I once bought a cheap but "smart" HP Ink jet printer for home. I don't have much to print other than the yearly tax documents. I was thinking that I would buy an extra ink cartridge and I should be good for 2 years and I haven't been more wrong. One ink cartridge didn't even last for 100 pages (less than one tax return). The day I realized that my ink cartridge only had 0.2ml (!!) of ink it in, I sold the printer and bought a brother ink tank printer. Now I don't have to care about my printer extorting me.
HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer
31–40 of 170 posts
Re: HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how they could tell though - Maybe the refill bottles themselves have electrical contacts and that's how they serialize the refills? Once it's been dumped into the printer, they burn an efuse on the refill so it's now useless to anybody? Seems like more waste than anything.
uhh.. or maybe just chemistry? you can fill the tank with urine if you want but YMMV.
That's fine for the magenta but what about the cyan, yellow, and black?
Re: HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer
#33CISS's (Continuous Ink Supply System's) have been around for decades. You can buy pretty basic printers and retrofit them with a $100 system that will hold enough ink to print 10's of thousands of pages. The problem with this system is that the ink heads dry (quickly). If you're doing a lot of printing (daily / weekly) – a CISS is pretty much your bread and butter. Refilling the ink in a CISS is pretty simple as well…
That's for inkjet printers though, no? This is for a laser printer. No worrying about drying ink heads. But now you've got me curious -- who is printing 10's of thousands of pages using an inkjet? I would have thought that anything at volume is laser, with the exception of photo printing.
companies that still deal w a lot of paper like factories or warehouses
Re: HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer
#34HP got all of us to recommend brother due to HP's horrible software and customer abuse. I don't think that damage can be undone.
Brother says "hold my beer".
Re: HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer
#35Re: HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how they could tell though - Maybe the refill bottles themselves have electrical contacts and that's how they serialize the refills? Once it's been dumped into the printer, they burn an efuse on the refill so it's now useless to anybody? Seems like more waste than anything.
My uninformed guess is an RFID tag in each refill bag. The printer will scan for Genuine Authorized Original Virtuous Toner, and only then allow the fill port to open. Once open you have one hour before that tag ID is burned and can't be used further. Or maybe you need to use the app and do this? ( https://ssl-product-images.www8-hp.com/pub/msc/C26A0B64-54DB... ) Whatever the mechanism, reviews are not good: https://…
If this is how it works, then I don't think they'd burn a tag. People will inevitably do a partial fill or maybe even just open it up to see how it works. And if there are multiple tags, which one does it burn?
The bottles also do not appear to be one time use.
Re: HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer
#37My HP LaserJet 6P is still running strong, almost 20 years after I bought it second-hand and almost 25 since it was released (!). I've been using nothing but unofficial toner in it and other than some streaking that developed in the last few years (too lazy to clean the toner for now), it's been flawless. Apparently HP made things so well for so long that they've decided to correct that mistake. No subscription requi…
I have a cheap, domestic HP1020.
Absolutely fantastic piece of kit for printing text.
It is from the before times, apparently it was so good it started eating into their low end commercial unit sales so they discontinued it.
Re: HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer
#38> NOTE: The printer only works with original HP toner refill kits. If original HP toner is not installed in the printer, the printer will not work as expected. Still vendor locked. Rather just stick with something you can refill yourself.
Looking at the manual, the toner refill kit is entirely passive and has no electrical contacts or other authentication. That's just verbage to scare you into buying their refill kit instead of the inevitable generic version.
> the toner refill kit is entirely passive and has no electrical contacts or other authentication
Yet.
Re: HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer
#39> Requires the HP Smart app download. > Subscription may be required; subscription may not be available in all countries > HP account required for full functionality > Get up to 5,000 pages or up to 2 years of pre-filled toner The disclaimers, or more succinctly, the anti-feature section.
In other news one toner of a generic HP laser printer prints about 3500 pages, without apps or subscription. And then you can send them to HP and they’ll recycle it for free, if you care about the environmental impact. I don’t quite understand what is the market for this product.
I think the idea is to reduce (its reduce, reuse, recycle in order of preference) as a bag of toner needs less resources than a cartridge.
The internet indicates a 5k page cartridge costs ~5kg of CO2 to make, and each trip to the recycling center costs ~1kg of CO2 (rough average cost of shipping a package).
A 5k page pouch in a box weighs 0.2kg, assuming a 4x weight->CO2 cost (high end of plastic production), it comes out to 0.8kg of CO2 per pouch. This is less than the CO2 cost of shipping back the cartridge for recycling.
If you assume the cost of return shipping and recycling is free, the cartridge will need to last >6 times to be worth it from a initial cost perspective. The figures I can find on cartridge lifetimes is 3-4 recycles before they are too worn to recycle again.
Even though its single use, its still a net win from a lifecycle perspective.
Re: HP LaserJet Tank – Refillable laser printer
#40> 250-sheet paper input tray nothing more annoying than having a half-empty ream of paper sitting on a shelf.
stop being so pessimistic. the ream is half full.