[AshamedCaptain]

A friend of mine also bought a monochrome laser Brother. It was about half of what you paid; but it came with one toner, and it was only half-capacity. Already a bad start.

The stock toner only lasted for a year or about 200 pages. A replacement toner costs 50€, more than a single black ink cartridge would cost, and the toner is rated for 1k pages only while the 44€ ink cartridge is rated for 2.2k. (!) In fact, for even one of the most expensive inkjet printers I can find, replacing all _4_ color cartridges costs in the vicinity of 100€. There are single color toners that are more expensive than that.

It is true that for an inkjet cartridge you will never be able to print the rated 2.2k pages, specially if you don't print frequently or in long-spaced batches. A single nozzle cleanup probably wastes around 200 pages equivalent of ink, and you definitely need one after about one week of not using the printer.

The math in these cases favors the lasers, albeit not by several orders of magnitude as is often claimed. Also, the same amount of ink is wasted if you don't use the printer for a week than whenever you don't use it for half a year.

[somehnguy]

Page count ratings aside, the issue I've always had with Inkjet printers is that I print rarely - so nearly every time I go to print, I need to buy new cartridges! It isn't very fun to spend $60 on ink so I can print 3 pages because my last cartridges dried/clogged up in the last 3 months.

My laser printer will sit there quietly out of the way indefinitely. Then I surprise it with a print job and it just does what I asked before getting out of the way again. Repeat in 3 months, same story.

[AshamedCaptain]

> so nearly every time I go to print, I need to buy new cartridges! It isn't very fun to spend $60 on ink so I can print 3 pages because my last cartridges dried/clogged up in the last 3 months.

Wait, do you know that most printers have the ability to clean these clogs (by wasting a large chunk of the ink)? You don't really need to throw the cartridge away. This is why I say that printing the rated amount of pages is difficult, since these cleanup operations waste a large chunk of the ink.

In my experience, an installed cartridge does not become unusably dry even after 1 year of total lack of use. That's because I've had all 4 colors installed for almost a year and they're still printing, and they were open & already close to the expiration date by the time I bought them (amazon warehouse stuff)...

[somehnguy]

I’ve never once had that cleaning process work. I’ve even tried a number of convoluted multi-step processes involving iso alcohol and a freezer to fix the cartridges. Always left with streaky prints.

But I’ve only tried it with 2 inkjet models before throwing those pieces of junk away and getting a laser. Printing bliss ever since.

[to11mtm]

> Wait, do you know that most printers have the ability to clean these clogs (by wasting a large chunk of the ink)? You don't really need to throw the cartridge away. This is why I say that printing the rated amount of pages is difficult, since these cleanup operations waste a large chunk of the ink.

That sometimes works. The last HP I bought, cartridges would easily start choking after a few months of non-use, and no amount of cleaning would stop prints from having soft lines/etc. Unfortunately my printing was so infrequent that I'd be lucky to get 50 pages out of a cartridge.

The only environment where I've seen Inkjet cartridges actually 'get fully used' in the last 15 years or so has been in CAD. [0]

Compare and contrast to my Father, who goes through ebbs and flows of printing. Since switching to Brother, his overall 'ink/toner' costs have gone down since there's less waste, also Brother drivers are a bit less offensive than HP.

[0] - I'll add that while the quality of HP Plotters went down substantially between the era of the OG DesignJet 750C and the DesignJet 4000. Sure, the latter was faster, had a way nicer spittoon setup[1] and separate nozzle/ink cartridges, but had a number of design issues that prevented any real use of batch plotting. Any time we did a large series of prints unsupervised it would wind up feeding output back in and jamming the whole thing. [2]

[1] - Tl;dr- where excess ink went between jobs. Part of me wonders if the lack of such bits in consumer printers leads to more clogged nozzles.

[2] - Nothing like telling your boss your print job broke a 2 week old printer that cost almost as much as the compact sedan you bought a couple years prior...

[ricardobeat]

Owner of a color Samsung C430W laser printer here. Have changed the black and yellow toner once in 3-4 years. Both still at > 80%. Never worried about 'dry cartridges'. Works seamlessly on Mac, Windows and mobile phones, no driver installs (should be totally possible on inkjets too, but never is).

There is absolutely zero chance you'll ever get 2k+ prints from an inkjet cartridge unless you're printing a small emoji on the center of the page. The most I think I've seen is ~500 pages of text.

[rblatz]

So with infrequent use you use about 1% of the cartridge just cleaning. I typically print 1-3 pages when I print something. So your ink cartridge would give me about 200 pages.

[AshamedCaptain]

Sounds about right. Which would make this corner case about 5-10x more expensive than a laser, which is close but below one order of magnitude difference. At these points and with such infrequently printing, the cost of the printer itself becomes more relevant than the cost of ink, and that favors inkjets and inkjet multifunctions (e.g. dual-sided ADFs can be had for around 50€ inkjet, since they obviously under-price them; much harder to see these prices for lasers or even non-cartridge inkjets).

[laurencerowe]

I’m not sure it’s a corner case. I print a handful of times a year. I’ve had my $80 Dell laser about 10 years and just had to replace the toner and buy a second ream of paper. This seems about average for people I know.

If I’d bought an inkjet I suspect I’d have had to buy a new cartridge at least once a year wiping out any savings on the printer itself even if I had gone for the more expensive Brother (which would have been less of a pain on a Mac now that the old Dell drivers barely work on current macOS.)

[maccard]

Could you share what cartridge you're talking about specifically?

[AshamedCaptain]

27XLL https://www.amazon.fr/Epson-C13T27914022-Cartouche-compatibl... is currently at 43€ and is rated for 2.2K pages.

[maccard]

I own a HP M15w, bought 2 years ago for ~£100. They're still available for ~£100.

I'm still on whatever toner came with the printer. It uses the 44a toner, which is ~£45 on Amazon (or third part ones are available for £12), and it's rated for 1000 pages.

I had a look at the HP and brother range of cartridges, and every single one of them was rated less than 200 pages. I found _one_ brother cartridge that does 500 pages but on a £500 printer.

What inkjet cartridges are you looking at that do 2200 pages?

[2b3a51]

I'm part way through a third party toner for our M15w and it seems to be holding up well.