I have bought a “starter” cartridge inkjet, a "premium“ AIO inkjet, and (supposedly) one-of-the-better-ones monochrome laserjet. All of them gave me nothing but grief. I used to think this was an accepted loss with the entire printing landscape, that it’s a problem of the domain itself.
Turns out it was because I had always bought HP.
The last final printer I bought is a Brother inktank. It is not without its quirks, granted, yet I have never felt so easy.
God knows how much of a grief stricken, pain inducing, blood boiling, poisoned my life was– because HP. Once I switched to a different vendor, a burden of sorts was lifted.
i have had a total of 5-6 products in my lifetime from HP, and I’m pretty sure each one has easily taken out years from my life expectancy.
My advice, since as others have said inkjets are trash: If you only need to print something every so often, use your local library. Easier if you live close to one, and still a hassle loading it on a thumb drive, but to me it’s easier than having a printer taking up space in my home.
And if you want to print photos, get it done at a lab. It’ll cost more or less the same or even be cheaper, and come out much better.
Living in Japan and being able to walk a block over to the convenience store when I need to print something every few months is the greatest daily life I’ve ever had with a printer.
Get an ecotank printer
I have am epson ecotank and they actually make money on the printer instead of the ink, you fill the ink into tanks on the printer
I have to press “keep on printing” on my printer for months now and every print is fine. This is just disgusting.
I had to print maybe 3 times in the last 10 years and just used one of those coin operated printer things. Does anyone still print that much to justify owning a printer?
Yes. But I use a cheap Brother laser printer.
*Goes through and upvotes all the comments about getting a Brother laser printer*
If you need an ink jet, I can also recommend the Epson L3260 ink tank. You pay a bit more for the printer but the ink is fairly reasonable.
Why is it the cyan that’s low in the comic? It’s always fucking yellow that they scream about.
If I recall correctly it always screams about yellow because many printers print microscopic dots that make a code allowing law enforcement to ID the printer
Anyone ever tried to assemble a compute cluster from these?
Also note that printers come with a smaller cartridge. Buying another printer isn’t cheaper, even if it costs less.
This is true, and yet somehow when I buy the “XL” sized cartridges they don’t feel like they lasted much longer than the “S” size that came with it.
it is if you only print rarely
The key is to buy a brother laser printer
It’s black and white but most people rarely have a need for color. Meanwhile, the toner doesn’t dry out like an inkjet printer will
You buy that one $150 inkjet printer and you’re set.
I bought a secondhand Brother printer from ~20 years ago for $20, with toner and drum all set, and it works flawlessly on modern systems. They even still keep the official page with the drivers and the stock of replacement parts is readily available should I ever need them.
My only regret about buying a brother laser printer is that I didn’t get one much sooner. I love it!
Swear to god old inkjet printer don’t let the ink dry out. My old HP printer works fine with refills and I print like 3-4 times each year. Never had any ink dry out. I’m convinced they purposefully made later printers dry it out on purpose. Problem is that “later” was like 15 years ago or smth.
I will throw this idea into the ether and hope someone with more time, knowledge, and talent than me builds on it: swap the brains of an HP Printer with a raspberry pi. All the motors and wiring are in place, and HP sells the printer for cheap to screw you on ink and software. You’d probably want a new source of ink and a way to refill the cartridges to fully cut out HP. I feel like this would get you pretty close at an affordable price.
The whole world wants the Linux version of a printer, we just need a couple people to get together and figure this out.
Inkjet cartridges are only refillable a handful of times before components wear out if you don’t screw up the refill in the first place. I used to work at an ink refill franchise, it’s all trash.
A decent toner printer and a small business that will refill toner for cheap is the way to go.
Ohh God … That’s a very, very tall order.
You wouldn’t think that it’s that complicated. I worked in a print-on-demand house for about 5 years, The amount of black magic fuckery that goes on between streaming data into that driver and getting stuff on the page is absolutely insane.
You’re standing on the backs of like 40 years of trade secrets and poorly implemented protocols at half-assed feature sets.
And then the worst part is, HP is spent the last 20 years making the printer cheaper. Most of the inkjets don’t even have steppers anymore, just DC motors and a resistive feedback ribbon.
Developing a multi-platform certified signed driver would be a pretty decent hurdle as well.
Can’t we just stop printing? Change things over to black and white thermal when we really need something that’s pretty easy to do.
I would love to make a living lobotomizing smart devices.
Someone could probably do this. But it would just be a fun project, not replicable.
You’d need to write your own printer driver. There are probably some open source libraries out there to do most of the heavy lifting, but it’s still a project.
The big issue is going to be the interface between the pi and the printer’s “motors and wiring”. Doable, but too finicky to publish a “kit” or something for someone else to replicate. It could be worth the work if it would help other people, but I don’t think that’s on the table.
Honestly, I think anyone with the ability to do that would probably find it easier to just build their own printer.
The Linux version of a printer is just buy a brother color laser (or non color). I bought one for 85 bucks like 15 years ago and it still chugging along
Bought a Brother during the pandemic when they were hard to get. I shelled out $500 on an office machine and I’ve spent probably $100 in 3rd party toner in 5 years. No regrets.
Please tell me more about this brother laser thingy and why it is a good alternative
I work in IT. Our clients are small offices with existing equipment. So I see a wide variety of machines in different environments.
I would only buy a Brother printer. No question.
Brother is probably the least offensive brand. Laser uses toner instead of ink. So no more of this not printing anything for 6 months and it no longer works crap. Toner lasts basically forever. I’ve replaced my toner cartridge exactly once in like 15 years. The starter cartridge lasted something like 5700 pages of text. The non-starter cartridge should last longer.
“The motor was unable to verify activation. Please contact HP support”
Move over shockedpikachu.jpg
LOL, but what about ecotank technology?
Fuck you, HP
Or you can buy a safety razor and a 100 pack of blades and never have to think about razors again for the rest of your life.
Shaving is one of the most basic of human grooming techniques going back hundreds of years, we figured that shit out ages ago. Ignore Gillette’s marketing, ignore BIC’s “cheap” prices. Just get a no-name safety razor and some blades and you’ll be sorted for the rest of your life. You don’t need fancy shaving creams either, lather up some soap and rub it all over your face. Done. Easy. Cheap. Sustainable. Now you can use your time on picking your nose or playing video games or whatever you wanna do for fun!
This will cost like $30 and you might not need to buy blades for years and years.
I went a different route and just didn’t shave for six years, then chopped it off in one go with an electric razor.
When I did leave the house and worried about being presentable, I did enjoy a safety razor. I also had good luck with a shavette. Never got a really good shave with a straight razor, but I did both damage my (cheap) sink and sport a stylish but gnarly cut for a few days. That is, of course, a skill issue rather than tool issue.
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