It’s technically more money upfront, but you’re not just buying the printer itself: you’re also buying the starter ink/toner cartridges that come with the device. The starter toner gives you vastly more pages than the starter ink, and it basically never goes bad. According to Brother, the size of a starter toner cartridge is 1000 A4 pages. According to HP, their Deskjet and Envy starter cartridges print about 150 and 250 pages, respectively.
So that higher upfront cost doesn’t just go into a better, more efficient machine; it also goes into quadruple the starting pages. There are people who could seriously never print more than 1000 pages, whereas the starter for a Deskjet is so small that you practically ought to buy a spare cartridge for when it near-immediately runs out.
undefined@lemmy.hogru.ch 16 hours ago
That’s true. I don’t print much (I’m happy to go to the print shop) but my wife does quite a bit, but not enough to keep the ink from drying out.
After buying two inkjet printers and having constant problems with the cartridges it probably would’ve been cheaper to start with the laser printer I eventually bought. I didn’t realize that HP would lock out cartridges from their subscription on cancellation either (which feels very morally wrong to me).