[jmyeet]

Never, ever, ever buy a printer that takes cartridges. They’re discounted to at or below cost where they make the money back on cartridges.

They use ink to clean the heads. They say empty when they’re not. The cartridges that come with the printer aren’t full. There is a constant firmware update war to defeat third party cartridges for obvious reasons.

Buy a tank printer that you fill with ink bottles.

[ilyt]

I'd say they would put DRM on paper if they could

Except fucking Dymo did: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/02/worst-timeline-printer...

On plus side choosing which brand label printer to buy was very simple...

[loloquwowndueo]

Well - buy the printer and once it runs out of ink toss it and buy another printer :)

I did that with an HP inkjet - got me out of trouble until it ran out, then I replaced with a Brother laser that was half of what the ink refills for the HP would have been. Toner for the Brother is like 20 bucks and lasts for a couple of years given my level of usage.

[jmyeet]

Years ago I used to do this when I rarely but occasionally needed a printer. Less than $100 for a printer that'd last me 2-3 years then just buy a new one. I fully support this strategy if your usage is really, really low.

[jerry1979]

Regarding the brother printer, what do you do with your replacement ink things?

[loloquwowndueo]

I sell them to one of those shady “cheap toner/ink” places, I imagine they refurbish and resell the cartridge in turn.

[1123581321]

Better to buy a laser and send the occasional photo quality ink job out to a print shop, unless you’re running a creative studio.

Even the starter Brother laser toner prints for ages.

[bityard]

Sounds like you're talking about ink printers, TFA is about laser printers.

Laser printers are far more cost-effective than ink printers, and there are even color laser printers with very decent color quality for everything except photos. (Ink printers are better for photos but even I think those look terrible compared to professionally-developed photos.)

[hathawsh]

Agreed. I've had the same HP color laser printer for over a decade and it's still working well. I've only had to replace the toner cartridges once or twice. Before that, I went through at least 3 inkjet printers that all failed because the ink dried out.

BTW, a cool modern hack is converting a document to high-res image files and then submitting the images to the Walmart photo printing service or similar. The document will look incredible.

[thebetatester]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25047231

[aspectmin]

Any recommendations on a good tank printer?