
Never buy Epson printers - e-nouri
http://e-nouri.com/epson-products-sucks/
======
JensRex
I bought a Brother (HL-2170W) laser printer about 8 years ago, and it's still
using its original cartridge. I do very little printing, but I do need it from
time to time.

During my last move, I accidentally tipped a book shelf on top of it. Cracked
a few plastic bits, and bent some metal things inside it. I unbent the metal,
and glued the plastic, and the thing still prints like it's new out of the
box.

I've talked more than a few people out of buying inkjets.

~~~
pjc50
I have an HP LaserJet 4L. It's noisy and has an inconvenient Centronics
interface. This is because it's over 20 years old, but it has been similarly
reliable _and repairable_ because it dates from the era when HP were a
respected engineering company.

~~~
Grishnakh
You should get rid of that old thing, and upgrade to a early/mid-2000s HP
LaserJet 2300d. It's about the same size, but it's far faster at printing
(especially graphics), has a USB interface, you can add a JetDirect 10/100
ethernet card, and is a true Postscript printer. It's also extremely reliable,
and the ink cartridges are cheap on Ebay.

The 2400 series (which replaced the 2300 series) looks pretty good too, and
has built-in ethernet (no extra card needed), but that's when they switched
manufacturing to China, so I don't know how reliable it is.

------
walrus01
Never buy any inkjet printer. I threw in the garbage a Canon multifunction
that refused ton work as a SCANNER when its ink was empty.

If you have the space and print a lot of black and white, buy an eight year
old used HP LaserJet with an Ethernet interface.

~~~
manyxcxi
I don't know why people still bother with inkjets. It's like the companies are
actively punishing you for buying these models of printers. If they are
necessary for work, then MAYBE. But even then, if you're buying commercial
hardware you're not dealing with this junk either.

It also used to be that laser was incredibly expensive in comparison, now
they're about the same price if you compare color inkjet to black and white
laser.

I bought a Brother black and white laser MFC 7 years ago. I've changed the
toner three times and it is just ready to print when I am. I've never had it
not print, my old inkjet required a prayer before every print job.

No nozzle jams, no problems with a color being used up, preventing a b+w
print. It just works. I paid maybe $180 for the printer 7 years ago and I'm
not going to replace this printer until it fully dies. It has fax and multi
page scanning capabilities- the only thing that sucks is that it isn't
networked by default and the Linux drivers are touchy.

I plugged it in to my TP-Link Archer C7 and their printer sharing drivers work
fantastic on OS X. I will never buy another inkjet printer again.

~~~
davnn
You can't generalize all inkjet printers. I use a Canon Maxify Injket in my
company (we print only ~200 pages / month) and it's amazing. There is no
laserjet that could compete in price/print.

~~~
Drdrdrq
Sure you can. The difference is in usage pattern. If you use printer rarely,
ink will dry out and you will have to clean the head (using lots of ink in
process) or replace cartridge. On the other hand with the frequent usage laser
printers become cheaper per page quickly. I once had Epson Stylus 800. Sucked
big time. Replaced with HP 6L, never owned an inkjet again, never will.

------
csomar
Multi-function inkjet printers are a Scam. No, I'm serious.

1\. The printing functionality is flawed. A cartridge will not last for more
than 100 pages. (I tried Epson, HP and Canon).

2\. The cartridge will dry and not function after a few weeks only.

3\. The original cartridge cost almost as much as a new printer with the
cartridge.

4\. The printer will not function (Scanner or Fax) without the full cartridges
(black and colours).

5\. They are buggy and noisy as hell.

~~~
kaonashi
The purpose behind the engineering of the printers is to drive the sales of as
many ink cartridges as possible while being as cheap as possible to produce.

From this perspective, offering many additional features which turn off when
the ink rent hasn't been paid makes much more sense.

~~~
chrischen
Makes sense until people stop buying them for laser printers.

~~~
Grishnakh
There's a problem with that theory: they're simply _not_ going to stop buying
them and switch to lasers.

We've had this dynamic for at least 15 years now, and people still are buying
cheap-o inkjets and getting ripped off on ink cartridges. If people haven't
learned after a decade and a half, they're never going to learn. Just look at
the other comments on this discussion (including the blog posting that started
it all): even on "hacker news", which is full of technologists rather than
regular people, tons of people here have fallen for the inkjet scam. If a
bunch of nerds don't know any better, than you certainly can't expect the
regular public to figure it out.

~~~
chrischen
People don't really print anymore. If you do print, you're an office or
business that runs laser printers.

------
StreamBright
Reminds me of:

"I am going to spend the rest of my career focusing on the hard problems of
computer science: printers, projectors, and screen sharing."

[https://twitter.com/britt/status/611996866146779136](https://twitter.com/britt/status/611996866146779136)

~~~
veddox
Printers are my biggest IT nightmare. No piece of modern computer hardware
fails so consistently, so ununderstandably or so frequently as a printer.

~~~
Spooky23
Not true at all. Buy a good management solution (we use PrinterLogic) and buy
good printers.

By getting rid of crap devices, putting the good, self-service management
system in solution in place, and proactively replacing consumables, we took
something like 75k annual printing tickets down to around 300.

Those support interactions and dispatch cost like $1M/year, so eliminating
them paid for 100% printer replacement in about 18 months.

Because we bought thousands of printers at once, we made the vendors quarter
and were able to extract additional concessions re:reliability guarantees,
etc. So if our estimation of the quality of the devices are wrong, we're
shipping a lot of printers back.

~~~
veddox
The problem is that you can only afford to do that if you're a moderately
large business. For home users or small schools (where I have worked), that's
simply not an option moneywise...

~~~
Spooky23
Decent 3rd party print management solutions start around $25/printer. They are
often free when tied to hardware.

Nobody can afford garbage equipment. You're better off doing without.

------
soneca
Honest question: Why printers are so stuck in time? Why no great innovations?
Why there is no product out there that "Just work" and won the Market?

I never heard of startups making printers, not even those dreamy kickstart
projects.

Why we have this product that annoy People for ages and no one fix it? Anyone
could give me any insight?

~~~
tdicola
It's a race to bottom of costs, not some market teeming with innovation. Sure
you could build the most amazing printer in the world but no consumer is going
to spend $1000 for it vs. the $50 special at the big box store. Think of them
like razors and razor blades--they'll throw an extra blade on to amp up the
marketing but in the end it's all about selling some plastic and electrical
bits for a few pennies less than the next guy.

~~~
washadjeffmad
I didn't get your razor analogy at first because you can have inexpensive and
high quality with safety razors (eg - Feather blades).

The ones you reference are aptly called disposable razors and electric razors.
Disposables are sham products through and through, but a large portion of the
electrics market is high utility, fairly inexpensive basic function devices,
like trimmers.

A Fill-ups(tm) that pre-warms the lotion it squirts on your face and starts
your car for you on cold days for an extra $150 over the previous model is a
bit of a gimmick, but there are plenty of standard models that are low cost,
long lasting, and well priced if you know what you're shopping for, which was
part of your point about cheap vs quality printers.

------
tdicola
Get a cheap consumer black and white laser printer and never look back. I
can't think of any time I've needed or wanted to print color. For photos and
such send them off to be printed with real photo printers.

~~~
abrowne
I print my occasional shipping label et al. at work (shh!), but did the same
for my parents. I don't like Samsung with anything creative, but their simple
black and white laser printers seem great and even have official Linux
support.

------
danbolt
I don't own a printer, and I feel like when I have to print something I
usually employ one of the following strategies:

1) Going to an office supply store, library, or university with the PDF of
what I need to print on a USB drive.

2) My workplace providing a printer for work-related printing.

I can imagine good reasons why someone would need to own a printer, but it
seems almost like a car these days. If you don't want to deal with one, and
you can live your life effectively without, it might be better to rely on
services to print for you.

~~~
nommm-nommm
That's a good strategy.

I own a printer, because I need to print shipping labels. I didn't own one
until I started doing a lot of shipping. Even in college the CS lab let us
print for free (the library charged) so I used that to print out assignments.
I bought the cheapest black and white only laser printer in existence - $25.

------
zanny
I pretty much exclusively buy Epson XP-420's nowadays. What other all-in-one
option is there that meets the following criteria?

1\. Complete and free Linux support

2\. Wireless

3\. Affordable - remember, we are competing with a printer that regularly
retails for $40 and whose cartridges cost around $10 per set. "Just buy the
$200 Brother with $40 a set toner" isn't satisfactory to the people I
recommend printers to.

HP printers are known to be draconian with their cartridge DRM, and their
Linux support is kind of a PITA with how they use their own protocol and suite
of tools and every HP printer I have tried has never played nice with Cups
management.

~~~
JohnTHaller
Since most folks only print black and white for occasional stuff (forms,
taxes, resumes, etc), something like the Brother HL-L2320D mono laser printer
is a good bet. Works with Linux (rpm and deb available from their site),
wireless, affordable. It's under $90 and toner is $30 for 1200 pages (2.5
cents per page) or $49 for 2600 pages (1.9 cents per page). Compare that to
$13 for 175 pages (7.4 cents per page) with the Epson.

If you don't need wireless, bump down to $68 for the HL-L2320D. For both
printers, good 3rd party toner is about $10 for 1000+ pages to save even more.
I listed only first-party numbers above.

If you really want to print pictures at home, you can on a "cheap" inkjet. But
it'll cost you overall more per print (due to ink drying out, etc) and be
worse quality than you can get from a local pharmacy, office store, or
printer. A good quality inkjet for photos is another story, but quite a bit
pricier.

~~~
zanny
This is not just for me though, I consult and regularly recommend printers to
clients. If they are business scale we always go laser, but home users do not
want to hear they should buy multiple printers for b/w + color printing, and
they don't want to buy a scanner separately (the 2340D is perfect _except_ it
lacks a scanner).

In many cases, it is hard enough to get them even remember what the print icon
looks like, how to use ctrl-p, or that the word "Print" is in the file menu.
Trying to get the tech illiterate to not only manage two printers, but also
replace ink and toner for both of them, is crazy.

And the thing is nobody in this is printing often. Frequent printers should
always buy laser, we know that, that is established. But we are talking about
the once a week printers who just want everything for cheap. What better
alternatives are there for that use case than an Epson 420?

~~~
JohnTHaller
I usually recommend lasers to very infrequent printers as well due to the
likelihood of an inkjet cartridge drying out or clogging up between infrequent
printings.

And you caught my copy pasta error. The first reference was indeed to the
2340D not the 2320D.

------
dpcan
This is not unique to Epson, so if you go out an buy an HP thinking you'll be
safe... do your research first.

I have an HP Officejet 6700 Premium right behind me that works the exact same
way. If I run out of Magenta, it won't even print in black.

I've been thinking of trying to find a way to inject some water or something
into the empty cartridges to trick it. The strange thing is - I almost never
print in color, yet somehow, I run out of color ink. I don't get it. And it's
costing me way more than I want to spend to print.

~~~
eosrei
The simpler option is to buy a high quality laser printer. I'm on the same
cartridge in my HP4200N for almost 10 years since it's good for 12,000+ pages.

------
elorant
Has anyone tried Epson’s Ink Tank series? They have a ridiculously low cost
per page, with new inks costing as low as $5/bottle. I’m thinking of buying
one to replace my aging Lexmark E-232 which has printed more than 70k pages
without a hitch.

------
8jef
How hard would it be to hack an open source printer hardware, say using some
standard black toner cartriges (any brand), and make a Kickstarter out of it?

~~~
tdicola
What are you going to offer that the big printer manufacturers don't offer
today?

Cheaper prices? I doubt it, you're not going to be at the same scale as the
big players and will pay a ton more for parts. Not to mention you're going to
have major upfront costs for tooling, molds, etc. unless this thing is going
to look like an erector set.

Higher quality? Again doubtful, unless you've been researching inkjet
technology for years and have some incredible breakthough. If you're asking
how hard it is to make a printer I doubt you have some special tech ready to
revolutionize the industry (no offense).

Cheaper ink? If you want to cheap out you can already refill ink cartridges or
even buy recycled / dirt cheap ink for most printers. There are plenty of
knockoff cartridges and even brick and mortar stores (look at any mall) that
sell those cheap cartridges. Or just go laser and never worry about stupid
cartridges again.

Better support? Not on a Kickstarter project budget. Have fun dealing with
crazy customers freaking out that their 15 year old Windows 2000 box won't use
your printer.

------
m0llusk
Epson recently found through customer research that anxiety about ink
cartridges was one of their biggest problems and so they are launching
printers with refillable ink tanks, currently available in the form of the
Epson EcoTank L355. Given that the company has understood this problem and
released products to address it it seems that never buying Epson printers
might be an incorrect response.

~~~
lstamour
The concept is nice but the EcoTank printers themselves look like junk, in the
store at least. Given how expensive they are, you'd have thought they'd make
the design more durable-looking or used better materials. That said, I haven't
seen the ET14000 or two-tray workforce in person, and maybe they work better
than they look :)

------
alanfranzoni
1) That's not just Epson. Many manufacturers do that. 2) That's a cheap
consumer all-in-one. You're buying a subsidized product which pays for itself
via expensive ink cartridges. Requiring all of them in order to print is
called "leverage". It's at least ten years that such products exist - if you
didn't know, it may be your fault as well. 3) Want a reliable printer with a
decent cost per page? Aim at the SOHO market, at least. There you won't get a
subsidized price, and printers would actually need to print more than 10 pages
per month - hence the higher price tag.

Just an example: I've got an Epson Workforce Pro 5620. It's an inkjet, color
all-in-one printer with double sided printing and scanning. It works great,
the price-per-page using original Epson cartridges is on par with most non-
heavy duty color laser printers (i.e. those in the $400-$600 range) but it's
much cheaper ($280 on Amazon right now).

Don't cry for something we all know about.

------
marijn
Hahah, you think the other vendors are better?

At least the Epson stuff I've owned is easy to install with Linux and doesn't
break after a few months of use (contrary to various Canon and HP devices). If
there exists a non-terrible printer manufacturer (in a consumer budget range)
do tell me.

~~~
ssmoot
I bought an HP M252dw Color Laserjet supporting WiFi and AirPrint off Amazon
for $230 last year. It replaced a Konica Minolta color laser I'd had for
several years that ran out of toner (that one was $120 IIRC). I didn't have to
replace it, but I really wanted an AirPrint printer. I also had to be a be
choosy since I wanted something that would fit in the IKEA printer stand I've
had for about 10 years.

Sure toner costs about double what ink does, but with the very occasional
printing I do it's actually much cheaper since I don't have to replace the ink
or print heads from disuse whenever I need to print something. The laser
printer is always ready and will go years on the same toner cartridges.

Forget black & white. Having a color laser at home is one of the best computer
purchases I've made. I had a cheap Canon USB Scanner in the closet for the
once or twice a year I need that function.

------
e-nouri
Epson printers still require you to have the 4 cartridge even if you want to
just print in black !

~~~
bsilvereagle
I believe this is because the tracking dots[1] require yellow ink.

[1]
[https://w2.eff.org/Privacy/printers/index.php](https://w2.eff.org/Privacy/printers/index.php)

~~~
kuschku
Well, why can I print with just black ink on my canon and HP multifunction
printers then?

(they also allow me to do high-res (4800dpi) scans of money without any issue,
in hilarious contrast to photoshop, which refuses to open them)

------
mchahn
Not too long ago I bought a cheap printer (don't remember the brand), took it
home, and returned it after seeing the horrible quality of the print. Then I
brought home another cheap printer of a different brand, had the same
experience, and returned that.

The reason I was buying cheap printers is that they were the only ones locally
available, other than one very expensive model, the epson XP800. Apparently
the market has been shrunk to only people that don't care about quality. They
give the printer away and make a killing on the ink.

In the end I bought the expensive Epson and have been very happy with it. I'm
not happy about the state of the market though.

~~~
gherkin0
Is there a name for the scenario where market forces push new products to be
objectively inferior to older ones?

~~~
mchahn
Maybe planned retrogression instead of planned obsolescence?

~~~
gherkin0
I don't think there's usually a plan to "retrogress" on product quality,
though. It just sort of works out that way.

------
atroyn
Is there room in the market for a 'prosumer' printer, something like the
OnePlus of printers?

Along with non-apple laptops and notebooks, printers seem to be one of the
things people complain about the most.

------
t3ra
To the author : It's 2016 if you still insist on buying original cartridges
you seriously need to start to Google better options.

Injects can be refilled at home with a simple injection and syringe! All you
need to buy is some good quality ink from eBay (or aliexpress)

If not that There are "compatible oem cartridges" at 1/4 the cost available
EVERYWHERE!

or if you do the slightest bit of printing : Invest in a CISS (Continuous ink
supply system).. Even Epson makes original CISS systems.

------
8jef
How hard would that be to hack together some printer harware and make it a
Kickstarter?

~~~
bbcbasic
It's the business model that is the problem no the tech. This dude spent 5
hours trying to hack his printer. He is the problem! Just value your time and
go out and buy a decent printer ffs. To get a printer this bad you have to
spend next to nothing on it :-)

~~~
ersii
There are plenty of horrible printers though.

A decent printer? Sure, I'd like one. Just.. where do I find one? And how
would I be sure it's not one of bad ones?

------
vardump
I don't currently have a printer. I think I'd want an economic laser printer.
Probably going to print less than 50 pages per month.

Needs to work fine under Linux.

Any suggestions?

~~~
jhaand
Brother HL-L2340D. Laser B/W, Duplex, Wifi, Linux support and only 80 EUR.

~~~
jschulenklopper
I just checked that type number online, to see whether that was possible (or a
typo on your end): two-sided printing for that price. But you're right.

I'm (almost unfortunately) not in the market for a new laser printer. My
current Brother HL-2150N still works like a (one-sided) charm.

------
jrapdx3
Having owned more printers than I can remember, including Epson, Brother,
Ricoh, Tektronix, HP, using laser, inkjet, and even other technologies, I
think there are a few conclusions to draw:

\+ For printing _documents_ laser printers are by far the best choice for
reliability, economy and quality of output. Color lasers have become quite
reasonably priced, so if color printing is needed, no need to get something
less.

\+ For _photos_ , nothing beats a high-quality pigment inkjet printer, but
they can be expensive, especially large-format models.

About 12 years ago I bought an Epson Pro 4000, with 17x22in capability, it was
at the time used leading edge tech. It required 8 ink cartridges. I preferred
the 220 ml size, but those cost ~$100 each. The main problem with the 4000 was
the heads clogging easily, a big annoyance and costly too.

But the Pro 4000 made absolutely gorgeous prints. Now it needs to be replaced,
though spending >$2000 is not a pleasant prospect. Newer machines no doubt
have much better print heads, probably lower TCO.

AS many here point out, small desktop inkjets can be expensive to operate and
document output quality is often poor vs. laser.

\+ It's been pretty consistent, printers and printer drivers cause 90% of
system admin problems. Windows has always been by far the worst on this score.
Amazingly, I had tremendous issues with a 6 year old Ricoh under Windows, but
absolutely no driver problems with Linux. The customary Postscript-based
printing in the Unix world is a predictable standard and usually easy to work
with.

Many laser printers have built-in Postscript emulation, though a PS option for
high-end printers or plotters can cost upward of $1000. Still might be worth
it to avoid the Windows printer driver hell.

------
chops
I have one major use-case for (very cheap) inkjet printers: on the beach. I
run a non-trivial number of beach volleyball tournaments[1], and the beach is
not a terribly hospitable place for electronics.

So I carry with me a cheap printer that's light to carry. If it takes a fast-
moving ball that breaks off a part, or it gets overloaded with sand, dust,
destroyed by rain, whatever, it's no skin off my back, since it was just $30.

So far the same crappy printer has been serving me for about 4 years in this
capacity.

Toting around a laser printer would be a huge pain in the ass.

Otherwise, I'm completely onboard with the overarching sentiment: there's not
a lot of reason to own an inkjet printer.

[1] My flagship product ([http://bracketpal.com](http://bracketpal.com)) is a
tournament management system, and beach volleyball is the niche I focus
primarily on.

~~~
collyw
How do you power it? Are there battery powered printers these days?

------
xemoka
This isn't just consumer grade printers. At work we have a number of large
scale plotters and they all stink. Our main is a HP DesignJet T1300 44-inch
wide plotter. Even it refuses to print if any of the 6 inks are too low or the
heads are 'needing to be replaced'.

The software on it is absolutely brutal too, it has a resistive touch screen
as it's primary input and it's incredibly slow to page through. On top of
that, if you try to speed things along (for example, pre-opening the paper
roll cover before manually paging through to the 'replace paper' menu link) it
will complain and refuse to do what you ask until you start back at the
beginning.

I have had nothing but trouble, and these are multi-thousand dollar printers.

------
jafingi
Printers (for consumers) need development. They still function like the old
days with all the bad stuff comes with that.

I personally just have a B&W Dell laserprinter that cost almost nothing. It's
fast, prints everytime, and one cartridge lasts very long time.

Before my Dell, I had a 3-in-1 HP printer. It was the worst printer I've ever
had. Paper jammed all the time. And half of the time it wouldn't pick up the
paper, and told that there was no paper in it even though the paper tray was
completely full. And those problems started on day one.

I'm still looking forward to seeing a printer that's really useful and user
friendly. Silent. Easy to replace cartridges. One that doesn't jam paper every
second page. we need the iPhone of printers.

~~~
Grishnakh
>Printers (for consumers) need development.

I don't see why. If you want a better printer, you just have to pay more money
and get one aimed at the SOHO (small office) market, which isn't subsidized by
ink cartridge prices as the guy above notes.

The home printer market is like this because it's highly profitable. What
you're probably thinking is that these printers need to be more like SOHO
printers: cartridges that last a long time, ability to print tens of thousands
of pages without any reliability problems, etc. They already have these
printers: they're sold to people who have small offices and small businesses
or workgroups.

The problem is people who seem to think that they should be able to get a
business-class printer for $39.99. There's a reason they're that cheap. This
is one of those cases where you really get what you pay for.

>I'm still looking forward to seeing a printer that's really useful and user
friendly. Silent. Easy to replace cartridges. One that doesn't jam paper every
second page. we need the iPhone of printers.

We've had those for a long, long time now. My HP LaserJet 2300 is mostly like
that, except maybe the silent bit (you're never going to get a printer that's
totally silent; mechanical contraptions that move things around with motors
are going to make noise), and I think it's about 13 years old now. But that
printer probably cost around $600 when it was new. You're not going to get the
"iPhone of printers" at feature-phone prices.

------
gerbilly
I have an Apple Laserwriter 12/640 PS, bought in 1997 and still going strong.

I think the guts of it are actually Lexmark.

I have to hack the driver for it on new versions of OS X, but it runs fine
without it.

It's just to control some of the optional print features.

------
agumonkey
I only very lately learned that you could attempt some hackish head cleaning
with warm purified water. By pouring it in place of colored ink, it's supposed
to melt dried stuck ink clogging the head.

I had a Lexmark S605[1], unfortunately the black side of the head got clogged,
making it almost useless, unless cheating by printing in blue.

[1] the best AIO wireless printer I had. Solid build, not noisy, consistent
throughput. My mother had to buy a quick replacement, a HP envy4500, it's a
cheap piece of crap. Even the motors sucks. Slow, noisy, random.

------
mbell
I haven't owned a printer in probably 10 years and I'm not particularly young
(32).

I get their usefulness in some aspects of business operations but I'm a bit at
a loss as to why an individual would purchase one.

What are the use cases now? The only two I can think of are printing photos,
which I get but it seems better handled either through a photo printer or an
outside service or for printing 'offical' documents to fill out manually, but
I've completed many such transactions by digitally filling out and signing a
pdf.

~~~
bbcbasic
There are a few.

Tickets. Boarding Passes. Government forms that cannot be filed
electronically. Carrying information you need where you don't want to reply on
a phone whose battery could run out.

To read something in a focused way, with no internet to distract you.

I printed out a plane ticket today to fly in a country where waving your phone
with the same ticket is apparently not satisfactory.

~~~
mbell
It doesn't surprise me that there are edge cases where you need paper. It
surprises me that those edge cases are numerous enough that you would own a
printer and deal with it.

All of my boarding passes are covered via phone but on the occasion that I
need a pass for an airline that doesn't have that option I would just spend 5
minutes at a kiosk to get it.

On the occasion I have to file a gov form that isn't available digitally or I
can't fax (via email), I'll just get it printed at whatever local place can do
so.

Point is that home printing really isn't a necessity anymore, and depending on
circumstance it's debatable if it's a time/cost savings. As a result I would
expect the home printing market to get more and more expensive.

~~~
Grishnakh
I got my printer for something like $100 on Ebay, and it's ridiculously
reliable and the cost per page is dirt cheap. Why would I want to waste my
time driving somewhere and paying to print stuff when I can do it in a few
seconds at home?

The home printing market is only going to get more and more expensive if
consumers are so stupid they can't go buy small business printers on Ebay that
are a few years old and off-lease.

------
largelargefirm
Well, the printer manual probably says, like mine does: "Install all ink
cartridges; otherwise, you cannot print".

But in my Epson XP-200, if my black cartidge runs out, it tells me that I can
use a 'composite black' mode where it blends the ink from the colour
cartridges to form black. And vice versa - when the colour ink runs out and
black ink still remains, you can continue printing temporarily with black ink
only.

So there are always those options if you need to get something printed.

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LarryMade2
Epson - If its not chipped ink cartridges its vacuum tubes on their print-
heads.

Canon, the print head or logic board dies and unless you replace one and it
works or fails you don't know which - sorry.

HP - built like a tank - ink priced like mil-spec.

Dell/Lexmark shiny logo in place of compatibility.

Never buy a network printer without an LCD display to read error
messages/input IP addresses.

Beware of printers that can't use card stock - at all (Yeah, Canon, you and
your latest inkjets).

Might try Brother next.

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Sir_Substance
I use printers so infrequently, it's usually easier to use the work or public
library printer when I need to rather than maintain ink cartridges. They
usually go dry before I use them, I typically print less than 10 pages a year.

For the record, it's always government paperwork. Always. If you work for
government, I have this super-neat thing called Flask to tell you about,
you're gonna lose your shit when you find out!

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innocentoldguy
I hate printers in general. After all these years, manufacturers still haven't
come up with a standard communication interface that would allow me to just
plug in the printer and have my OS detect and use it without issue. Instead,
especially with Epson printers, I have to download some awful crap-ware
driver, which supports all OS versions up to the one right before the one I'm
currently running.

~~~
Grishnakh
If you use Linux (with CUPS) and a business-grade printer with Postscript or
PDF support, you won't have this problem.

------
soyiuz
My HP LaserJet 1020 has been chugging away for 10+ years on $11 refilled
cartridges that yield around 2k monochrome pages. It just might last ten more!

~~~
LyndsySimon
I pulled a LaserJet 1160 out of storage today because my wife's inkjet stopped
working. It printed ~75 pages without a hiccup, and I don't even know how old
the cartridge in it is.

------
bbcbasic
I wonder if 3d printers will go the same way. You're 24 carat gold reel is a
little low so I am not going to let you print plastic. Muwhhaahaa!

------
sdenton4
With all of the hype and excitement for 3d printers, I always have the many
failings of 2d printers itching at the back of my brain...

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wfunction
This isn't really a new thing, it's been like this for over a decade. It's why
Epson printers are so cheap; they make their money on the cartridges. I've had
better luck with HP in general (Officejet), though I don't know how good each
particular model is so some may be worse.

------
KiDD
I purchased a Xerox Phaser 6100 Color Laser Printer for $30 on Craigslist.
Only problem is there are no drivers for OS X... Course it had %70 toner still
and I don't look forward to having to replace the toner but at least are all
separate colors and can be replaced separately!

~~~
strictfp
Just register it as a standard postscript printer and it will most likely
work.

~~~
yrro
I used to have one of these. It didn't understand Postscript, but after
installing Splix it appeared in Cups printer model list and worked absolutely
fine.

------
roflchoppa
Hardware startup - non-shity printers, use any cartridge you want. PRO-FEATURE
use a balled point pen.

------
decasteve
I had an Epson 3800 photo printer. It once ran out of ink in the middle of a
print and stopped mid-stream. I replaced the cartridge and it started back as
if not missing a beat.

Paying more upfront for a printer saves you in the long run. Avoid cheap
multi-function printers like the plague.

------
capote
We're all getting trolled by the printer companies. Look at this thread.

------
Tempest1981
And you know that some high-paid exec decided it was a good idea to refuse to
print when low on ink... "to ensure quality" and uphold the brand name. Haha -
it had the opposite effect.

------
th0br0
The same goes for HP OfficeJets (or at least mine ... 8600 Pro)

~~~
DavidNielsen
Considering my wife just bought a 8620 this bodes well for my future.. oh joy.

------
jgalt212
In general, I agree with all the ant-inkjet comments.

That being said, I've yet to see a laser printer with grayscale rendering
approaching that of a garden variety inkjet.

------
owly
Lasers only. It's really the only way to go, especially if you only print
occasionally. They last forever compared to ink jets.

------
jokoon
Well don't buy inkjet printers.

Although manufacturers might pick up on that and start doing the same for
laser printers...

~~~
Grishnakh
They're not going to do it for business-class printers, because businesses
aren't going to put up with it. They do it with consumer-class printers
because consumers are dumb and want the cheapest thing they can find and don't
print a lot, but businesses need printers that can print a _lot_ of pages
without maintenance. There's plenty of competition in the business printer
market, so it'd be pretty stupid for mfgrs to pull too many shenanigans there.

------
tambourine_man
Can't this be hacked in the drivers?

I remember loving Gutenprint (née Gimp-Print) back when I printed

~~~
creshal
Usually it's implemented on the firmware level.

