For home usage, a later printer toner cartridge will last you years and won’t go bad. Ink jet printer cartridges are way more expensive and dry out which is why they constantly need replacing. Brother is a much better brand than HP.
Comment on HP CEO: You're 'bad investment' if you don't buy HP supplies
jaxxed@lemmy.world 5 months agoCan you give us more detail about how that solves the problem?
fidodo@lemmy.world 5 months ago
stephen01king@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
It’s funny how much worse Lemmy is at downvoting simple questions than Reddit. People on here treat every question as if it was asked with bad intentions.
Crack0n7uesday@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Brother makes their money on printers and printer support (like really big offices that print thousands of documents a day, those printers have special techs). They don’t make as much on ink sales so they don’t really care about third party ink cartridges.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 5 months ago
You can buy 3rd party toner for Brother and they don’t lock you out if your own printer for doing it.
On brother printers, if the printer says toner is out and you can’t print, you can press a key combo on the printer to reset the toner page counter and then continue printing until there is literally no toner left at all.
somethingp@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Not OP but I only use a brother MFC black&white laser printer at home. It addresses the HP issue in 2 ways. 1 - The genuine brother toner costs much less per page to the point that it’s not terrible to have to buy it if necessary. And 2 - brother does not put DRM on their printer and there are tons of 3rd party toners available at about 1/3rd the price. Generally brother printers cost more up front, but basically last a lifetime, and the toner is pretty cheap.
Also I want to add that if you need color inkjet printing, the Canon Megatank and Epson Ecotank printers are an awesome option for most home printing. I use a Canon g6020 at home for photo printing and I love the photos that come out of it.
BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Epson seems like a great choice, until you learn about the ecotank sponge issue.
You can buy a new waste ink sponge for next to nothing, but the firmware counter needs to be reset. That requires either a sketchy piece of software from some Russian hacker, or shipping the printer to epson and then paying epson for 5min of work and return shipping. The latter is rumored to be about the same price as a new ecotank.
But you’re happy with your megatank? I might look into that… I stopped looking at inkjets after hearing about the ecotank.
stephen01king@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
Wait, I thought the counter can be reset with some specific button presses only. I’ve seen the video guides on YouTube.
BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
w00t? I will really have to look into that. There’s a reasonably priced 2nd hand A3 ecotank in my vicinity, and I’ve been avoiding it because of this.
Do you have sources?
somethingp@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Yeah the Canon has been pretty good. I’ve had it for around a year now. I sort of print in batches, like I’ll have a week where I print a few photos then nothing for a month or so. When I had a long break once (2-3 months), the printer started printing streaks so I had to run some sort of fixing cleanup cycle which fixed the issue although it wasted some ink. I haven’t had to buy any replacement ink yet because again I don’t print a lot, but I’m sure if I was using a traditional inkjet I would’ve had to buy replacement ink cartridges a few times already.
fidodo@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Brother printers aren’t even that much more expensive than HP. I think you break even by the time you have to buy like 2 HP ink cartridges.
somethingp@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Yeah it’s definitely cost effective over time, and the printers generally seem to be higher quality. I’ve heard about inkjet printers breaking a lot during moves, but I’ve moved with my brother printer like 5-6 times and it’s been fine through everything.