

How to get your lying printer to use up all its ink - fmanjoo
http://slate.com/id/2198316/

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kenver
It's a bit absurd that in many cases it's actually cheaper to throw your
printer away and buy a new one, rather than replace a multicolour cartridge.

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maryrosecook
The practice of charging more for the media than the device is not uncommon.
Example: Polaroid.

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kenver
Yea thats true, but if buying a polaroid camera and getting say 10 pictures
with it included was cheaper than buying 10 of the media seperately it would
be a bit crazy, and thats exactly what I've seen with some printers recently.

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netcan
disposable cameras.

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orib
Uh. Right. Because the _refills_ for disposable cameras are so much more
expensive than the actual camera.

If they sold refills at all, then the camera wouldn't be disposable, so unless
this was some sort of joke...

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eru
Disposable cameras are 'recycled' i.e. refilled. They even announce this on
the box.

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gizmo
The Brother HL-2040 only costs around $83 or so (newegg). I have one, and I'm
very happy with it. Fast. Tidy. Quiet. It's a great printer. For $80 bucks
it's an absolute steal.

The toners aren't free, but the price per page is very very low. I think it's
in the top 5 of home laser printers. We're talking a few cents per copy here
(including paper). A great deal once again. I researched the different
printers before I bought one, and I knew full well that Brother can't make
much profit on the laser printer itself - so the toners are more expensive.
This is great, because this way people who print only semi-regularly can still
get affordable laser printers.

Manjoo the author agrees with me: great printer and very inexpensive. So what
makes the author think he is getting cheated? Why does he think Brother owes
him anything? Why does he feel so outraged? The guy would be HAPPY if the
toner ran out 20% earlier, but then he'd have faded pages for a while. Brother
decides to put some more ink in there (doesn't cost them much) so the quality
is high all the way to the end, and then the toner shuts down.

"Fight back against the lying infuriating evil ink-and-toner cabal?". Please.
Thanks to companies like Brother you can get great printers for less than
$100. Your efforts to put them out of business by cheating their business
model are petty.

Who is -really- the greedy and infuriating party here?

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iigs
Everybody gets so mad about this because a lot of printer vendors go out of
their way to force you to not use materials or resources that you purchased,
and presumably the only reason is for them to make more profit.

It would be one thing if the printer had a red flashing button that you had to
push to override the forced stop (i.e. an explicit, vendor-approved method of
opting out of quality in favor of using up something you paid for). Some
product owners are fortunate enough to have (generally accidentally) selected
products that can be overridden via vendor-unapproved hacks.

While it's quite benevolent that companies like Brother choose to give us
"great printers for less than $100", I don't feel that they're beyond reproach
for selling me a container of liquid or powder at an exceptionally high price
and telling me i can't have the last 5-10% of it for _any_ reason.

It absolutely is infuriating to have a printer that is fully capable of
printing a sheet of paper, except that it has been programmed not to.

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gizmo
> It absolutely is infuriating to have a printer that is fully capable of
> printing a sheet of paper, except that it has been programmed not to.

No, that is exactly the deal you agreed to when you bought the printer. That's
the whole point of inexpensive printers. Buy high-end printers if you want
lower per-page costs.

You, the customer, make the choice. There's no lying involved by anybody. The
terms were perfectly clear up front.

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orib
The terms were that I get a toner cartridge that I get to use as I see fit.
Nothing more, nothing less.

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shard
This is a major reason why I eBay'd an old LaserJet4 when I needed a printer.
It's built like a Mack truck, and it doesn't play games with toner levels.

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pmjordan
I've got a LaserJet 5 with a duplex unit. The thing weighs a ton, will happily
break your back if you try to transport it, and will occasionally get itself
into paper jam when you need something printed NOW (mine has thus earned the
print queue name of 'satan'), but I still love it. Just gotta keep a parallel
port around to plug it into...

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Tichy
What about ozone emissions? Somehow I would feel uneasy around dinosaur
printers.

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mleonhard
I want an ink-jet printer with a very large ink canister, enough to print
20,000 pages. Then we could have competition to see who can make those 20,000
pages of ink fit in a smaller canister.

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pmorici
This is so true. When I first bought my printer 3 years ago the guy at the
store told me the ink cartridge was a small one so it was going to run out
fast so I should buy an extra. my low ink light has been on for over a year
now yet the print outs still look great.

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mattmaroon
I love my Canon I860 mainly because it's easy to override the nag screen, and
it breaks the colors down into multiple cartridges meaning I don't have to
replace the whole thing just because blue ran out. That always pissed me off.

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cstejerean
I actually went to Best Buy to get some ink when I realized that instead of
paying $70 for new ink I could spend $100 and get a wireless laser printer (a
Brother 2170w). Sounds like this trick could come in handy.

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zenspider
afaik, almost all new printers come with half-full ink/toner cartridges.

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dhimes
I also wonder about that "engine maintenance" light in our cars, too. It's
almost always for maintenance stuff which is, for lack of another word,
"elective" (at least at the time).

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maximilian
I have just that laser printer in the article. I'll have to bookmark this site
for later and keep my black electrical tape at the ready.

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JMiao
remember when creed from the office dyed his hair w/ the office inkjet?

