Fstoppers on YouTube: Printer Ink, It's a SCAM
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In this video, a Canon print cartridge is opened up and revealed not to contain the meagre 11.9 ml (0.4 fl oz) of ink it is advertised. The proposed solution is to buy a printer designed to be manually refilled with bottles of ink (such as the featured Epson EcoTank ET-2850), though it has only been tested briefly.
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Laser printers are great also if you just need black.
I have a brother laser, cost me 80bucks. Had to replace my toner once, after about 4000 pages. Cost me 34 bucks to get a new toner. Another 2000 pages in. It just doesn't stop. Unplug it. Leave it unplugged for a month or two. Plug it in, wait a couple minutes, wireless print 50 pages with no driver installs. Unplug.
Pretty much the same story. Got pissed at an inkjet one night when my wife needed to print something for school. Still going strong 1 toner replacement later.
Seriously; I feel like I learned the inkjet-cartridges-are-a-scam lesson when I was a kid and have been all about laser printers ever since. I don't understand how anyone is still falling for that.
I bought an HP laser printer in 2016 or thereabouts. I only just had to replace the "starter" toner cartridge on it a couple months ago (despite it warning me it was low on toner probably 3 years ago). Bought an off-brand toner cartridge for like $20.
They're spendy but you can get color laser printers as well. But yes, I love my brother laser printer.
I splurged a little while back on a Brother HLL3290CDW. A bit spender than a monochrome laser, but the image quality is fine and it lets my wife print off as many stickers as she wants without having to spend big bucks on ink every couple of weeks.
I bought a canon color laser printer two years ago with the starter toners. After about 6 months or so, warning came that one of the colors is empty. It was still printing fine so I continued printing. One by one, warning came for all colors, so I bought a 3rd party toner set, but still didn’t replace them because they were still printing fine. 2 years later, I’m still getting warnings that all colors are empty, but just the other day, I printed color pictures of all the 700 Pokémon for my daughter. They’re still going good. I don’t know if they’ll ever actually run dry, or if I should preemptively replace the toners.
Never open it, you've stumbled upon an infinite duplicate bug. Don't tell the admins
My HP color laser (178?) acts the same, with the added "extra low" that you have to allow to accept in some shady parameter in the config or it won't print.
I splurged a few years back on a Brother Color Laser. So worth it. I just send photos to CVS or Snapfish for printing.
Really hard to justify its cost if your ever print like, 50 pages a year.
Quite the opposite. Black and white laser printers are very cheap, and unlike inkjet printers they don't dry out and clog if you don't use them regularly. You can literally spend less than $100 for one that can print thousands of pages just with the toner cartridge it comes with. Color laser printers are the ones that are expensive.
And not even that expensive. 200 bucks will get you a good color laser printer
If you print rarely inkjet is going to dry out and stop working, making them even more expensive and annoying.
My printer was constantly getting clogged because I only print every few months. I was literally buying a new ink cartridge every time. Laser printers can be left quiet indefinitely without wasting ink/toner, they're much better for intermittent use.