where you refill the colours according to your needs.
I also suspect that some of the applications mentioned in the article aren't using the built-to-a-price-point inkjet printers. Quality varies. Sometimes you have to check the reviews and pay a bit more for that quality.
I don't know if this is what they purchased, but EcoTank is a good term to search for if you want an inkjet that won't charge you an arm and a leg for proprietary cartridges. The basic idea is that instead of swappable cartridges, they just have ink tanks that you top up from a squirt bottle. These bottles are cheaper than any cartridge while containing like ten times the amount of ink.
I ended up getting an Epson EcoTank printer (ET-4850). Specifications claim to have 7500 page (black) and 6000 page (cym) yields, which is around what I would expect for a similarly priced monochrome laser printer. The ink itself costs about 1/2 of that for toner a similarly priced monochrome laser printer (black only, verses all four bottles). Colour lasers are more expensive for supplies.
Would I recommend it? No idea. I'm still new to the inkjet printer market. I'm sure hiccups will pop up along the way. On the other hand: it works in Linux, is quiet, and the lights don't dim when it comes to life. (It is also worth mentioning that it is more of a document printer than a photo printer.)
I happened to pick up the same model a little while back, to replace an HP that died after most of a decade of good service - Instant Ink's an amazingly good deal, if you use it for photos, but I wanted something I could easily use better than stock inks in.
The resolution is reasonable, though the default color settings produce a blue cast (vs. both on-screen rendering and my Pixma Pro 100, as well as the HP it replaced) that I haven't figured out how to reliably prevent yet. As a photographer this irks me greatly, enough so that I won't print my own work on it until the problem is solved; others may not care.
It tends to go into deep sleep and need a poke to start listening to the network again, which is annoying when it lives with the other printers in the attic. I work around this with a homelab cron job that curls the printer's admin web interface once a minute.
Other than that it's been solid thus far, though admittedly I've only had it a few months. Certainly it'll be a while before I need to refill it.
If you just want to occasionally print out concert tickets / photocopy id documents / etc., half-assing it by getting a that only does black and white is the worst of both worlds - better to either save the space by not owning a printer at all, or avoid ever having to go to a print shop by having a printer that can do colour when you need it. If you're actually printing out a lot of documents then yeah laser makes sense, but I've never understood the HN home laser dogma.
I almost never print, but when I do I don't want to struggle with an inkjet printer that has dried up nozzles. A $140 Brother laser printer will pretty much work for the rest of your life.
This anecdotally holds up, at least for Brother laser printers made in the 2010's. Over a decade later it's still working perfectly. Granted I do have to nudge a mechanical part back into place every year, but the service manual is so good that maintenance is near-trivial.
Yup. I was on the laser printer is the best printer train until I actually had to buy a printer for my home (until then I was printing from the college lab or office). I quickly realized that a laser printer made no sense for the reasons you outlined.
I don’t understand the reasons the person you replied to or you are making references to. You rather having to go print every little thing just because once a year you want it to be color?
What most people print at home must be Amazon return labels, some school papers and resumes which are all black and white. If you’re in college reading lots of papers with graphs in color you can easily print at school.
I got so tired of being asked by friends and family to help them with their shit inkjet printers that I’ll never ever touch one again. I don’t even know when I would HAVE to print color but if I must, and I’m not working in an office, I’ll just go to any store near me and get it done. The laser is painless 99% of the time, where the inkjet is pain 99% of the time.
Before I moved across the country I donated my brother laser printer to the least tech savvy aunt in the family that could NEVER print and I have not heard of a single printing issue in almost a year. Where it was always always something. “Some” cartridge failed, not even 20% used. Didn’t say which one to make you change both. Change one, pray, if you’re lucky it works. A week later, black one fails. Or they get clogged, or they need to clean the whatever, which uses 10% of the ink. Such shit I can’t believe there isn’t a mass lawsuit against this.
> I don’t understand the reasons the person you replied to or you are making references to. You rather having to go print every little thing just because once a year you want it to be color? What most people print at home must be Amazon return labels
If you're returning a package you've got to go somewhere to drop off the package anyway, so may as well print the label there.
> some school papers and resumes which are all black and white. If you’re in college reading lots of papers with graphs in color you can easily print at school.
Again that sounds like like you're getting the worst of both worlds. If you're going to go to the trouble of getting a printer so you can print off papers, you want to be able to print off all your papers, not just the ones that don't have graphs in. If you're just going to print them at school why wouldn't you print them all at school including the black-and-white ones?
(FWIW a CV where I live is expected to have a colour photo embedded)
You live somewhere with different tradeoffs. Here we have more mail drops without printing stations attached, and out jon applications are less explicitly racist and sexist.
I've had cases where colour was required e.g. one of my ID stamps was unreadable in black-and-white, my tax return form has colour sections (might have been accepted in black-and-white but was certainly clearer in colour)...
I absolutely 100% guarantee that you can submit tax forms printed in black and white. I suspect the IRS is more surprised when they see printed forms that are anything but.
Thing is, I also own a color scanner. It’s just as easy for me to make a color copy of a doc as a B/W copy. That’s pretty common now. If your bank thinks that a form with red lines on it must be an original, then they suck at technology more than most banks.
> If your bank thinks that a form with red lines on it must be an original, then they suck at technology more than most banks.
Be that as it may, I don't have a banking license and wasn't about to turn my nose up at a bank that finally let me open a corporate account after about 4 months of effort.
It's not really a mystery — if your main use case is documents (b&w or color), a laser printer is generally a better choice. If your main use case is photos and photographic imagery (like for stickers), you still need to go inkjet.
My daily driver for the last 7 years has been a Brother color laser, but this year I replaced it with an Epson ET-8500 inkjet because my needs had changed.
Mainly because lasers always work. You can ignore one for a year, then turn it on to print something and it’ll greet you like a Labrador retriever seeing you get home from work.
I’ve never had that experience with any inkjet, however expensive. If I don’t use one for several months, it’s always a flip of the coin whether it’ll work without draining half the tank in self-cleaning cycles.
Lasers are just vastly more reliable than inkjets. I can always count on my laser waking up and printing before falling back into a coma. I can’t trust any inkjet.
> I’ve never had that experience with any inkjet, however expensive. If I don’t use one for several months, it’s always a flip of the coin whether it’ll work without draining half the tank in self-cleaning cycles.
Shrug. I've used boring consumer HP/Canon/Epsom inkjets and never had a problem. I think the first printer my parents ever had 20 years ago occasionally needed to print a test page, but I haven't had that happen since then.
The article says that 75% of pages printed in home/office desktop is laser (the blue segment of the pie).
I suspect most of us printer owners own inkjets, but people who print a lot of pages use laser, while inkjets are decorative after terrible experience with the first cartridge.
> The article says that 75% of pages printed in home/office desktop is laser (the blue segment of the pie).
Thank you, you're right — this supports the parent commenter's point for the combined business and home markets. I wasn't able to find any data on the breakdown for the home market specifically, but based on my social circle I'd guess COVID/remote work significantly increased home laser purchases.
> …while inkjets are decorative after terrible experience with the first cartridge.
Having bought an inkjet after a two-decade "only laser/LED" rule, tank/CISS ink is making inkjets nice again. Still, I wouldn't recommend an inkjet if you (1) never intend to print photos/images or (2) regularly go more than a month without printing.
It starts out claiming that 1980s offices were more noisy than today, but I don't know that that is true. We don't even have cubicles anymore. You're lucky if your team and seven others aren't sharing the same conference table "open office" space.
Those old hammer printers were loud. Commercial printers were often housed in cases with sound-deadening materials, even though they usually occupied a room dedicated to computers (with the offices having terminals). Workers in smaller offices and personal computer users often had to put up with the relatively loud high-pitched drone of dot-matrix printers, though some would get enclosures to deaden the sound.
Even if open offices somehow manage to be louder, it is an entirely different quality of noise.
I interned at a stodgy 80s-style company in the 90s (I'm sure the office was exactly the same as the decade before). It was nice actually, compared to my "modern" office. The printers and copiers were in different places so they generally weren't bothersome if you were at your desk. The main noise annoyances were 1) telephones ringing sometimes--those old phones were loud, and 2) neighboring workers talking. They didn't have separate cubicles, but rather cubicle walls were used to separate workgroups from each other. I guess 3) computer keyboards were noisy back then, but at this place most workers didn't have computers at their desks yet.
Peak quietness for offices was, in my experience, in the late 90s or early 2000s. Everyone had separate cubicles with sound-absorbing walls. I really miss those days.
Of course, everyone's experiences will be different. Different companies had different office layouts, though there definitely have been clear trends.
Offices at the office. With walls, and doors that shut, and sometimes even windows that opened.
They were relatively easy to find up until the late 90s when I stopped "going in"; maybe if people want to fill their expensive commercial real estate you all can convince the suits to bring them back?
That's all nice; it's still incredibly stupid to buy consumer inkjets for home or office use. They are garbage.
Inkjets produce nicer pictures than toner-based printers (LED, Laser) at great expense and hassle. You're better off using an online service for bulk printing of pictures.
For document printing, they completely lose to toner-based. They are slow. They have to be used regularly or they dry up, which is a hassle to fix and perhaps cannot be.
I can ignore my LED printer for weeks or months, and be confident that when I need to count on it to print something, it will print.
Also, to begin with, inkjet cartridges are tiny compared to toner, and most of the content is the liquid carrier. Toner is 100% solids, and the cartridges are much larger.
I see. Right; I'm vaguely aware of those things through passive exposure to ads. I've mostly written off inkjets, so my attention has been minimal. Refillable, big tanks do make a difference. If that's the deal breaker for someone, they may be worth another look.
Basically if it's a liquid you can inkjet it. (basically each nozzle has a chamber with a tube leading into it and a hole in the top. A resistor heater boils the drop and it spits out the hole).
I always wondered if anyone ever tried to make a fuel injector out of one. (the finer the mist you can make your gasoline, the better it combusts).
Source: I looked at thousands of these things under a microscope at a company that makes lots of them. 0/10 would not recommend.
I wonder if you could make a really good fuel injected motor utilizing these for RC/Drone engines.
An RC/drone I think that would be neat would be a 'diesel electric' (not diesel) - but a motor utilizing this for injecting into a generator for a gas-electric helicopter. Like a Chinook where the interior is the gas-electric generator, but the overall design modeled after the Chinook given that its the Heavy Lifter of Helos with a payload lift capacity of ~20 tons.?
--
In the late 1990s I worked at a company who manufactured a lot of the physical media for various software/games/OS (Intuit/Everquest/SunOS for example)
We manufatered the CDs, copy, manuals, boxes, etc - boxed and shipped it...
All the CDs were printed using Brother inkjets.
My buddy was a fairly famous DJ in the rave scene in the 90s - so in my off hours we would make and print his CDs...
dj morgan...
I designed and printed these logos onto CDs in the 90s
(I actually designed the Decepticon Logo in circuitry when I worked at Intel - but we lost the artwork, and that was the cover - the CD was printed with the logo as drawn in circuit traces and was pretty bad ass for the 90s scene...)
For engine injector need high pressure. In automobile direct injector used 20 layers of piezoelectric plates to achieve this, and sure, high voltage applied.
I'm pretty sure I've come across piezos on inkjet printers too. Can't remember the make, but resistive heating is only one way to get the ink to go splat.
Also, products like Irrigreen (https://irrigreen.com/) which uses inkjet technology to “print” an exact pattern of water onto a lawn, avoiding sprinkler overlap.
The few states with high cost of water, like California or Texas, can be enough of a market.
BTW since they have basically a positioned spray technology, they could literally "print" things with grass, giving it different nutrients or even dispersing different seeds. Anything from a decorative striped pattern to signs of affiliation and slogans.
Thank you! I'm on Step 3. KILL THE SHIT OUT OF YOUR LAWN
8 truckloads of free wood chips, free cardboard from Costco and Craigslist. Free coffee grounds, roasting chaff and burlap bags from a local coffee roaster.
I don’t know if both authors being affiliated with HP Labs is a coincidence or a sign of a conflict of interest… But the article kinda reads like a desperate last-ditch promo for the inkjets.
I haven’t had an inkjet for 30 years - only black and white lasers. Starting with HL LaserJet 5L in 2000, then Samsung and now Brother (yay for their nice platform independence so they work on Linux).
My Prusa 3D is also arguably spewing a material into a surface so I guess yeah, maybe I should count it as an inkjet as well, though ;-)
Seems like the point of this article missed a lot of people entirely, since they are so fixated on consumer inkjet printers. That's a very specific case of inkjet printing, but inkjet technology is way more than that.
For example continuous inkjet printers are used to label packages of many items you buy every day. There's also research about inkjet printing wearable electronics etc. None of which has a lot to do with HP.
A lot of the comments here read like a hobbyist programmer saying “C++ is dead, I haven’t written any C++ in my projects for years and since I’ve switched to Rust, I’ve never looked back”.
Yes, I stand by this analogy because inkjet is that important. The market is doing great and technology is improving at an impressive rate.
To build on your example of continuous IJ presses: more and more applications have lately been switching to drop-on-demand, as those printheads continue to get better (especially piezo IJ) and cheaper (especially thermal IJ).
Since there’s no “jet” in your 3D printer from an engineering perspective, arguably you shouldn’t. That would be extrusion (and Prusa correctly refers to it as such).
Home inkjet printers are only ideal for a niche usecase where you print lots of photos regularly (to the point where you need your own printer over a photo printing service). Their only advantage over laser printers is higher image quality.
If you don't print frequently, the ink nozzles clog up (and you inevitably use a bunch of ink trying to fix them). For infrequent document printing, a laser printer will Just Print whether it's been sitting unused for an hour or a month. If you occasionally need some photos printed, using one of the myriad services will be better than replacing the inevitably gunked up ink cartridges.
If you print a lot of documents, the laser printer easily outstrips the speed of an inkjet. You'll also run up huge ink fees since the cost per page of ink tends to be higher than toner.
Therefore, the only reason you should get an inkjet printer is if you often need high quality colour prints (photos).
I think the "occasional printing will clog up nozzles" affects some printer models more than the others.
As a single data point, I used a Canon i9990 for many years. It had a very irregular use -- I would print a few 13x19 photos or a tiled panorama, or an occasional school picture of kids for the relatives. Then it would sit unused for days to months until the next job. And even with this supposedly abusive cycle it ran like new until it completely died one day.
I personally had worse luck with image printing services. Maybe the machines are off, maybe the fellow who runs it does not care, but more often than not there is something subtly wrong: either the color is off, or there is a smudge at the edge or some minor artifact. My 2c.
You’re posting on an article about other things inkjet is used for and then you say the only thing you need a home inkjet printer for is for photos?
????
Photos is the last thing I’d buy an inkjet printer for. I’d be using a home inkjet to make circuit boards, temporary shirts, screen printing masks, transparencies, stickers, etc.
Laser printers are used for the toner transfer method, where you print your etching mask on a glossy paper and then transfer it to a PCB with heat (laminator, or clothes iron)
Inkjet printers are used in a direct print to PCB (remember those inkjet printers that could print on CDs back in the day?)
"Agilent developed a way to print strands of DNA from the four nucleic acid bases—cytosine (C), guanine (G), adenine (A), and thymine (T)."
"Inkjet systems are particularly suited for printing drugs in the form of thin films, such as transdermal patches to be applied to the skin and buccal films to be held in the cheek, where drugs can pass directly to the bloodstream without first going through the digestive system."
These applications are from dedicated machines, not available at BestBuy. Though I would like to see a supplier selling conductive inks for circuit board prototyping, and just maybe a home system could be filled with DNA or medicines??
The article also gave an interesting overview of the micro-dosing technology using for example piezo-electrics.
1) Surprisingly, the running costs, with generic ink, are the same as a laser.
2) The text quality is fine. The image quality is better than a laser. Photos are great.
3) It can do larger formats (up to 13x19), copies, duplex, etc. The cost is literally a fraction of a similar laser. A large format laser is $$$. This one is $250 right now.
4) The speed is similar to a basic laser, but slower than a nice laser. It's rated at 12PPM color and 25PPM mono. It's slower, but it's fast enough.
I used to share your opinion, but ink has come a long ways. Something like this is super-versatile, since it does literally everything for $250.
Just as an overview I recently researched for a new printer but of all the reviews, HP comes out last by a mile. I think the smartprint was mentioned a lot, then Canon (especially the low budget ones) , Epson/Brother are kind of tiered.
I had an Epson inkjet and I only used it maybe once a month, and I had to change the ink cartridges every other time I used it, despite attempts at maintenance. I've now a laser printer for a couple years and am now only just running low on toner. Don't buy inkjet.
At the time I was buying mine, Epson marketed the WorkForce Series as the ones which didn't rip you off on ink, and WorkForce Pro, I believe, was even better.
Read reviews for printing costs, and adjust for the cost of generic ink. That's even true for lasers now; it's rare, but I've seen models designed to rip you off on toner too.
The problem for GP and for me too is inkjets needs a couples of cleaning and test prints after a drop of IPA on K, C, LC, LM and M ink drawing port each time I'd use it. That won't happen with lasers at all.
Not in my experience. Have had one for several years, switch it on when I need and turn off for weeks at a time. Runs perfectly and total cost of ownership is already lower than the mid-range pro HP printer I had before.
Also laser printers draw a lot of power constantly, you may be confused here. The toner needs to be kept warm.
The heads don't clog on these printers, although perhaps they do need to be continuously powered to pull that trick off. As the sibling comment said, they are cheap to run, and as reliable as a laser. I gather all manufacturers have similar models that work just as well, including HP.
Be warned that since you aren't being ripped off for the ink you will be asked to pay the real cost of the printer. The cost is comparable to a laser, but much higher then their "we are going to gouge you on ink" cousins they will be sitting beside on the store shelf.
For printing, pretty much everything now works with IPP Everywhere, even if not certified. For scanning, SANE has built-in backends for most devices, and even a built-in as well as a third-party AirScan backend, which will again work with most newer devices.
I have a WF-4833 and CUPS/SANE support is really great. The only problem I've noticed is if you use two-sided scanning with the ADF, the odd pages will be upside down. You could probably fix it if you use SANE at the command line, but I've only ever used XSane, and had to manually flip the pages after scanning.
I print no more than a few times per year, but those times I do print it'd be really annoying not to be able to print. Inkjet simply doesn't work for that kind of use case, you have to be printing somewhat regularly for it to make any sense. Highly irregular printing patterns like this are better served by laser, because the toner doesn't go bad just because you haven't printed this month.
He says you should always buy their special guaranteed virus free ink, but in my opinion it's much easier and safer to avoid the printers completely. You never know when you buy ink online if it's genuine - you could "catch a virus" at any time. It's almost certainly nonsense, but you can't be too careful.
This is true if you're in a dry/mostly-dry climate. In Southeast Asia, a humid tropical climate, they have problems with toner clumping instead of ink drying, and I've noticed that inkjets (invariably with CIS/bulk ink systems installed) are far more popular than lasers.
I can confirm; in 11 years I haven't had a single issue with ink drying out, with very sporadic use of our printer.
I have also noticed lots of government offices that print a bunch of stuff all put an inkjet on almost every (rather than shared laser printers I'd been expecting to see), and I wondered why. Your explanation may be the key to that too.
> Their only advantage over laser printers is higher image quality.
There is also the significantly lower price. Although,if you print a lot, you'll eventually make up the price difference in toner. If, like me, you only need to print rarely, it's probably better just to print at a library or FedEx or UPS store when needed. But there is probably somewhere in the middle where a decent inkjet is more economical, especially if you can get one that works with third party ink cartridges.
> If you don't print frequently, the ink nozzles clog up...
This was true before, but my 10 year old Deskjet 4515 doesn't do that, even if you don't print for a couple of months.
Being an InkAdvantage(TM) printer, cartridges are not expensive either, and while its color inks are dye based (not pigmented), the colors hold up very well even when they are not stored properly (frame the photo up and leave it there).
B&W laser printers are nice, and they're cheap on the long run, but color laser printers polish the paper a lot (4 drums + baking), and reading long papers on that shiny copy is not very comfortable. Pens' handling on that paper also changes after that much heat and processing. Inkjets and B&W lasers doesn't have that problem.
I use my B&W laser for more disposable documents, but for code and papers which contains graphics, I prefer my Inkjet very much.
Lastly, people think that ink is just colored water. It's not. Same is true for toner. They're complex technologies. Yes, cartridges sent for some markup, but ink and toner quality varies. Esp. if you want archival prints.
Unless you print a ton, cost is definitely an issue. I was excited when I got a free color laser that was fairly new, but it was over $200 just to replace the black; my inkjet and a dozen replacements is still cheaper than refilling the all the laser cartridges
As others have noted, some printers (for instance Epson EcoTank) have printing costs that are pretty much on par with laser printers and almost no clogging issues. People usually don't take into account energy costs when buying laser printers (toner is typically kept warm from instant, no-preheating printing) and, crucially, laser printers are terrible for indoor air quality. I therefore reached the opposite conclusion as you…
I expected a much higher price. While $190000 is steep it doesn't seem that much for such printer.
For example: Nexa3D ships SLS printers for over $500000
Before someone thinks it costs just $190 for a color 3d printer, its ~ $190K.
TIL that some countries use comma and a period for separating numbers and decimals respectively and some other countries use them the other way around.
I bought my Brother color laser printer 12 years ago in a fit of HP inkjet induced rage.
It just runs and runs and runs.
I've bought a couple more for around the office and recommend them every time the subject of printers comes up.
If you don't want GBs of bullshit malware pretending at being drivers, you're sick of the color ink shenanigans, and you want a printer that wakes up and prints every single time, get a Brother Laser printer. They're amazing.
And the sad part now is that HP Color LaserJets are hampered by such godawful software and design that I wish I had bought a Brother color laser printer. I will never make that mistake again.
I have a beautiful HP Color LaserJet MFP 4301dfw that constantly loses connection to the WiFi access point and requires a reboot and/or logging into the incredibly shitty HP Smart software. I really wish HP had enterprise-grade or at least prosumer software instead of this fucking awful consumer shit. A $599 printer should have a solid software stack, and HP even markets it to small office consumers.
The machine has a beautifully designed exterior and solid internals that are plagued with an absolute shit software stack. Bill Hewlett and David Packard are probably rolling over in their grave at how fucking far their laser printer division has fallen.
Indeed about the founders. I'm sorry to hear you were fleeced. I highly recommend taking that monster out back and recreating our favorite scene from Office Space.
HP was once a great company that innovated and made incredible technology.
It was taken over by financial types in the late nineties. They sold off the test equipment core business and leaned into cost cutting. They excised any vestiges of integrity or quality wherever it could be found.
With regard to software, I've long since accepted that HP, Brother, Canon et al can't write drivers to save their lives - and shouldn't have to - in a world where AirPrint, Chrome OS Printing, Windows IPP, or Direct IP printing exist.
It's long past time for printing to be treated as an OS service, where 3rd parties write the smallest possible shim to plug into available devices.
I used to think I needed an inkjet, but I switched to a brother laser B/W printer years ago (mainly because of the linux compatibility), and in that time, I've only wished to print a color photo ... oh wait, never!
I bought some HP printer last year for $75. A couple bucks on popular auction site got me a coupon code that gave me like 16 months of free ink. Several reams of free paper.
The printer experience itself is horrible. I’m constantly having to reboot it, it cannot maintain a WiFi connection, they have crippled usb on it, etc. Reviews back me up, it’s a common experience.
However, it makes beautiful prints. I have printed literally hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pages of full color. And HP dutifully sends me another cartridge without prompting.
Just a couple weeks left on that trial. And the plan? Chunk it in the trash and start over again.
Obligatory "just get a Brother printer" comment. They are the cast iron pans of printing technology, the kind that your kids and grandkids will inherit some day.
Sadly they do drop support for old models in drivers for new OS versions, so I can only print from my aging gaming PC. Maybe network printing solves this but mine is USB-only.
by sheer coincidence last night I learned of a thriving community around modding Epson inkjet printers with "continuous ink supply system (CISS)" and (highly sus') firmware patches to turn them into dye sublimation and direct to film transfer prints. The videos said they use Epson because unlike other vendors they don't use heat in their printheads making it safe(?) to run dye sub ink through them (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHWTko3lk5Y )
146 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadI don't know who "most of us" is, but I had to check the year it was published because this is so wrong for everyone I know, home or office.
Black and white laser printers are price competitive with color inkjet printers in the short and long term for home or small office use. Most people don't need color, or if they do, inkjet is slow and low quality and more expensive than retail print shops for things like photos or full page flyers.
Know what's great for printing photos? The Walgreens up the block. It prints them waaaaayyyy more cheaply and nicely than any inkjet I've ever owned. The 2 times a year I want to frame and hang up a nice photo, I upload it to them and then walk over an hour later to pick it up.
There's no plausible reason I'd ever buy an inkjet again.
Yours in particular or generally laser printers? If the last one, that sounds surprising
Is it? Soho color laser printers are calibrated and designed to print color documents, not photos. They use CMYK (4) colors and inkjets designed for photos use 6 or more. It's possible to do photos with it but generally the laser printers most people have are not really designed for high quality photo (where a cheaper inkjet would be), they will show banding and be less color accurate.
Light cyan and light magenta are usually the additional colors added https://www.macworld.com/article/152010/6inkhetprinters.html
There are 7 color printers from Epson that add a dilute black.
It’s perfectly good for photos for elementary-school projects though.
Replacing the color cartridge was like $70. Instead of fixing this problem, I threw the ink jet away, and found a used Samsung ML-2010 on ebay for $60. It prints documents just fine, the only things I ever bother printing are forms that I have to sign.
Now I have a 15 year old HP office printer, also only black and white, and I genuinely like it. If I ever need to print color for whatever reason, I'll walk to one of the print shops a few blocks from me. It's not worth keeping a full color printer in my house that will work exactly once.
I also suspect that some of the applications mentioned in the article aren't using the built-to-a-price-point inkjet printers. Quality varies. Sometimes you have to check the reviews and pay a bit more for that quality.
Would I recommend it? No idea. I'm still new to the inkjet printer market. I'm sure hiccups will pop up along the way. On the other hand: it works in Linux, is quiet, and the lights don't dim when it comes to life. (It is also worth mentioning that it is more of a document printer than a photo printer.)
The resolution is reasonable, though the default color settings produce a blue cast (vs. both on-screen rendering and my Pixma Pro 100, as well as the HP it replaced) that I haven't figured out how to reliably prevent yet. As a photographer this irks me greatly, enough so that I won't print my own work on it until the problem is solved; others may not care.
It tends to go into deep sleep and need a poke to start listening to the network again, which is annoying when it lives with the other printers in the attic. I work around this with a homelab cron job that curls the printer's admin web interface once a minute.
Other than that it's been solid thus far, though admittedly I've only had it a few months. Certainly it'll be a while before I need to refill it.
I got so tired of being asked by friends and family to help them with their shit inkjet printers that I’ll never ever touch one again. I don’t even know when I would HAVE to print color but if I must, and I’m not working in an office, I’ll just go to any store near me and get it done. The laser is painless 99% of the time, where the inkjet is pain 99% of the time.
Before I moved across the country I donated my brother laser printer to the least tech savvy aunt in the family that could NEVER print and I have not heard of a single printing issue in almost a year. Where it was always always something. “Some” cartridge failed, not even 20% used. Didn’t say which one to make you change both. Change one, pray, if you’re lucky it works. A week later, black one fails. Or they get clogged, or they need to clean the whatever, which uses 10% of the ink. Such shit I can’t believe there isn’t a mass lawsuit against this.
If you're returning a package you've got to go somewhere to drop off the package anyway, so may as well print the label there.
> some school papers and resumes which are all black and white. If you’re in college reading lots of papers with graphs in color you can easily print at school.
Again that sounds like like you're getting the worst of both worlds. If you're going to go to the trouble of getting a printer so you can print off papers, you want to be able to print off all your papers, not just the ones that don't have graphs in. If you're just going to print them at school why wouldn't you print them all at school including the black-and-white ones?
(FWIW a CV where I live is expected to have a colour photo embedded)
Thing is, I also own a color scanner. It’s just as easy for me to make a color copy of a doc as a B/W copy. That’s pretty common now. If your bank thinks that a form with red lines on it must be an original, then they suck at technology more than most banks.
An original tax return form.
> If your bank thinks that a form with red lines on it must be an original, then they suck at technology more than most banks.
Be that as it may, I don't have a banking license and wasn't about to turn my nose up at a bank that finally let me open a corporate account after about 4 months of effort.
It's not really a mystery — if your main use case is documents (b&w or color), a laser printer is generally a better choice. If your main use case is photos and photographic imagery (like for stickers), you still need to go inkjet.
My daily driver for the last 7 years has been a Brother color laser, but this year I replaced it with an Epson ET-8500 inkjet because my needs had changed.
Meanwhile my parents have been through roughly a half dozen inkjets in the same time.
It's pretty obvious which is better for most home use cases.
I’ve never had that experience with any inkjet, however expensive. If I don’t use one for several months, it’s always a flip of the coin whether it’ll work without draining half the tank in self-cleaning cycles.
Lasers are just vastly more reliable than inkjets. I can always count on my laser waking up and printing before falling back into a coma. I can’t trust any inkjet.
Shrug. I've used boring consumer HP/Canon/Epsom inkjets and never had a problem. I think the first printer my parents ever had 20 years ago occasionally needed to print a test page, but I haven't had that happen since then.
Meaning, ~75% of us (see pages 14-16): https://o1.rtcdn.net/uploads/2022/04/Issue123EN2205-V4.pdf
I suspect most of us printer owners own inkjets, but people who print a lot of pages use laser, while inkjets are decorative after terrible experience with the first cartridge.
Thank you, you're right — this supports the parent commenter's point for the combined business and home markets. I wasn't able to find any data on the breakdown for the home market specifically, but based on my social circle I'd guess COVID/remote work significantly increased home laser purchases.
> …while inkjets are decorative after terrible experience with the first cartridge.
Having bought an inkjet after a two-decade "only laser/LED" rule, tank/CISS ink is making inkjets nice again. Still, I wouldn't recommend an inkjet if you (1) never intend to print photos/images or (2) regularly go more than a month without printing.
Even if open offices somehow manage to be louder, it is an entirely different quality of noise.
Peak quietness for offices was, in my experience, in the late 90s or early 2000s. Everyone had separate cubicles with sound-absorbing walls. I really miss those days.
Of course, everyone's experiences will be different. Different companies had different office layouts, though there definitely have been clear trends.
They were relatively easy to find up until the late 90s when I stopped "going in"; maybe if people want to fill their expensive commercial real estate you all can convince the suits to bring them back?
Inkjets produce nicer pictures than toner-based printers (LED, Laser) at great expense and hassle. You're better off using an online service for bulk printing of pictures.
For document printing, they completely lose to toner-based. They are slow. They have to be used regularly or they dry up, which is a hassle to fix and perhaps cannot be.
I can ignore my LED printer for weeks or months, and be confident that when I need to count on it to print something, it will print.
Also, to begin with, inkjet cartridges are tiny compared to toner, and most of the content is the liquid carrier. Toner is 100% solids, and the cartridges are much larger.
Tank-based printers have changed this equation a lot, FWIW. I haven't seen a cartridge-based printer that I'd recommend.
I always wondered if anyone ever tried to make a fuel injector out of one. (the finer the mist you can make your gasoline, the better it combusts).
Source: I looked at thousands of these things under a microscope at a company that makes lots of them. 0/10 would not recommend.
An RC/drone I think that would be neat would be a 'diesel electric' (not diesel) - but a motor utilizing this for injecting into a generator for a gas-electric helicopter. Like a Chinook where the interior is the gas-electric generator, but the overall design modeled after the Chinook given that its the Heavy Lifter of Helos with a payload lift capacity of ~20 tons.?
--
In the late 1990s I worked at a company who manufactured a lot of the physical media for various software/games/OS (Intuit/Everquest/SunOS for example)
We manufatered the CDs, copy, manuals, boxes, etc - boxed and shipped it...
All the CDs were printed using Brother inkjets.
My buddy was a fairly famous DJ in the rave scene in the 90s - so in my off hours we would make and print his CDs...
dj morgan...
I designed and printed these logos onto CDs in the 90s
https://i.imgur.com/6VUWeQN.png
(I actually designed the Decepticon Logo in circuitry when I worked at Intel - but we lost the artwork, and that was the cover - the CD was printed with the logo as drawn in circuit traces and was pretty bad ass for the 90s scene...)
(Note: am investor)
BTW since they have basically a positioned spray technology, they could literally "print" things with grass, giving it different nutrients or even dispersing different seeds. Anything from a decorative striped pattern to signs of affiliation and slogans.
But does it really use "inkjet" technology? It looks like an adjustable rate pump with a timing or orientation chip, mapped with an app.
I haven’t had an inkjet for 30 years - only black and white lasers. Starting with HL LaserJet 5L in 2000, then Samsung and now Brother (yay for their nice platform independence so they work on Linux).
My Prusa 3D is also arguably spewing a material into a surface so I guess yeah, maybe I should count it as an inkjet as well, though ;-)
For example continuous inkjet printers are used to label packages of many items you buy every day. There's also research about inkjet printing wearable electronics etc. None of which has a lot to do with HP.
A lot of the comments here read like a hobbyist programmer saying “C++ is dead, I haven’t written any C++ in my projects for years and since I’ve switched to Rust, I’ve never looked back”.
Yes, I stand by this analogy because inkjet is that important. The market is doing great and technology is improving at an impressive rate.
To build on your example of continuous IJ presses: more and more applications have lately been switching to drop-on-demand, as those printheads continue to get better (especially piezo IJ) and cheaper (especially thermal IJ).
“Inkjet 3D printing” exists, but it’s something quite different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powder_bed_and_inkjet_head_3D_...
If you don't print frequently, the ink nozzles clog up (and you inevitably use a bunch of ink trying to fix them). For infrequent document printing, a laser printer will Just Print whether it's been sitting unused for an hour or a month. If you occasionally need some photos printed, using one of the myriad services will be better than replacing the inevitably gunked up ink cartridges.
If you print a lot of documents, the laser printer easily outstrips the speed of an inkjet. You'll also run up huge ink fees since the cost per page of ink tends to be higher than toner.
Therefore, the only reason you should get an inkjet printer is if you often need high quality colour prints (photos).
As a single data point, I used a Canon i9990 for many years. It had a very irregular use -- I would print a few 13x19 photos or a tiled panorama, or an occasional school picture of kids for the relatives. Then it would sit unused for days to months until the next job. And even with this supposedly abusive cycle it ran like new until it completely died one day.
I personally had worse luck with image printing services. Maybe the machines are off, maybe the fellow who runs it does not care, but more often than not there is something subtly wrong: either the color is off, or there is a smudge at the edge or some minor artifact. My 2c.
????
Photos is the last thing I’d buy an inkjet printer for. I’d be using a home inkjet to make circuit boards, temporary shirts, screen printing masks, transparencies, stickers, etc.
I've heard of using Laser printers for this but not InkJet
Inkjet printers are used in a direct print to PCB (remember those inkjet printers that could print on CDs back in the day?)
"Agilent developed a way to print strands of DNA from the four nucleic acid bases—cytosine (C), guanine (G), adenine (A), and thymine (T)."
"Inkjet systems are particularly suited for printing drugs in the form of thin films, such as transdermal patches to be applied to the skin and buccal films to be held in the cheek, where drugs can pass directly to the bloodstream without first going through the digestive system."
These applications are from dedicated machines, not available at BestBuy. Though I would like to see a supplier selling conductive inks for circuit board prototyping, and just maybe a home system could be filled with DNA or medicines??
The article also gave an interesting overview of the micro-dosing technology using for example piezo-electrics.
Huh. Printing photos is one of the main areas where inkjets still blow lasers out of the water.
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/epson-workforce-pro-wf-7840-wir...
1) Surprisingly, the running costs, with generic ink, are the same as a laser.
2) The text quality is fine. The image quality is better than a laser. Photos are great.
3) It can do larger formats (up to 13x19), copies, duplex, etc. The cost is literally a fraction of a similar laser. A large format laser is $$$. This one is $250 right now.
4) The speed is similar to a basic laser, but slower than a nice laser. It's rated at 12PPM color and 25PPM mono. It's slower, but it's fast enough.
I used to share your opinion, but ink has come a long ways. Something like this is super-versatile, since it does literally everything for $250.
Just don't get HP.
The real pro-tips are always in the comments.
I've had a cheapish HP Smart Tank for several years, filled it with 3rd party ink, it goes weeks without use and had no problems.
At the time I was buying mine, Epson marketed the WorkForce Series as the ones which didn't rip you off on ink, and WorkForce Pro, I believe, was even better.
Read reviews for printing costs, and adjust for the cost of generic ink. That's even true for lasers now; it's rare, but I've seen models designed to rip you off on toner too.
It has the problem the GP was talking about, increased to complete new levels.
Also laser printers draw a lot of power constantly, you may be confused here. The toner needs to be kept warm.
The heads don't clog on these printers, although perhaps they do need to be continuously powered to pull that trick off. As the sibling comment said, they are cheap to run, and as reliable as a laser. I gather all manufacturers have similar models that work just as well, including HP.
Be warned that since you aren't being ripped off for the ink you will be asked to pay the real cost of the printer. The cost is comparable to a laser, but much higher then their "we are going to gouge you on ink" cousins they will be sitting beside on the store shelf.
The CEO of HP said there is a risk of viruses being transmitted in the ink cartridges:
https://www.wired.com/story/hp-ceo-ink-cartridge-hackers-dyn...
He says you should always buy their special guaranteed virus free ink, but in my opinion it's much easier and safer to avoid the printers completely. You never know when you buy ink online if it's genuine - you could "catch a virus" at any time. It's almost certainly nonsense, but you can't be too careful.
I have also noticed lots of government offices that print a bunch of stuff all put an inkjet on almost every (rather than shared laser printers I'd been expecting to see), and I wondered why. Your explanation may be the key to that too.
There is also the significantly lower price. Although,if you print a lot, you'll eventually make up the price difference in toner. If, like me, you only need to print rarely, it's probably better just to print at a library or FedEx or UPS store when needed. But there is probably somewhere in the middle where a decent inkjet is more economical, especially if you can get one that works with third party ink cartridges.
Not sure about other printers, but I use HP InkJet for a decade, never clogged up, sometimes sits unused for a month or more.
This was true before, but my 10 year old Deskjet 4515 doesn't do that, even if you don't print for a couple of months.
Being an InkAdvantage(TM) printer, cartridges are not expensive either, and while its color inks are dye based (not pigmented), the colors hold up very well even when they are not stored properly (frame the photo up and leave it there).
B&W laser printers are nice, and they're cheap on the long run, but color laser printers polish the paper a lot (4 drums + baking), and reading long papers on that shiny copy is not very comfortable. Pens' handling on that paper also changes after that much heat and processing. Inkjets and B&W lasers doesn't have that problem.
I use my B&W laser for more disposable documents, but for code and papers which contains graphics, I prefer my Inkjet very much.
Lastly, people think that ink is just colored water. It's not. Same is true for toner. They're complex technologies. Yes, cartridges sent for some markup, but ink and toner quality varies. Esp. if you want archival prints.
https://www.mimakiusa.com/products/3d/3duj-553/
3D Printing with 10,000,000 colors
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IkvzMJihuY
TIL that some countries use comma and a period for separating numbers and decimals respectively and some other countries use them the other way around.
International standard is space for separators - 1 000 000. That’s a pain on a phone.
(And yes, that’s even more of a pain on a phone.)
It just runs and runs and runs.
I've bought a couple more for around the office and recommend them every time the subject of printers comes up.
If you don't want GBs of bullshit malware pretending at being drivers, you're sick of the color ink shenanigans, and you want a printer that wakes up and prints every single time, get a Brother Laser printer. They're amazing.
No affiliation, just a super grateful customer.
I have a beautiful HP Color LaserJet MFP 4301dfw that constantly loses connection to the WiFi access point and requires a reboot and/or logging into the incredibly shitty HP Smart software. I really wish HP had enterprise-grade or at least prosumer software instead of this fucking awful consumer shit. A $599 printer should have a solid software stack, and HP even markets it to small office consumers.
The machine has a beautifully designed exterior and solid internals that are plagued with an absolute shit software stack. Bill Hewlett and David Packard are probably rolling over in their grave at how fucking far their laser printer division has fallen.
HP was once a great company that innovated and made incredible technology.
It was taken over by financial types in the late nineties. They sold off the test equipment core business and leaned into cost cutting. They excised any vestiges of integrity or quality wherever it could be found.
With regard to software, I've long since accepted that HP, Brother, Canon et al can't write drivers to save their lives - and shouldn't have to - in a world where AirPrint, Chrome OS Printing, Windows IPP, or Direct IP printing exist.
It's long past time for printing to be treated as an OS service, where 3rd parties write the smallest possible shim to plug into available devices.
Unlike HP and many others, I've never been forced to install crapware to get it to work from Android, iOS, Mac, Windows or Linux.
It just works and it works every time, whether I have it wired or on WiFi.
The printer experience itself is horrible. I’m constantly having to reboot it, it cannot maintain a WiFi connection, they have crippled usb on it, etc. Reviews back me up, it’s a common experience.
However, it makes beautiful prints. I have printed literally hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pages of full color. And HP dutifully sends me another cartridge without prompting.
Just a couple weeks left on that trial. And the plan? Chunk it in the trash and start over again.
Weird times, friends. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_ink#Advantages
I'd like to know about any projects because a cutter is quite a lot expensive although it seems like the same tech as an inkjet printer.