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Never, ever, ever buy a printer that takes cartridges. They’re discounted to at or below cost where they make the money back on cartridges. They use ink to clean the heads. They say empty when they’re not. The cartridges that come with the printer aren’t full. There is a constant firmware update war to defeat third party cartridges for obvious reasons. Buy a tank printer that you fill with ink bottles.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Inkjets have to be used regularly or they will suffer from clogs and in the case of Epson you're SOL if a head clean doesn't work. You can leave a laser idle for years and it will print fine.
I think eco tanks (and some other modern inkjets) will purge the heads regularly if left on, so it should be fine if left on standby constantly.
A contributing factor could be that the best-before date on the bottles is in the past. Though I have no idea how that date would matter for filling up, and no idea how to observe it after the ink is in the printer and the bottles disposed of.
Manufacturers want to provide a product that produces reliable high quality prints. That's why the toner low warning comes up very early, so that there's no chance that your important documents look unprofessional due to low toner levels. As a consumer, naturally, you can almost always ignore the warning and use the toner until you can't even read granny's apple pie recipe anymore.
If you have a Samsung laserprinter with number pad and empty toner / imaging unit try menu # 1904 menu and reset the counter, then happily print thousands of pages more
My printer has no number pad. It has a horrible menu system you navigate with arrow-keys. The cartridge it came with was tiny - it lasted for less than a ream. But the replacement I bought is still going strong (I don't print more than a couple of pages a week, which is why I didn't want an ink-jet).
That is why we shake it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Inkjets have to be used regularly or they will suffer from clogs and in the case of Epson you're SOL if a head clean doesn't work. You can leave a laser idle for years and it will print fine.
I think eco tanks (and some other modern inkjets) will purge the heads regularly if left on, so it should be fine if left on standby constantly.
I’m pretty sure my Canon inkjet uses more ink when idle than when I occasionally use it to actually print something. Quite sad.
I do wonder where it all physically goes tho. After years of seeing my cheapo cartridges just “evaporate” whatever reservoir the printer has for cleaning the heads and purging ink must be well and fully saturated at this point?!
I would like to see cartridges designed ecologically - refillable perhaps, or at least designed to flow as much out as possible - and allowing you to override the "toner low" warning and keep printing even if it's almost dry.
> refillable They used to be in some applications (like really big photocopiers). But toner is messy nasty stuff to deal with. Maybe refillable at a shop could work though.