
There is no good reason to ever buy an inkjet printer - smacktoward
https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2016/10/there-is-no-good-reason-to-ever-buy-an-inkjet-printer/
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tonymet
There's another often overlooked flaw with inkjets: the ink dries out. If
you're a typical household printing only a couple times a week, your yield /
cartridge plummets. I've had inkjet cartridges that expired after 30 pages or
less because i didn't print frequently enough. Jet cleaning wastes pages and
pages worth of ink.

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SpikeDad
Wow. Nonsense. His whole argument is that he's sure you really don't want to
print in color. Um, yes I do. And a color laser printer has an enormous cost
of materials and can't print a good photo.

I agree inkjet ink is way too expensive. But that's something I can manage and
more companies are introducing bulk ink systems if I'm really worried about
cost.

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smacktoward
Hi! I'm the author :-D

I address the photo-printing use case in the piece. There are tons of services
(online and local) that will print your photos for you on very good paper for
a low cost. I'm very skeptical that any inkjet can consistently produce photo
prints at the same level of quality as you'd get from using those services at
a competitive cost, because they're buying their consumables in bulk at
wholesale prices where you're buying them in small batches after retail
markups.

Maybe you're only printing a few photos, and the convenience of having a
machine on your desk outweighs the higher cost. But the fewer photos you're
printing, the less paying a premium to have hardware dedicated just to that
task makes sense.

I'm open to being convinced that I'm wrong here, though. If you have figures
that can show a plausible scenario where printing photos at home on an inkjet
beats getting prints made by a third-party service, post them here and I'd be
happy to review them.

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mixedCase
If you're making an article like this and you know about this case, the first
order of business is checking for prices. It might not be too late for that.

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mattthebaker
Amazing how ignorant people are to what is actually in an inkjet cartridge. It
is not the cost of the ink. The cartridges have precision MEMS components to
dispense the micro scale drops of ink. As with anything mechanical, they have
limited cycling, can clog with impurities in the ink, etc.

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jleahy
It's amazing how the cost of these MEMS components hasn't fallen at all over
the last 20 years whereas the price of other MEMS components (eg. gyroscopes,
accelerometers, microphones) have.

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rurban
No. Of course I bought a cheap laser for printing. But I need the cheap inkjet
for scanning and faxing.

