Submitted 4 weeks ago by Pondis@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
The printer I am liking right now isn’t laser but comes out to be about the same cost to print as laser.
It’s the Epson EcoTank. The print quality is pretty good for things where a laser printer is the wrong tool and the refills are relatively reasonable… and Shaq promotes it!
Eco Tank is a good choice if you print with regularity or need a photo printer, but not if you print maybe once or twice a year. It’s still an inkjet, and the head will still clog if sat unused for a couple months, requiring a lengthy head cleaning cycle and possible replacement of the maintenance box. If you almost never print, but need your printer to just work without fuss that one random day you need to print, it’s gotta be a laser printer.
Yeah it is awful for intermittent printing; you will not get as many prints as you expect but it WILL still print (after you run a couple of maintenance cycles to flush out the dry ink)
Definitely agree. Most printers are sold at a loss with the plan to milk the buyer long term through ink and other services. EcoTank printers are more expensive, but Epson makes their money at the time of purchase. The ink is extremely cheap, and there’s no way for them to tell if you use 3rd party ink at all. We’ve been printing out textbooks with ours, which would be financially disastrous with a traditional inkjet printer.
Overall I’ve bought two, one for home and one for the office at work. The cheaper ink has paid for the printers several times over now.
I was curious about the ecotank machines for the cheap ink, I will do more research.
My wife prints a lot (and needs color, cardstock support), and this is what we went with. Had it about a year now, and it’s been fairly reliable. A couple streaks and minor issues, but nothing major. Get a good amount of prints per ink refill.
Just get a business model, they have much less bullshit.
One that’s happy with a refilled toner.
Here’s the challenge. Is it possible to create a refilled/remanufactured toner cartridge as good as an original? Absolutely! Is the one you’re buying meet that standard? There’s no way to tell.
You could have bought a garbage refilled toner where the company did less than the minimum needed for it to function. There’s no standards body for these. The best you can do is buy from a company known to do good reman work. If you work at a company that still has a fleet of printers, and your IT team still maintains them, ask what brand they use.
I’ve had canon, HP, and brother inkjets - dislike them all (though hate HP as a company worse than the others.). Finally I bought a Xerox color laser printer (and scanner, etc) and really like it. Part of the enshittification is the world of inkjet ink, but part is also the companies.
if you’ve not ever updated the firmware of the printer, it might just be a faulty third-party cartridge. try another.
if the one you’re having difficulty with was a recent purchase, ask the vendor for a swap. the good ones will happily send another.
I did update the firmware because it wouldn’t connect to my WiFi.
When I checked, the toner I swapped in was from 2019, and the chip had a battery soldered on, so maybe the battery was dead?
But I am also expecting a level of enshitification as their firmware was bricking machines using third party ink.
Multifunction copier printer scanners are usually consumer crap. The good stuff is generally single function. Monochrome is more of a solved problem than color, I think.
InvertedParallax@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Brother, by far.
You might need to get genuine toner or something, but in every other way it can’t be beat.
cubism_pitta@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Brother has pulled some shit recently…
eRac@lemmings.world 4 weeks ago
“Recently” being one Reddit post three years ago about needing to manually index the color nozzles on their third-party ink.
A YouTuber hyped it up as Brother turning to the dark side so that he could profit off clicks.
InvertedParallax@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Still beats everyone else.
cecilkorik@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
That was unconfirmed but Louis Rossmann blew it up into a big thing. Don’t get me wrong, I love the guy, he’ll be the first one to admit he’s not perfect, but that was not his finest work and nothing about it was convincing. Brother isn’t perfect either, but as far as printer manufacturers go, they’re pretty okay.
Pondis@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
But real toner is expensive!
InvertedParallax@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Only other printer I would try is Samsung, had one a long time ago and it just worked.
But love my brother printers, they work on BSD automatically, never seen that before.
CaptDust@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago