I bought a Brother (HL-2170W) laser printer about 8 years ago, and it's still using its original cartridge. I do very little printing, but I do need it from time to time.
During my last move, I accidentally tipped a book shelf on top of it. Cracked a few plastic bits, and bent some metal things inside it. I unbent the metal, and glued the plastic, and the thing still prints like it's new out of the box.
I've talked more than a few people out of buying inkjets.
I have an HP LaserJet 4L. It's noisy and has an inconvenient Centronics interface. This is because it's over 20 years old, but it has been similarly reliable and repairable because it dates from the era when HP were a respected engineering company.
You should get rid of that old thing, and upgrade to a early/mid-2000s HP LaserJet 2300d. It's about the same size, but it's far faster at printing (especially graphics), has a USB interface, you can add a JetDirect 10/100 ethernet card, and is a true Postscript printer. It's also extremely reliable, and the ink cartridges are cheap on Ebay.
The 2400 series (which replaced the 2300 series) looks pretty good too, and has built-in ethernet (no extra card needed), but that's when they switched manufacturing to China, so I don't know how reliable it is.
Second Brother lasers. My HL-3170CDW color laser is still going strong after four years. Works flawlessly with Linux, OS X, and Windows; toner lasts forever; and print quality is fantastic.
Yep, my Brother MFC-something-or-other laser went about 10yrs I estimate before something went south with its brains. Never had a problem with the cartridges or any of the mechanicals, but I didn't use it often either. A brand new Brother MFC-L2740DW laser sits on my desk now and if it lasts 5 years I'll have gotten my $170 out of it.
The Brother color lasers also are happy to print without color toner cartridges present.
By contrast, HP's cheaper color lasers require the cartridges to be present, and if they run out and are left in the machine, they cause banding over your printouts. This is due to their integrated drums wearing out, so you have to replace the color toners even if they're not being used (or hack around with transferring chips onto less-used old cartridges, even black ones so they're seen as colour ones).
This is not true, I owned a 700$ multifunction printer scanner, copier, everythinger and it required me to hack the cartridges to print black, it always put shitty yellow tracking dots on all printouts. Don't send more business to Brother.
They have the worst software (on printer and in driver) of any printer company I have come across. Their driver installers download random bits from IP addresses in Japan with zero encryption. The hardware is stellar, the software is cringe worthy.
This is on a Mac. I wanted to see if the firmware bugs would be fixed by using their firmware update tool. The printer itself times out when attempting an on-device firmware upgrade. The downloaded update utility just attempts to grab a new firmware image from an IP which is non-responsive.
It can't scan over AirPrint if it has gone to sleep, it only can accept print jobs via IPP if you want it to WOL. So I have two printers configured, one via AirPrint for scanning and another via IPP for printing. There are so many low hanging firmware bugs that it makes me think the same folks wrote healthcare.gov
I've had 3 of the Brother multifunctions in various offices (7920, 7940, 7960), and a couple of the color multifunctions (9340 right now). Generally happy with them in every way.
I was pretty surprised when network scanning worked out of the box on Macs. I scan about as much as I print. AirPrint works on the newest ones, too, from iPhone/iPad.
Their inkjet line of crap are the worst printers I've ever had to use and continually clean themselves out of ink, even when you aren't using it. If you unplug it and plug it back in, the damn thing will clean itself for a proportional amount of time. So it will use ink at a nearly constant rate regardless of whether or not you use it. It is totally some kind of fraud.
I bought a brother dcp7040 and am still on 1st full size cartridge after the sample toner ran out. Absolutely love this printer!! Ink junk can go to hell.
I feel like a laser printer evangelist now. I have a few laser Brother models I always recommend to people who complain about their inkjets based on their OS, the functions they need, and if they primarily print BW or color.
Sort of like high deductibles did to people's willingness to seek medical treatment, I know more than a few people with inkjets that actively avoid using them because "it's so expensive and never works".
They're afraid to use up their ink, so it ends up expiring(!) or drying out having been barely used, and the next time they desperately need to print something, they have to buy $50+ of cartridges before they can print anything at all.
The HL-2140 I got in '09 for $60 can print on transparencies for PCB masking, does manual duplexing and easy booklet printing under Linux and OSX, and with aftermarket toner refills I've only needed to replace the drum/cart once. Contrasted to the cost efficiency of all the low or mid range inkjets I've owned ($80-350), it's been an exceptional return.
I'm equally happy with our Brother HL-2150N. Already using the third cartridge in its fifth (?) year, but a very basic and cheap and capable laser printer.
Same here. I bought that one for my study but finally it was used by all my family (big error to put it on the network) who print 500+ copies with the original cartbridge. Given it was almost the same price as laser printer (~100€), it happened to be a very good deal over the years.
even when you hit the end of that toner cartridge there is a small hack to get you another at least 50 pages, the brother printers use some kinda beam sensor that passes through the cartridge if the printer detects this is unbroken the cartridge must be empty because there is no toner all you do is block this there a small clear plastic window on the cartridge reboot the printer and you're good to go. you may get faded pages after a while try shaking the cartridge a bit.
also people just don't buy inkjet printers if your printing patterns are limited to just a few prints a month there always just going to dry out go with the laser printers they use toner and never dry out.
Well to be fair I bought an Epson inkjet printer (Workforce something) several years ago and never used up its original cartridge. Granted I don't print much but I was still fairly impressed.
Of course that doesn't invalidate the point of TFA. Also they have an ink dump that is chipped - when it is "full" they force you to buy a replacement rather than just empty it.
I don't know why people still bother with inkjets. It's like the companies are actively punishing you for buying these models of printers. If they are necessary for work, then MAYBE. But even then, if you're buying commercial hardware you're not dealing with this junk either.
It also used to be that laser was incredibly expensive in comparison, now they're about the same price if you compare color inkjet to black and white laser.
I bought a Brother black and white laser MFC 7 years ago. I've changed the toner three times and it is just ready to print when I am. I've never had it not print, my old inkjet required a prayer before every print job.
No nozzle jams, no problems with a color being used up, preventing a b+w print. It just works. I paid maybe $180 for the printer 7 years ago and I'm not going to replace this printer until it fully dies. It has fax and multi page scanning capabilities- the only thing that sucks is that it isn't networked by default and the Linux drivers are touchy.
I plugged it in to my TP-Link Archer C7 and their printer sharing drivers work fantastic on OS X. I will never buy another inkjet printer again.
Nozzle jams were the bane of my existence with the 3 HP inkjets I inherited/bought during my college years.
I also switched to a Brother B/W laser printer last year (HL-L2380DW) and it works over my network, I can print to it from a phone/tablet/desktop (win/OSX/linux/iOS/android), and on each platform it "just works", printer/scanner/copier.
We have printed hundreds of pages thus far and have yet to replace the cartridge that came with it when we bought it. No streaking, no alignment issues, no clogging, and it even has double-sided print support. ~$200 investment, and have never had a better printing experience.
EDIT: I should highlight that the reason i ended up with 3 HP printers was because the average lifespan of each came out to ~1.5 years. Inherited 2 used, bought the last one new, and when that one also died so quickly is when we made the switch to laserjet.
My last HP multifunction was complete garbage. The sheet feeder was unreliable. The scanner insisted on adding a black vertical line about 2 inches from the left margin of every scanned page. Scans resulted in massive file sizes even though quality was sub-par.
Print quality was fair, but cartridges went dry super fast. Frequently replaced cartridges for drying vs usage. Software was also sub-par. Network printing wasn't exactly reliable, as the printer would go unreachable.
Switched to a Canon MX512 and it was a much better experience on all points above. I'm sure there are better units to be had, but for light duty printing and scanning, it gets the job done.
You can't generalize all inkjet printers. I use a Canon Maxify Injket in my company (we print only ~200 pages / month) and it's amazing. There is no laserjet that could compete in price/print.
Sure you can. The difference is in usage pattern. If you use printer rarely, ink will dry out and you will have to clean the head (using lots of ink in process) or replace cartridge. On the other hand with the frequent usage laser printers become cheaper per page quickly. I once had Epson Stylus 800. Sucked big time. Replaced with HP 6L, never owned an inkjet again, never will.
I don't print 200 pages a year. I might not even print 200 pages in 2 years. At my usage level I would have to buy a new freaking inkjet cartridge EVERY TIME I wanted to print because they'd be dry.
They probably are. I wonder if you'd be better off printing the photos at Walgreens or something like that. Also, it would seem HIGHLY wasteful to use a high quality photo inkjet printer to print your Amazon return label...
We have a colour Brother laser which I got a few years back which seems pretty solid - toner isn't cheap but we can probably go for years without changing it so it's not that bad.
I have a Brother that works pretty well. It does track how much toner is used and requires replacement before the stuff actually runs out. However, a quick bit of screwdriver work, or some tape in the right place, and you can convince it to start over. I've done this several times since I got the printer many years back, and it still prints fine on the original toner cartridges. I'm sure someday I'll have to actually get some new ones....
Lasers do have disadvantages – mainly their excessively high power consumption and their air pollution.
Modern gel inks don't dry out in my experience, and make for very efficient printers that are much less maintenance intensive than lasers. And ink is cheaper than toner unless you print several hundreds of pages a month.
I'm sure I'm having a brain fart and missing something obvious, but why are inkjets cheaper than laser only at lower monthly page volumes?
Seems that your savings would just continue to increase the more you print. Or is there something else that affects the inkjet price per page at higher volumes?
It's the per-page cost. A toner cartridge will print several-thousand pages before it runs out, but most people don't print that often. The base cost on a color laser might be $300, while for an inkjet it might be $50. If you never burn through the sample cartridge that comes with the inkjet then you're ahead of laser because of amortization. However, if you manage to run out of ink more than once then laser will end up costing you less, assuming you print equal amounts with both printers.
Ah OK. I was thinking strictly operational costs, while this comparison includes the price of the printer and assumes other constraints. Got it. Thanks.
I bought inkjets for years because I was doing a lot of photo printing, but my latest one (or I should say last one!), a Canon Pixma, was just ridiculous this way. No ink = no scanning -- whaaaaa?? I don't print much anymore, so now the cartridges dry up in the printer and/or expire, I'm not sure which, before I get any use out of them.
I picked up a Brother laser a few months ago and I don't ever have to be annoyed by that crap again.
I'm very happy with my inkjet HP PSC1410 printer/scanner that I bought 9 years ago... I don't print very much and probably use one B&W cartridge per year (cheap on ebay) and the cartridge doesn't dry out..
> 4. The printer will not function (Scanner or Fax) without the full cartridges (black and colours).
My parents recently scraped an Epson all-in-one. Something had broken inside and the printer insisted that there is a paper jam and refused to do anything, even scanning.
They took it apart trying to figure out what's wrong. This thing had probably hundred moving parts or more, mostly made of plastic. It was so overengineered I'm surprised it had ever worked at all.
My favorite part is the CD/DVD tray which takes like 10 seconds to eject because the drive is hidden deep inside and the device has to rearrange some of its guts to bring it to the front. As much as I admire people who were able to pull it off, this is sick.
The purpose behind the engineering of the printers is to drive the sales of as many ink cartridges as possible while being as cheap as possible to produce.
From this perspective, offering many additional features which turn off when the ink rent hasn't been paid makes much more sense.
There's a problem with that theory: they're simply not going to stop buying them and switch to lasers.
We've had this dynamic for at least 15 years now, and people still are buying cheap-o inkjets and getting ripped off on ink cartridges. If people haven't learned after a decade and a half, they're never going to learn. Just look at the other comments on this discussion (including the blog posting that started it all): even on "hacker news", which is full of technologists rather than regular people, tons of people here have fallen for the inkjet scam. If a bunch of nerds don't know any better, than you certainly can't expect the regular public to figure it out.
I've got a HP PSC1215 that is 10+ years old, and don't agree with all of your complaints.
1. Cartridges last about 200 pages, which isn't great (I use a laserjet for anything I don't need in colour, so personally not a huge issue). They are rated for 500ish pages, so YMMV.
2. Never had this issue - I've had cartridges in for over a year, and they've still worked fine
3. Not the best of comparisons, as the printers often ship with 'trial' cartridges that contain much less ink than the replacements. That said, a set of Black+Colour cartridges will cost me about £30 (a little expensive really), or a third-party/refilled set will be about £15 (always worked fine for me; YMMV).
4. Never had this issue - I used it as a scanner recently without any cartridges in at all and it worked fine.
5. It's noisy when printing. I hadn't encountered any major bugs - mostly used with OS X, so can't really comment on Windows driver quality.
Hi. I didn't complain mainly about the quality of the printer. It's cheap and it's expected to just work. But not working because a cartridge is available or "malicious" pricing of printer/cartridge is not honest business.
You can see it however you want, but that's how businesses work now, and they've been doing it for a century now. It's called the "razor and blades" business model, which started with Gillette. You get the main item cheap, and then the consumables are horrendously overpriced. Who cares if it's honest or not? People are so gullible they'll buy into it, and if they haven't figured it out after 100 years, they're never going to, so companies might as well use this model or else they'll be uncompetitive.
If you don't like getting ripped off this way, it's really easy to avoid: buy a business-class printer, and not some cheap-o consumer printer.
I had a Canon Pixma iP1600 that would still work after months of non-use. I was in awe, since every other inkjet is like you described -- I had several HPs.
I don’t know what kind of printers you buy, but the ones I had – from HP and Canon – solved all those issues:
(a) you can refill cartridges, you know that?
(b) printers will ask you "foreign cartridge detected, accept? yes/no", and it works
(c) refill ink goes for a few cents per liter
(d) the printer works fine without some cartridges, just press "yes" when it asks you "print with just black?"
(e) I print 400 pages university books on one set of cartridges once a semester usually, and have enough left to print another whole semester my homework.
Vendors actually hard-code "I'm dry and won't print anymore" kill-switch into chip on cartridge as protection against regeneration. You may refill your cart, but if kill-switch went on already, your printer will not print anyway claiming dry cartrigde.
Well, my printer allows me to ignore that switch if I keep the "abort print" and the "print test page" button both pressed for at least 15 sec after inserting the cartridge.
Not true at all. Buy a good management solution (we use PrinterLogic) and buy good printers.
By getting rid of crap devices, putting the good, self-service management system in solution in place, and proactively replacing consumables, we took something like 75k annual printing tickets down to around 300.
Those support interactions and dispatch cost like $1M/year, so eliminating them paid for 100% printer replacement in about 18 months.
Because we bought thousands of printers at once, we made the vendors quarter and were able to extract additional concessions re:reliability guarantees, etc. So if our estimation of the quality of the devices are wrong, we're shipping a lot of printers back.
The problem is that you can only afford to do that if you're a moderately large business. For home users or small schools (where I have worked), that's simply not an option moneywise...
Also, printer user interfaces are consistently incomprehensible. I had a Brother 5070N for a long time, ended up giving it away. It was almost impossible to tell what the few problems it had were. I made the mistake of getting a Canon Pixma 3520. 5 LEDs and 4 buttons as a user interface for something that hooks up to a wireless network, and has all kinds of physical things to do to it? You've got to be kidding. Unfortunately, that's typical for printer state-of-the-art. LEDs and push buttons. What a joke.
IMO it's mostly inkjet printers. The whole market was made so they can make tons of money on ink.
To make this work, the printer needs to be cheaper than alternatives (I even had situation when I was buying a computer that came with printer, when I told them I don't want the printer the price was higher!)
Those printers are made as cheap as they can make them, they don't bother about their quality, because it cost to you as much as one or two cartridges.
Also the issues the author of the article has are simply are to force you to buy more ink (the printer doesn't need color cartridges to print black, but still requires them, and once you put color cartridges in and don't use they'll dry out)
They are quite complex and the consumer versions are commodity items. There are printhead - ink - paper interactions and the electrophotographic process for laser printers requires optimization to print on different media. There are lots of things that can go wrong - and do. I have spent much of my career in an analytical lab analyzing these problems. Such problems raise costs and with commodity items, very high yields are required to be profitable.
Years ago we had a professor (I forget the name) from MIT come to our Research Labs and give a talk on his research. He was using game theory to study product research, development, and manufacturing. When all was said and done, he concluded that if you were not first or second to market, you spent significantly more money to enter the market and your probability of being profitable was much lower.
It's a race to bottom of costs, not some market teeming with innovation. Sure you could build the most amazing printer in the world but no consumer is going to spend $1000 for it vs. the $50 special at the big box store. Think of them like razors and razor blades--they'll throw an extra blade on to amp up the marketing but in the end it's all about selling some plastic and electrical bits for a few pennies less than the next guy.
I didn't get your razor analogy at first because you can have inexpensive and high quality with safety razors (eg - Feather blades).
The ones you reference are aptly called disposable razors and electric razors. Disposables are sham products through and through, but a large portion of the electrics market is high utility, fairly inexpensive basic function devices, like trimmers.
A Fill-ups(tm) that pre-warms the lotion it squirts on your face and starts your car for you on cold days for an extra $150 over the previous model is a bit of a gimmick, but there are plenty of standard models that are low cost, long lasting, and well priced if you know what you're shopping for, which was part of your point about cheap vs quality printers.
Get a cheap consumer black and white laser printer and never look back. I can't think of any time I've needed or wanted to print color. For photos and such send them off to be printed with real photo printers.
I print my occasional shipping label et al. at work (shh!), but did the same for my parents. I don't like Samsung with anything creative, but their simple black and white laser printers seem great and even have official Linux support.
We came to the same conclusion. My wife is a teacher and we often print her notes, tests, homework assignments, and worksheets to be copied at school. The B&W laser "just works" and is both fast and economical.
I don't own a printer, and I feel like when I have to print something I usually employ one of the following strategies:
1) Going to an office supply store, library, or university with the PDF of what I need to print on a USB drive.
2) My workplace providing a printer for work-related printing.
I can imagine good reasons why someone would need to own a printer, but it seems almost like a car these days. If you don't want to deal with one, and you can live your life effectively without, it might be better to rely on services to print for you.
I own a printer, because I need to print shipping labels. I didn't own one until I started doing a lot of shipping. Even in college the CS lab let us print for free (the library charged) so I used that to print out assignments. I bought the cheapest black and white only laser printer in existence - $25.
I pretty much exclusively buy Epson XP-420's nowadays. What other all-in-one option is there that meets the following criteria?
1. Complete and free Linux support
2. Wireless
3. Affordable - remember, we are competing with a printer that regularly retails for $40 and whose cartridges cost around $10 per set. "Just buy the $200 Brother with $40 a set toner" isn't satisfactory to the people I recommend printers to.
HP printers are known to be draconian with their cartridge DRM, and their Linux support is kind of a PITA with how they use their own protocol and suite of tools and every HP printer I have tried has never played nice with Cups management.
Since most folks only print black and white for occasional stuff (forms, taxes, resumes, etc), something like the Brother HL-L2320D mono laser printer is a good bet. Works with Linux (rpm and deb available from their site), wireless, affordable. It's under $90 and toner is $30 for 1200 pages (2.5 cents per page) or $49 for 2600 pages (1.9 cents per page). Compare that to $13 for 175 pages (7.4 cents per page) with the Epson.
If you don't need wireless, bump down to $68 for the HL-L2320D. For both printers, good 3rd party toner is about $10 for 1000+ pages to save even more. I listed only first-party numbers above.
If you really want to print pictures at home, you can on a "cheap" inkjet. But it'll cost you overall more per print (due to ink drying out, etc) and be worse quality than you can get from a local pharmacy, office store, or printer. A good quality inkjet for photos is another story, but quite a bit pricier.
This is not just for me though, I consult and regularly recommend printers to clients. If they are business scale we always go laser, but home users do not want to hear they should buy multiple printers for b/w + color printing, and they don't want to buy a scanner separately (the 2340D is perfect except it lacks a scanner).
In many cases, it is hard enough to get them even remember what the print icon looks like, how to use ctrl-p, or that the word "Print" is in the file menu. Trying to get the tech illiterate to not only manage two printers, but also replace ink and toner for both of them, is crazy.
And the thing is nobody in this is printing often. Frequent printers should always buy laser, we know that, that is established. But we are talking about the once a week printers who just want everything for cheap. What better alternatives are there for that use case than an Epson 420?
I usually recommend lasers to very infrequent printers as well due to the likelihood of an inkjet cartridge drying out or clogging up between infrequent printings.
And you caught my copy pasta error. The first reference was indeed to the 2340D not the 2320D.
I've never had anything but plug and play it just works with HP network/wireless printers. The Linux stuff works far more reliably than the Windows drivers.
For $100, you get a wireless/ethernet dual sided printer that can also has a sheet fed scanner.
The main downside of the HPs is the cartridge cost, along with the DRM and the annoying "this cartridge is expired" messages you need to click through.
This is not unique to Epson, so if you go out an buy an HP thinking you'll be safe... do your research first.
I have an HP Officejet 6700 Premium right behind me that works the exact same way. If I run out of Magenta, it won't even print in black.
I've been thinking of trying to find a way to inject some water or something into the empty cartridges to trick it. The strange thing is - I almost never print in color, yet somehow, I run out of color ink. I don't get it. And it's costing me way more than I want to spend to print.
The simpler option is to buy a high quality laser printer. I'm on the same cartridge in my HP4200N for almost 10 years since it's good for 12,000+ pages.
Has anyone tried Epson’s Ink Tank series? They have a ridiculously low cost per page, with new inks costing as low as $5/bottle. I’m thinking of buying one to replace my aging Lexmark E-232 which has printed more than 70k pages without a hitch.
How hard would it be to hack an open source printer hardware, say using some standard black toner cartriges (any brand), and make a Kickstarter out of it?
What are you going to offer that the big printer manufacturers don't offer today?
Cheaper prices? I doubt it, you're not going to be at the same scale as the big players and will pay a ton more for parts. Not to mention you're going to have major upfront costs for tooling, molds, etc. unless this thing is going to look like an erector set.
Higher quality? Again doubtful, unless you've been researching inkjet technology for years and have some incredible breakthough. If you're asking how hard it is to make a printer I doubt you have some special tech ready to revolutionize the industry (no offense).
Cheaper ink? If you want to cheap out you can already refill ink cartridges or even buy recycled / dirt cheap ink for most printers. There are plenty of knockoff cartridges and even brick and mortar stores (look at any mall) that sell those cheap cartridges. Or just go laser and never worry about stupid cartridges again.
Better support? Not on a Kickstarter project budget. Have fun dealing with crazy customers freaking out that their 15 year old Windows 2000 box won't use your printer.
Epson recently found through customer research that anxiety about ink cartridges was one of their biggest problems and so they are launching printers with refillable ink tanks, currently available in the form of the Epson EcoTank L355. Given that the company has understood this problem and released products to address it it seems that never buying Epson printers might be an incorrect response.
The concept is nice but the EcoTank printers themselves look like junk, in the store at least. Given how expensive they are, you'd have thought they'd make the design more durable-looking or used better materials. That said, I haven't seen the ET14000 or two-tray workforce in person, and maybe they work better than they look :)
1) That's not just Epson. Many manufacturers do that.
2) That's a cheap consumer all-in-one. You're buying a subsidized product which pays for itself via expensive ink cartridges. Requiring all of them in order to print is called "leverage". It's at least ten years that such products exist - if you didn't know, it may be your fault as well.
3) Want a reliable printer with a decent cost per page? Aim at the SOHO market, at least. There you won't get a subsidized price, and printers would actually need to print more than 10 pages per month - hence the higher price tag.
Just an example: I've got an Epson Workforce Pro 5620. It's an inkjet, color all-in-one printer with double sided printing and scanning. It works great, the price-per-page using original Epson cartridges is on par with most non-heavy duty color laser printers (i.e. those in the $400-$600 range) but it's much cheaper ($280 on Amazon right now).
At least the Epson stuff I've owned is easy to install with Linux and doesn't break after a few months of use (contrary to various Canon and HP devices). If there exists a non-terrible printer manufacturer (in a consumer budget range) do tell me.
I bought an HP M252dw Color Laserjet supporting WiFi and AirPrint off Amazon for $230 last year. It replaced a Konica Minolta color laser I'd had for several years that ran out of toner (that one was $120 IIRC). I didn't have to replace it, but I really wanted an AirPrint printer. I also had to be a be choosy since I wanted something that would fit in the IKEA printer stand I've had for about 10 years.
Sure toner costs about double what ink does, but with the very occasional printing I do it's actually much cheaper since I don't have to replace the ink or print heads from disuse whenever I need to print something. The laser printer is always ready and will go years on the same toner cartridges.
Forget black & white. Having a color laser at home is one of the best computer purchases I've made. I had a cheap Canon USB Scanner in the closet for the once or twice a year I need that function.
Maybe you got to have them inserted, yes, but they can be empty. (My HP OfficeJet 6500A Plus also prints with empty color cartridges. I just replaced them today after weeks of emptyness).
I had Lexmark before, it was never a problem! unbelievable, the thing is that I never used the colors, they dried out! You have to buy all of them just to print in black!
Not too long ago I bought a cheap printer (don't remember the brand), took it home, and returned it after seeing the horrible quality of the print. Then I brought home another cheap printer of a different brand, had the same experience, and returned that.
The reason I was buying cheap printers is that they were the only ones locally available, other than one very expensive model, the epson XP800. Apparently the market has been shrunk to only people that don't care about quality. They give the printer away and make a killing on the ink.
In the end I bought the expensive Epson and have been very happy with it. I'm not happy about the state of the market though.
It's the business model that is the problem no the tech. This dude spent 5 hours trying to hack his printer. He is the problem! Just value your time and go out and buy a decent printer ffs. To get a printer this bad you have to spend next to nothing on it :-)
It's not worth it; you'll never be able to make it cheaper than a good small-office printer.
If you want a nice printer that is reliable, has ultra-cheap cost-per-page, is rated for 50,000 pages per month, uses Postscript, etc., they're out there, but you're not going to find one for less than $50. But you can find one for $300-1000 (depending on if you want color or B&W). Your kickstarter project isn't going to be able to beat that.
Have a look on the Open Printing site to see if there's a driver that can be used with CUPS. Then have a look on toner seller sites to see if the carts can be refilled cheaply.
The Open Printing site tends to list any problems some printers / mutli-function devices have.
My Brother HL-2380DW black and white laser with flatbed scanner works great in Linux (Ubuntu 15.04 at least). The scanner I actually have setup to scan straight to Dropbox so I don't even have to screw around with scanning software on a computer. It does cloud print and apple print too so all your mobile devices will work. Supports auto duplexing of printing so you just check a box to print on both sides. Great printer if you just need an occasional use scanner. They make a version without any scanner too that's a bit cheaper, and a version with a fancier auto duplexing document scanner if you do a lot of document scanning.
HP 4200N. It's not light, but you can get them cheap and they run forever. You turn it on and Linux, OS X and Windows automatically detect it on the network and can print. No hassles and no nonsense. I've had the same cartridge for going on ten years since it's good for 12,000+ pages. I'm sure I should do the scheduled maintenance, but it's good enough print quality for my needs.
Having owned more printers than I can remember, including Epson, Brother, Ricoh, Tektronix, HP, using laser, inkjet, and even other technologies, I think there are a few conclusions to draw:
+ For printing documents laser printers are by far the best choice for reliability, economy and quality of output. Color lasers have become quite reasonably priced, so if color printing is needed, no need to get something less.
+ For photos, nothing beats a high-quality pigment inkjet printer, but they can be expensive, especially large-format models.
About 12 years ago I bought an Epson Pro 4000, with 17x22in capability, it was at the time used leading edge tech. It required 8 ink cartridges. I preferred the 220 ml size, but those cost ~$100 each. The main problem with the 4000 was the heads clogging easily, a big annoyance and costly too.
But the Pro 4000 made absolutely gorgeous prints. Now it needs to be replaced, though spending >$2000 is not a pleasant prospect. Newer machines no doubt have much better print heads, probably lower TCO.
AS many here point out, small desktop inkjets can be expensive to operate and document output quality is often poor vs. laser.
+ It's been pretty consistent, printers and printer drivers cause 90% of system admin problems. Windows has always been by far the worst on this score. Amazingly, I had tremendous issues with a 6 year old Ricoh under Windows, but absolutely no driver problems with Linux. The customary Postscript-based printing in the Unix world is a predictable standard and usually easy to work with.
Many laser printers have built-in Postscript emulation, though a PS option for high-end printers or plotters can cost upward of $1000. Still might be worth it to avoid the Windows printer driver hell.
I have one major use-case for (very cheap) inkjet printers: on the beach. I run a non-trivial number of beach volleyball tournaments[1], and the beach is not a terribly hospitable place for electronics.
So I carry with me a cheap printer that's light to carry. If it takes a fast-moving ball that breaks off a part, or it gets overloaded with sand, dust, destroyed by rain, whatever, it's no skin off my back, since it was just $30.
So far the same crappy printer has been serving me for about 4 years in this capacity.
Toting around a laser printer would be a huge pain in the ass.
Otherwise, I'm completely onboard with the overarching sentiment: there's not a lot of reason to own an inkjet printer.
[1] My flagship product (http://bracketpal.com) is a tournament management system, and beach volleyball is the niche I focus primarily on.
This isn't just consumer grade printers. At work we have a number of large scale plotters and they all stink. Our main is a HP DesignJet T1300 44-inch wide plotter. Even it refuses to print if any of the 6 inks are too low or the heads are 'needing to be replaced'.
The software on it is absolutely brutal too, it has a resistive touch screen as it's primary input and it's incredibly slow to page through. On top of that, if you try to speed things along (for example, pre-opening the paper roll cover before manually paging through to the 'replace paper' menu link) it will complain and refuse to do what you ask until you start back at the beginning.
I have had nothing but trouble, and these are multi-thousand dollar printers.
Printers (for consumers) need development. They still function like the old days with all the bad stuff comes with that.
I personally just have a B&W Dell laserprinter that cost almost nothing. It's fast, prints everytime, and one cartridge lasts very long time.
Before my Dell, I had a 3-in-1 HP printer. It was the worst printer I've ever had. Paper jammed all the time. And half of the time it wouldn't pick up the paper, and told that there was no paper in it even though the paper tray was completely full. And those problems started on day one.
I'm still looking forward to seeing a printer that's really useful and user friendly. Silent. Easy to replace cartridges. One that doesn't jam paper every second page. we need the iPhone of printers.
I don't see why. If you want a better printer, you just have to pay more money and get one aimed at the SOHO (small office) market, which isn't subsidized by ink cartridge prices as the guy above notes.
The home printer market is like this because it's highly profitable. What you're probably thinking is that these printers need to be more like SOHO printers: cartridges that last a long time, ability to print tens of thousands of pages without any reliability problems, etc. They already have these printers: they're sold to people who have small offices and small businesses or workgroups.
The problem is people who seem to think that they should be able to get a business-class printer for $39.99. There's a reason they're that cheap. This is one of those cases where you really get what you pay for.
>I'm still looking forward to seeing a printer that's really useful and user friendly. Silent. Easy to replace cartridges. One that doesn't jam paper every second page. we need the iPhone of printers.
We've had those for a long, long time now. My HP LaserJet 2300 is mostly like that, except maybe the silent bit (you're never going to get a printer that's totally silent; mechanical contraptions that move things around with motors are going to make noise), and I think it's about 13 years old now. But that printer probably cost around $600 when it was new. You're not going to get the "iPhone of printers" at feature-phone prices.
I only very lately learned that you could attempt some hackish head cleaning with warm purified water. By pouring it in place of colored ink, it's supposed to melt dried stuck ink clogging the head.
I had a Lexmark S605[1], unfortunately the black side of the head got clogged, making it almost useless, unless cheating by printing in blue.
[1] the best AIO wireless printer I had. Solid build, not noisy, consistent throughput. My mother had to buy a quick replacement, a HP envy4500, it's a cheap piece of crap. Even the motors sucks. Slow, noisy, random.
I haven't owned a printer in probably 10 years and I'm not particularly young (32).
I get their usefulness in some aspects of business operations but I'm a bit at a loss as to why an individual would purchase one.
What are the use cases now? The only two I can think of are printing photos, which I get but it seems better handled either through a photo printer or an outside service or for printing 'offical' documents to fill out manually, but I've completed many such transactions by digitally filling out and signing a pdf.
Tickets. Boarding Passes. Government forms that cannot be filed electronically. Carrying information you need where you don't want to reply on a phone whose battery could run out.
To read something in a focused way, with no internet to distract you.
I printed out a plane ticket today to fly in a country where waving your phone with the same ticket is apparently not satisfactory.
It doesn't surprise me that there are edge cases where you need paper. It surprises me that those edge cases are numerous enough that you would own a printer and deal with it.
All of my boarding passes are covered via phone but on the occasion that I need a pass for an airline that doesn't have that option I would just spend 5 minutes at a kiosk to get it.
On the occasion I have to file a gov form that isn't available digitally or I can't fax (via email), I'll just get it printed at whatever local place can do so.
Point is that home printing really isn't a necessity anymore, and depending on circumstance it's debatable if it's a time/cost savings. As a result I would expect the home printing market to get more and more expensive.
I got my printer for something like $100 on Ebay, and it's ridiculously reliable and the cost per page is dirt cheap. Why would I want to waste my time driving somewhere and paying to print stuff when I can do it in a few seconds at home?
The home printing market is only going to get more and more expensive if consumers are so stupid they can't go buy small business printers on Ebay that are a few years old and off-lease.
* Printing tax forms (even if you do them electronically it is much easier to have a file folder of all your info should you get a query from the government)
* Printing homework or practice questions for my kids
* Printing registration forms for the many places that aren't computerized
* Faxed identification for various purposes
* Faxed contracts for real estate
* Scanned documents and identification for people that accept them over email
* Scanned expenses
And that's not including my wife's use of it, who is a student and will regularly print off stuff to mark up by hand.
> Printing tax forms (even if you do them electronically it is much easier to have a file folder of all your info should you get a query from the government)
I store them as PDFs and put them on a NAS that with backups to S3
> Printing registration forms for the many places that aren't computerized
Generally have found I can fill out the PDF and stamp a signature on it and it's fine.
> Faxed contracts for real estate
Same as above.
> Scanned *
Not a printer, I just use a phone app for 'scanning' documents.
i have a cheap brother b/w laser at home, and use slightly more expensive hp b/w lasers at work because they're faster.
at home i print things like movie and event tickets. i don't like fumbling around on my phone for tickets because sometimes there's no reception and the email or whatever isn't cached. occasionally i will have government paperwork or something to print from home also. i will also print out maps and lists when i know reception will be crappy.
basically, mandatory paperwork and shitty cell reception are my use cases.
For online tickets, you can usually download them. If not, I just take a screenshot (both Android and iOS have built-in support). I've traveled on Ryanair just fine using them.
For maps, there are plenty with offline support: Google Maps, HERE, OsmAnd, etc.
I'm not criticizing your approach, just saying that I've never felt that need. Official paperwork, on the other hand, is still a pain; our local governments seem particularly adverse to digital documents.
uh yeah, i understand you can use a phone offline. but i'm just not going to rely on my phone to get into a place that i traveled to get to. screenshot, offline, blah blah, what if the battery dies? what if the damn thing just stops working, like it has done multiple times in my life? what if someone snatches it from me while it's out in my hand like it normally is? what if someone spills a drink on it while it's out on the table at the dinner before the show?
how do you think i know of all these terrible scenarios?
i'd rather hang on to a piece of paper, and if i lose it, then i have nobody to blame but myself. call me a luddite.
Well, the printer manual probably says, like mine does:
"Install all ink cartridges; otherwise, you cannot print".
But in my Epson XP-200, if my black cartidge runs out, it tells me that I can use a 'composite black' mode where it blends the ink from the colour cartridges to form black. And vice versa - when the colour ink runs out and black ink still remains, you can continue printing temporarily with black ink only.
So there are always those options if you need to get something printed.
I use printers so infrequently, it's usually easier to use the work or public library printer when I need to rather than maintain ink cartridges. They usually go dry before I use them, I typically print less than 10 pages a year.
For the record, it's always government paperwork. Always. If you work for government, I have this super-neat thing called Flask to tell you about, you're gonna lose your shit when you find out!
I hate printers in general. After all these years, manufacturers still haven't come up with a standard communication interface that would allow me to just plug in the printer and have my OS detect and use it without issue. Instead, especially with Epson printers, I have to download some awful crap-ware driver, which supports all OS versions up to the one right before the one I'm currently running.
My HP LaserJet 1020 has been chugging away for 10+ years on $11 refilled cartridges that yield around 2k monochrome pages. It just might last ten more!
I pulled a LaserJet 1160 out of storage today because my wife's inkjet stopped working. It printed ~75 pages without a hiccup, and I don't even know how old the cartridge in it is.
This isn't really a new thing, it's been like this for over a decade. It's why Epson printers are so cheap; they make their money on the cartridges. I've had better luck with HP in general (Officejet), though I don't know how good each particular model is so some may be worse.
I purchased a Xerox Phaser 6100 Color Laser Printer for $30 on Craigslist. Only problem is there are no drivers for OS X... Course it had %70 toner still and I don't look forward to having to replace the toner but at least are all separate colors and can be replaced separately!
I used to have one of these. It didn't understand Postscript, but after installing Splix it appeared in Cups printer model list and worked absolutely fine.
I had an Epson 3800 photo printer. It once ran out of ink in the middle of a print and stopped mid-stream. I replaced the cartridge and it started back as if not missing a beat.
Paying more upfront for a printer saves you in the long run. Avoid cheap multi-function printers like the plague.
And you know that some high-paid exec decided it was a good idea to refuse to print when low on ink... "to ensure quality" and uphold the brand name. Haha - it had the opposite effect.
They're not going to do it for business-class printers, because businesses aren't going to put up with it. They do it with consumer-class printers because consumers are dumb and want the cheapest thing they can find and don't print a lot, but businesses need printers that can print a lot of pages without maintenance. There's plenty of competition in the business printer market, so it'd be pretty stupid for mfgrs to pull too many shenanigans there.
During my last move, I accidentally tipped a book shelf on top of it. Cracked a few plastic bits, and bent some metal things inside it. I unbent the metal, and glued the plastic, and the thing still prints like it's new out of the box.
I've talked more than a few people out of buying inkjets.