51–60 of 213 posts
I've gotten "please replace ink cartridges" messages when I've never even printed a single page since I replaced the previous cartridge — since I use the printer mostly for its ADF scanning function.
Well, that's ~$100 I'll never get back.
It's sad that the industry has moved in this direction.
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I have a Brother laser printer/scanner combo that I bought 8 years ago, I actually wish it broke down so I could replace it with something that supports AirPrint without feeling bad about throwing out perfectly good hardware
Hook it up to a Raspberry Pi and expose the printer over network There you go, DIY AirPrint
Home printers, yeah the ink is expensive. You're mostly paying for convenience. I don't print photos at home, we order prints online and they're mailed to us, very cheap and easy.
What I print at home is strictly things I need to sign and bring to someone (or sign and scan/email). For that purpose, they work fine. I don't mind paying the price for ink, it lasts for a couple years before I need a new cartridge. I like the fact that I can still go to an actual store and buy ink for my printer if I need it on short notice.
Toner printers are "less scammy", at least in my experience. I had a HP one and always bought the genuine cartridges. Then I saw those videos about the printing industry scams (which does happen) and tried a third party toner that costs 1/5 of the price. Guess what? After like 10 perfect printed pages, it started leaking some powder, then stopped printing random chunks of the page and turned impossible to use. I went…
> People that do print at home, are mostly photographers that want physical prints of their photos. And parents printing color-in pages of Elsa and Anna
Serious photographers printing at home are using dye sub instead of ink jet
Bit off topic, but what printer would people recommend for someone who needs one every now and then, that is capable of color prints and scanning, that won't stop working when unused for several months? I'm getting the impression ink jet is not the way to go due to the long pauses, but the color lasers are all seem very expensive for such occasional use.
Laser printers are the way to go. They are typically for offices and follow a different business level: large volume printing and low-cost ink.
Anything color that's reasonably priced?
I used to work for Lexmark, back when they were in the inkjet business. They are perhaps most notable for starting and fueling the race to the bottom in printer price. The theory was that if you could lock the users in, the customer lifetime value would be made on selling profitably prices supplies (i.e. the ink cartridge). There were a few big problems with this: - People often could buy a new printer, with supplies…
Every time one stopped working (probably ran out of ink, or printed poorly because of long delays between printing) he would go to Best Buy, get talked up by a salesperson about a nice new printer, and buy it.
It's just incredible to see this story in action.
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i understand that but 90% of the time that i try to print something it just sits in the queue all alone with no error code and no attempt at printing, i don't think that's a mechanical problem.
Could be a sensor problem, or a part of the startup mechanism has failed.