You can get inkjet printers that don’t have restrictions on the ink. They cost more, though.
The reason printer manufacturers are so hell-bent on being a pain in the ass with the ink is because they’re using a razor-and-blades model. They’re selling you the printer at a lower price than they really should, if their price reflected their costs, with the expectation that they’ll make their money back when you buy ink at a higher price than you really should, because people pay more attention to the the initial price of the printer than to the consumable costs.
Same way you can get unlocked cell phones instead of network-locked cell phones with a plan. Gaming PCs instead of consoles. It’s not that they’re unavailable, but you’re gonna have to accept a higher up-front cost, because you’re not getting a subsidy from the manufacturer.
Canon sells a line of inkjet printers that just take ink from a bottle. No hassles with restrictions on ink supply there. The ink is cheap, and there are third-party options that are even cheaper readily available…but you’re going to pay full price for the printer.
https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/printers/megatank-printers
Their lowest-end “MegaTank” printer is $230:
https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/megatank-pixma-g3290
A pack of third-party ink refill bottles is $15, and will print (using Canon’s metrics), about 7,700 color pages and 9,000 black-and-white pages:
https://www.amazon.com/Refill-Compatible-Bottles-MegaTank-4-Pack/dp/B0DSPSS5W7
Compatible GI-21 Black Ink Bottle Up to 9,000 pages, GI-21 Cyan/Magenta/Yellow Ink Bottles Up to 7,700 pages
On the other hand, Canon’s lowest-end “cartridge” printer, where they use the razor-and-blades model, is $55.
https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/pixma-ts3720-wireless-home-all-in-one-printer
But you rapidly pay for it with the ink; It looks like they presently sell a set of replacement cartridges for $91. And that set will print a tiny fraction of the number of pages that the above ink bottles will print.
page yield of 400 Black / 400 Color pages per ink cartridge set and cost of $90.99 for a value pack of PG-285(XL) and CL-286(XL) ink cartridges (using Canon Online Store prices as of June 2025).
All that being said, I do think that lasers are awfully nice in that you don’t need to deal with nozzles clogging. You can leave a laser printer for years and it’ll just work when you start it up.
redlemace@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
That’s just the tip of the iceberg of printer issues. I’m in networking, don’t get me started on networking and security issues involved in printing “solutions”
tio_bira@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
I used to work as IT on a multinational and have few things in this life than i hate more than printers and owls, but they found a way tonmake printers even shittier
mp3@lemmy.ca 13 hours ago
We tried the owls in some of our meeting rooms and we scrapped those.
What’s the point of having a 360 camera in the center of the room when everyone will stare at the big TV anyway? All the people at the other end see is everyone looking sideway to the camera.
Godnroc@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
If you buy their TV bar unit, apparently you can pair the two to cover longer tables. The people in the back are covered by the table unit and the front is covered by the bar.
I know this from reading knowledge base articles because no organization I’ve ever been apart of ever wanted to spend the money on a good system that covered everything properly, so I have never had the chance to do it.
frongt@lemmy.zip 12 hours ago
It automatically focuses on whoever is speaking.
vinnymac@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
I took one of the broken ones from my office, repaired it, and now it allows my dnd campaign to see the DM and all the other players reactions when playing remotely.
Fermion@mander.xyz 13 hours ago
What do you have against owls?
pr06lefs@lemmy.ml 13 hours ago
having to constantly replace mice
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Are you talking to me? Oh, you weren’t? Then who were you talking to?
Who? Who? Who? Who?
hansolo@lemmy.today 12 hours ago
Not hooty owls, it’s a conferencing thing.
tio_bira@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
I have nothing against the damn pests until they start to making their nests near my house, since the college the same owl have his nest near and the fucking screaming the whole night.
Sometimes even when the mother abandon the nest and the owls grow up one asshole offspring refuses to hunt and spend the night screaming wait for his mom back with, until it gave up on starvation and goes way or (hopefully) dies
wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 hours ago
Sounds like it sucks at every level. From what I’ve dealt with on just software/drivers:
You want to use scan to email through anything that isn’t a fully open, no auth, anonymous SMTP relay? Go fuck yourself.
Wait… we changed our mind. We’ll totally support SMTP authentication, but with an arbitrary undocumented limit on the password length we can store, which is definitely shorter than the password length requirements for most SMTP relay suites. Certificates? Holy shit are you from the future?
Or you can scan to network share, but I hope you enjoy finding all the hidden catches and caveats that are completely undocumented!
You want an option so people have to log in at the printer itself to release their print job? Enjoy six different interfaces for five different underlying standards for how that works across two different manufacturers. And we reserve the right to just stop supporting that feature or change it entirely with any firmware or driver update. And if there’s a mismatch between the driver and firmware then we’ll just make the print spooler/job queue shit itself and require manual intervention to continue printing.
You want our driver to properly communicate to end user software the paper sizes it supports? If it supports double sided printing or not? How it will collate multiple copies? Man, we can’t even care enough to indicate to software if we’re Black and White or Color. Best we can do is completely ignore the options you picked through your software and our driver and just do whatever we think is best. That’s a good compromise, right?
For the price of these god damn enterprise mfds, there’s no excuse.