For those wanting to know what the ink costs for comparison it’s £2.04 per ml.
Next time I’m in the club and want to show how baller I am then I’m buying a round of HP light magenta.
It’ll need to be a round of of every colour since so many printers will refuse to print a black and white document because one of the colour ink cartridges is empty, also it’s a colour you rarely use yet somehow is the first to run out.
In this imaginary scenario we can do anything. So that’s a full round of color for the table, and heck, why not for the whole VIP suite! Lets spray it like a rainbow round here!
Thanks dude, you’re the best
Jesus… And here I thought Whiskey was Fancy…
That is substantial… That’s with an injet printer, or a ink tank printer? Converted mine roughly runs at £0.18 per ml.
Guys, just buy laser printers, assuming you have any need for a printer still in the year of our lord, 2023. 15 years ago my printer wouldn’t let me scan a document because it was low on magenta ink, so I took it outside and smashed it on the ground, threw it into the dumpster, drove to the store, and bought a Brother laser printer. During the entire 15 years since then I’ve had to buy toner one time, and I found it at the thrift store for $5. That’ll probably hold us over for the rest of our lives since we rarely need to print these days. Ink jets are shitty rip-off machines. Destroy yours today.
I bought a Brother laser printer years ago and I’m still on the first full sized toner cartridge (not including the half sized one it came with).
My printer usage got cut drastically when I stopped having in-person D&D games.
I’m still on the factory toner cartridges after 15 - 18 years. They’re refillable, as are the replacements.
Tabletob RPG stuff is what I need mine on the regular as well
Photographers don’t have that option. Last time I checked, laser printers sucked for photos.
I’m glad I don’t need to print photos. But if I did, I would probably consider one of these options:
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a continuous ink system (“CIS”). There are CIS kits for modifying a rip-off printer. There are also complete printers that come with an integrated CIS but they charge a fortune for those since they’re not gouging you on the ink swindles.
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project the digital image onto real photo paper in a darkroom & develop it with chemicals. I think Walmart has a machine that does that, in effect, and you pay per photo for their service.
As a photographer, I just bought a separate canon dye sub printer for 6x4s, I rarely print anything bigger so I just outsource it.
Your 2nd option is called digital c-type, although the machines for that usually use lasers.
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Amen I bought a used one from work for £20 8 years ago with a bunch of spare toners and I still haven’t used any of the toners. Do they actually go off?
Eventually, but they’re good for thousands of prints.
Or they may be good for one print, depending on how frequently the printer is used.
Install a new cartridge, print one page, wait a year before trying to print again and you’ll need a new cartridge.
It’s a no-brainer why they practically give those things away.
You’re talking about an ink jet. I’m talking about a laser printer. The toner doesn’t dry out, it’s already dry. Our toner lasted us like 8 years before we had to replace it.
Indeed, I was. I’d lost the plot, thought the commenter above you had bought an inkjet. Thanks for the clarification.
I got a brother laser free from work 5 years ago. Haven’t had to buy ink yet.
We were implementing 802.11x auth at the domain, for all network nodes and had to can a few printers that didn’t support it. A few of us for lucky 😃
just buy laser printers
If we didn’t have #climateChange, laser printers are favorable for most non-photographic use cases. But I hate to say it: laser printers are substantially less energy efficient than #inkjet printers.
My solution: own no printer. Use a print shop or library. A lot of the energy waste is in powering on and charging up the drum. If you have to stand in line to use a #laserPrinter, that’s a good thing energy wise because high volumes is more efficient per page (but AFAIK still never as effecient as an inkjet… but perhaps reasonable enough).
Stop buying printer ink. Buy a laser printer and buy toner instead. It’s significantly cheaper.
For B&W text, sure. But the quality of laser required to print a decent colour photo is not cheap.
This is why I print the color pages at work
I would do that to, but I work from home.
When you have to add the cost of a transatlantic flight it costs nearly as much as the inkjet we have at home.
Almost is the keyword. You’d still save a few bucks
Maybe try and blag it on expenses 😉
Yeah, I didn’t even had a printer until I started working from home. It’s so good to use those free company stuff :)
Big brain energy
It’s gotten cheaper than an inkjet DO NOT BUY AN HP!!! Brother MFC-L3710CDW $399, scanner with a page feeder, scan to USB in multiple formats (jpg, pdf, etc) scan to a network folder, straight color copy, + a color printer that never clogs or dies off because you didn’t need it for a month. Also does B&W of all of the above with just black toner.
How often does the average person really need that, though?
Theres always ‘but sometimes’ arguments to everything, but the advice was general.
Shipping labels, concert tickets, sometimes train tickets and airline tickets (some companies don’t accept them just on the phone), contracts, NDAs, tax returns, etc.
Depends on where you live and how much you interact with other companies and government agencies.
Every single thing you’ve listed would be absolutely fine in B&W
Well OK yeah, for those you just need B&W. Color becomes useful when trying to impress. I’ve sent rent applications in color specifically because I know that the real estate agents are subjective. Some of the talks that I’ve held were helped out by coloring my notes while I was presenting. And some home crafts and activities (escape rooms with friends) were helped out several times by the color printer. Given that there isn’t a huge price gap in maintenance and initial costs, for me it was worth it.
Also, neither the OP nor the comment I was replying to mentioned anything about color. I was specifying stuff about printers in general.
Lol, the comment thread you replied to is literally talking about color printers. The person you replied to said “How often does the average person really need that” with the ‘that’ being in reference to printing in color. Then you listed a bunch of stuff that doesn’t need color
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The comment I replied to did being up the topic of colour though, just read the thread.
My response to that is that the average person doesn’t need colour printing, and honestly doesn’t even need to print at all with rare exception.
Based on your replies you are not the average person in terms of printer usage. So that’s why you had the responses that you’ve had. You’re just seeming to look for an excuse to argue?
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I’ve printed most items on that list in black and white. Why would you need color for any of those things?
I wasn’t replying to anything that mentioned color.
Yes, you were. The comment you responded to was asking whether coloured printing is all that necessary in response to someone saying that while b&w laser printers may be cheap, colour ones aren’t.
A simple B&W laser printer would work great for all those things
Yes. The word “color” is mentioned exactly 0 times in the ancestor nodes above my comment.
Yeah, cos it was spelt correctly, “colour”, right there in the comment
The laser doesn’t print anything. I haven’t taken apart a home printer but I assume it works the same as the smaller machines I fix. The laser charges the drum. That puts the image on the drum by attracting toner. Then the paper rolls over the drum. I skipped some steps but that’s the general idea.
The point is the laser just has to be good to charge the drum.
It’s quite common to leave out the noun when everyone knows what everyone’s talking about. In this case when someone says “An inkjet is worse than a laser”, we know they’re not talking about the actual jets or lasers
Okie dokie. I care about as much as the people down voting me for knowing how printers work.
Hmmm not sure if non-native or just wildly autistic
It has a significantly higher upfront cost though. So not that interesting for low volumes.
That’s probably what they’re probably counting on to keep the ink business alive.
A laser printer is actually better for low volume printing. With ink cartridges, they dry up if you don’t use them within a year and will need to be replaced.
I’ve had my laser printer for about 12 years now, and only replaced the drum once since I print so little. Also, I have a Brother printer, which was roughly around $50 at the time.
This is great wisdom. Brother printers are very cheap and 3rd party consumables moreso.
Just block them from accessing the internet. They tend to auto-update their firmware and then some 3rd party cartridges will suddenly stop working.
You can get a little Brother laser with network and duplexing for the same price as a cheap inkjet. It will be much cheaper to run and the ink never dries out. We do that and have an HP Envy with the Instant Ink free tier (10 pages per month with no rollover).
Serious question. Why are people buying ink based printers when laser printers exist?
Because most people print so rarely that it doesn’t actually make sense to invest in a more expensive machine with lower running costs.
This is actually the sole reason I went with laser - I print so rarely that a traditional inkjet would not stand up to long periods of inactivity, as the ink wells would either dry up or the printer firmware would force replacement.
A monochrome laserjet should run you about the same price as an inkjet and cartridge refills (since the included inkjet cartridges won’t last long), and would probably suit 90% of most user needs. I highly recommend the Brother line of monochrome laser with duplexer, mine is 10 years old and going strong.
Second-ing Brother, there. Best all around one, and it doesn’t have crap like vendor-locked ink cartridges, firmware that’s dependent on PC-specific software that doesn’t get updates, and all the other malicious printer company tricks you see common at HP and others. Printers that are cheap require expensive ink for the vendor to make their profits. Reasonably priced printers are usually not subject to that scammy selling tactic.
Same here. I have a Brother 2370DW that I’ve owned for around three years and it’s still using the toner that came with it.
The only color prints I’d make are photos and those get sent out to a printing service.
Got a Brother laser printer when I was still at home because I got tired of using the cheapo inkjet. Because everytime we needed something printed we’d have to run to the store and buy $50+ in black and color cartridges for 1 or 2 pages. I took my printer with me when I moved out and helped my parents pick out an identical printer because they liked mine so much lol.
OMG, same here. I got tired of buying a new inkjet every 2 years or so. I bought a Brother laser all-in-one 4 yrs ago and haven’t looked back. My only regret was not spending the extra bucks to get a color model.
OMG this is such a fallacy… Inkjets cost SOOOO much more to run than a laser that uses toner that doesn’t dry up like ink cartridges do.
Don’t blame me. I don’t even own a printer. On the extremely rare occasion that I actually need to print something there are plenty of places that will do it for pennies. I haven’t spent more than a dollar in a year since I gave up owning a printer of my own, and the prints are all way higher quality anyway. A laser printer still costs more than an inkjet and the ink to fill it though, and the idea that years down the line it will pay for itself just doesn’t occur to or even matter to most people.
Wasn’t that their point though? That the laser is lower running cost but despite that still not worth it for someone who doesn’t print often enough? If savings in running cost are such that it’ll take a decade to recoup the difference in initial outlay at the rate of home printing then despite the laser being objectively better it might not be worth it for extremely low volume printing.
I goddamn hate my piece of shit inkjet and didn’t know laser printers had become something viable for consumers so I’d love for them to be wrong.
Most of the times the printer will be cheaper, so people will buy it, but later the ink will be expensive, which is were these companies will make all the money…
The colours are better
This is what happens when you have a monopoly on the ink cartridges. It’s literally why they put chips in them - to force you to buy new ones.
Never buy HP printers.
Even their laser printers are riddled with phoning home and cash grabs.
I got a second-hand Xerox laser printer a while back and it is the best printer I’ve used.
Friends don’t let friends buy inkjets. Sane people don’t let even their worst enemy buy HP printers.
Buy a Brother laser printer and never worry about printer issues again. They just work.
It physically hurt me to buy an inkjet for my grandmother. She needed a scanner and I needed to be there to install it. Walmart said they had a Brother MFD in stock, but they actually didn’t.
I’m just waiting for the first time she calls me to say the printer isn’t working. I’m buying one here and driving up there to replace it.
Well that just makes you a good grandson. You helped her with her immediate need but you’re going to make it even better when the opportunity comes up. Nice!
edit: Apologies if I assumed the wrong gender!
Appreciate it, and yeah I’m a guy.
Don’t laser printers easily cost upwards of $300? A bit hard to justify for occasional printing.
We were gonna buy a new printer and I told my mom to buy laser. She said no, following a similar reasoning to yours, and bought an inkjet hp. For a year we couldn’t use it because of a faulty ink cartridge. We only do occasional printing so we often just went to a local print shop(?) instead of doing anything about it. Then we bought another cartridge (which costs more than half the price of the inkjet printer itself) and the printer is only printing the upper half of pages for some reason. I’m the tech guy in my house and I’ve had, at this point, a lifetime’s worth of HP’s bullshit. I’m not even gonna try to fix it because it’s always the most convoluted stuff with drivers and various standalone programs and none of it works. You know, cell phones and controllers and cameras can be plug-and-play but inkjet printers NOOOO. Idk what the conclusion is but ig just don’t buy that shit. If you don’t want a laser printer then stick to printing your stuff at a local business.
My grandmother constantly complains about having to buy new ink carts for her printer and how expensive they are… I found her a good laser printer for a good price, she refuses to even let me set it up. Some people just cant be helped.
There’s this book “Waiting For the Galactic Bus”. It’s about two immortal, energy based aliens who get stranded on primitive Earth and give a proto-ape an IQ boost, creating the human race. They find that when humans die their consciousness sticks around and has gathered in two “post-life energy pools”. The humans in these pools are expecting some version of heaven and hell, so the aliens decide to give them what they want just to keep them happy.
At first the alien running the pool dubbed “below stairs” doesn’t understand what the humans are asking for, but the other gives him a copy of Dante’s Inferno as an explanation (his response: “These people are sick!”) So he gives the humans the scenery and props they want, and makes sure all the exits are clearly marked. They can leave any time they want. But they stay because they insist on having their hell.
This book is one of the most insightful commentaries on human nature I’ve ever read.
The real cost of an inkjet is that one needs to buy ink regardless of whether they print. It tends to dry out over a few months. If you don’t happen to use all the 100-200 pages, the money is wasted.
In the past, just because the printer was on sale, I have been able to buy a cheap printer for less than new ink.
I bought a brother a couple of years ago for just under $200. That was the cost of 4 sets of ink. I have replaced the toner a couple of times at $17 each. Each replacement has lasted me a few thousand pages.
This was a replacement to a pair of brother printers of the same model I obtained via yard sale for a total cost of $10. These yard sale printers would have lasted longer if not for small children and dogs.
I have probably printed 6k pages for the cost of $180 over the course of several years. Most of the printing has been school work for kids and forms in general.
This is the biggest part of the scam. You buy a new cartridge ($80 mind you!) to print something, then go to print again a few weeks later and the damn thing doesn’t work anymore. Should be a class action law suit.
Sometimes you could rescue them by blotting them on an alcohol soaked paper towel.
Or you could just throw it in the trash, get a laser, and enjoy trouble free printing. No offense.
None taken! I have already moved on to laser printers. It is literally one less problem in my house. I can’t imagine freaking out and trying to get just a few more pages from my printer, but I was there once.
I bought a Brother laserprinter in 2004 for about 350€. It still works like on the first day (although I’m not using it much these days). I had to replace the drum once, I think…
I picked up a low cost, black and white laser printer. It was ~60 CAD, 10 years ago, and still sees nearly daily use. Gone through two toner cartridges since then.
10/10, highly recomended
How much does a few cartridges of ink cost?
Literally just bought an all-in-one copier/scanner/color laser printer for $300 on the dot the other day from Brother directly, so no, it seems like there are plenty of reasonably-priced laser printers. I’ll take that over $30 every time I want to print something because the ink cart dried up.
It’ll pay for itself many times over 15-20 years it’s going to serve you.
No sir! You can buy a basic brother laser printer with duplex on Amazon for $120. It’s a myth that laser printers are significantly more expensive. And they are absolutely, hands down, no bullshit, super straight facts here, cheaper in the long run. Vs inkjets it does not take long at all for that ‘long run’ savings to be realized.
This is why inkjets are a scam.
Another great newish option is an ink tank printer. They aren’t heavy duty like laser but you get color. You can just get the ink tanks refilled once they run out.
I bought my brother laser printer in 2011 since it was cheaper than buying a bunch of programs from a print shop. It still works great. So yes, it definitely an expensive up front purchase, but it should last you for as long as you have to print stuff.
Depends on which one you buy. The ubiquitous Brother HL-L23XX is around $150 and I think I got it on sale a few years ago for closer to $100.
But more than that, its all about the cost of ink vs toner. Ink is expensive, can dry up and clog which will require a new cartridge, and consumer inkjets are getting to the point where they have hardware DRM preventing third party cartridges.
Lasers may have higher up front costs but toner doesn’t bad (at least I’ve never seen it happen and I’ve had the same toner drum for four years) and it lasts so many prints that you’ll get your money’s worth.
In my experience, ink does dry up. Repeatedly. I was using 1 cartridge per two or three prints. So I got a $300 laser printer and it was worth it.
Mine too. Before this printer I had an old HP inkjet (so old that its basic drivers weren’t bloated PoSes) and every time I had to print, I would have to buy a new cartridge. If I tracked how much I spent on ink I would not be surprised if it was more than the entire cost of the laser printer.
I can’t remember the last time I printed something. Honestly.
Ooh Wee!
To save you a click, the comparison printer ink in the article is £2.04 per ml.
The article is worth reading though.
Ok business idea
You buy the printer. The printer is made out of wood and metal. If you hit it with a hammer your hammer will break. It communicates only over Ethernet. Uses the default driver of the most popular desktop OSes. If you call support a surly man yells at you and tells you that this isn’t fucking EAgames, you buy it you own it our business is concluded. You put whatever ink you want in it via a syringe. Your grandkids can inherit it when you die and it will still work. When it breaks you get out a screwdriver and pliers to fix it. The manual warning for electrical shock hazard is “if you are too dumb to fix it you deserve getting electrocuted. Please hire someone who can be trust with scissors to open this”.
You put whatever ink you want in it via a syringe. You manage to make it not clog after I forget to print a color page for two weeks (make it a decade) and I will buy & recommend your printers exclusively for the rest of my life.
I have an ink tank printer that works pretty much like this. The tanks are translucent so I can even see the ink.
As long as you are happy, that is all that counts! Personally my color printing is like 14 pages every 7 months and that’s not enough to keep an inkjet happy, my samsung color laser on the other hand has been zero effort all that time.
sennheiser problem unfortunately, but you will have cult followers- try releasing it as open hardware? maybe
This is why I’m going to hold onto my ancient inkjet without DRM until it dies. I can buy the no-name ink off amazon for $7 and it works just as good
I’m impressed there are people out there paying £120 for 100ml of lavender oil.
Lavender essence is used everywhere in perfume industry, from detergents to mix it with other things to create perfumes. 100ml of essence can produce a huge amount of other products, that’s why it’s so expensive.
I know a village in Spain dedicated to it for generations where most of them became rich with it.
almost. Cogollor. I’m from Guadalajara and Cogollor started with the lavender industry much before Brihuega. But now with the internet Brihuega is the one that became famous with it.
More Marketing campaigns in Brihuega
Cogollor:
Isn’t even blood cheaper? We should print with blood.
I would love to have that option. When I’m writing a letter in protest of something and want my outrage to have full impact, what better medium than writing the letter in blood?
But blood should be free right? I mean for medical use at least(is there any other use)
And here I am, I have so much ink I don’t even know what to print. I thought I would go through it faster and keep refilling cartridges with this.
530mlThe problem with comparing cost like this is how much you use varies drastically I use 35-40 litres of petrol a week commuting I might have used a litre of printer ink in the last 10 years
Sure, but that doesn’t change the cost of the liquid. It’s a direct comparison of the price of 1ml for each product. That’s not a problem, that’s just the cost of the liquid. People do the same thing with different metals, rocks, and whatever else you want to compare the price of.
Of course the amount of liquid(or other stuff) you sell change the cost of the product.
If you for example only produce/sell 1 litre of a product, then all your costs(plant, distribution, people, suppliers…) will be spread throuout this 1 litre you sell, but if you could sell 1000 litre of that product the cost per litre would be lower. Of course your overall costs will increase with your output increase, but not on the same level. That’s called Economy of Scale
