Never buy Epson printers
e-nouri.com
e-nouri.com
During my last move, I accidentally tipped a book shelf on top of it. Cracked a few plastic bits, and bent some metal things inside it. I unbent the metal, and glued the plastic, and the thing still prints like it's new out of the box.
I've talked more than a few people out of buying inkjets.
The 2400 series (which replaced the 2300 series) looks pretty good too, and has built-in ethernet (no extra card needed), but that's when they switched manufacturing to China, so I don't know how reliable it is.
By contrast, HP's cheaper color lasers require the cartridges to be present, and if they run out and are left in the machine, they cause banding over your printouts. This is due to their integrated drums wearing out, so you have to replace the color toners even if they're not being used (or hack around with transferring chips onto less-used old cartridges, even black ones so they're seen as colour ones).
They have the worst software (on printer and in driver) of any printer company I have come across. Their driver installers download random bits from IP addresses in Japan with zero encryption. The hardware is stellar, the software is cringe worthy.
It can't scan over AirPrint if it has gone to sleep, it only can accept print jobs via IPP if you want it to WOL. So I have two printers configured, one via AirPrint for scanning and another via IPP for printing. There are so many low hanging firmware bugs that it makes me think the same folks wrote healthcare.gov
This is par for the course in brother firmware, https://gist.github.com/seanjensengrey/4223dc23d1f7cc95a157
I was pretty surprised when network scanning worked out of the box on Macs. I scan about as much as I print. AirPrint works on the newest ones, too, from iPhone/iPad.
Sort of like high deductibles did to people's willingness to seek medical treatment, I know more than a few people with inkjets that actively avoid using them because "it's so expensive and never works".
They're afraid to use up their ink, so it ends up expiring(!) or drying out having been barely used, and the next time they desperately need to print something, they have to buy $50+ of cartridges before they can print anything at all.
The HL-2140 I got in '09 for $60 can print on transparencies for PCB masking, does manual duplexing and easy booklet printing under Linux and OSX, and with aftermarket toner refills I've only needed to replace the drum/cart once. Contrasted to the cost efficiency of all the low or mid range inkjets I've owned ($80-350), it's been an exceptional return.
also people just don't buy inkjet printers if your printing patterns are limited to just a few prints a month there always just going to dry out go with the laser printers they use toner and never dry out.
Of course that doesn't invalidate the point of TFA. Also they have an ink dump that is chipped - when it is "full" they force you to buy a replacement rather than just empty it.
If you have the space and print a lot of black and white, buy an eight year old used HP LaserJet with an Ethernet interface.
It also used to be that laser was incredibly expensive in comparison, now they're about the same price if you compare color inkjet to black and white laser.
I bought a Brother black and white laser MFC 7 years ago. I've changed the toner three times and it is just ready to print when I am. I've never had it not print, my old inkjet required a prayer before every print job.
No nozzle jams, no problems with a color being used up, preventing a b+w print. It just works. I paid maybe $180 for the printer 7 years ago and I'm not going to replace this printer until it fully dies. It has fax and multi page scanning capabilities- the only thing that sucks is that it isn't networked by default and the Linux drivers are touchy.
I plugged it in to my TP-Link Archer C7 and their printer sharing drivers work fantastic on OS X. I will never buy another inkjet printer again.
I also switched to a Brother B/W laser printer last year (HL-L2380DW) and it works over my network, I can print to it from a phone/tablet/desktop (win/OSX/linux/iOS/android), and on each platform it "just works", printer/scanner/copier.
We have printed hundreds of pages thus far and have yet to replace the cartridge that came with it when we bought it. No streaking, no alignment issues, no clogging, and it even has double-sided print support. ~$200 investment, and have never had a better printing experience.
EDIT: I should highlight that the reason i ended up with 3 HP printers was because the average lifespan of each came out to ~1.5 years. Inherited 2 used, bought the last one new, and when that one also died so quickly is when we made the switch to laserjet.
Print quality was fair, but cartridges went dry super fast. Frequently replaced cartridges for drying vs usage. Software was also sub-par. Network printing wasn't exactly reliable, as the printer would go unreachable.
Switched to a Canon MX512 and it was a much better experience on all points above. I'm sure there are better units to be had, but for light duty printing and scanning, it gets the job done.
Modern gel inks don't dry out in my experience, and make for very efficient printers that are much less maintenance intensive than lasers. And ink is cheaper than toner unless you print several hundreds of pages a month.
Seems that your savings would just continue to increase the more you print. Or is there something else that affects the inkjet price per page at higher volumes?
It works great.
I picked up a Brother laser a few months ago and I don't ever have to be annoyed by that crap again.
1. The printing functionality is flawed. A cartridge will not last for more than 100 pages. (I tried Epson, HP and Canon).
2. The cartridge will dry and not function after a few weeks only.
3. The original cartridge cost almost as much as a new printer with the cartridge.
4. The printer will not function (Scanner or Fax) without the full cartridges (black and colours).
5. They are buggy and noisy as hell.
My parents recently scraped an Epson all-in-one. Something had broken inside and the printer insisted that there is a paper jam and refused to do anything, even scanning.
They took it apart trying to figure out what's wrong. This thing had probably hundred moving parts or more, mostly made of plastic. It was so overengineered I'm surprised it had ever worked at all.
My favorite part is the CD/DVD tray which takes like 10 seconds to eject because the drive is hidden deep inside and the device has to rearrange some of its guts to bring it to the front. As much as I admire people who were able to pull it off, this is sick.
From this perspective, offering many additional features which turn off when the ink rent hasn't been paid makes much more sense.
We've had this dynamic for at least 15 years now, and people still are buying cheap-o inkjets and getting ripped off on ink cartridges. If people haven't learned after a decade and a half, they're never going to learn. Just look at the other comments on this discussion (including the blog posting that started it all): even on "hacker news", which is full of technologists rather than regular people, tons of people here have fallen for the inkjet scam. If a bunch of nerds don't know any better, than you certainly can't expect the regular public to figure it out.
In reality inkjet are cheap, many companies (from top of my head I see BofA) use them to print bills, because it saves them cost.
It sucks that prices are so artificially manipulated.
I got an epson all-in-one (WF-3640) and bought a continuous ink system off amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00OIC1MAS?psc=1&redirect=t...
works great, i print a ton, and still less than half way through the ink.
1. Cartridges last about 200 pages, which isn't great (I use a laserjet for anything I don't need in colour, so personally not a huge issue). They are rated for 500ish pages, so YMMV.
2. Never had this issue - I've had cartridges in for over a year, and they've still worked fine
3. Not the best of comparisons, as the printers often ship with 'trial' cartridges that contain much less ink than the replacements. That said, a set of Black+Colour cartridges will cost me about £30 (a little expensive really), or a third-party/refilled set will be about £15 (always worked fine for me; YMMV).
4. Never had this issue - I used it as a scanner recently without any cartridges in at all and it worked fine.
5. It's noisy when printing. I hadn't encountered any major bugs - mostly used with OS X, so can't really comment on Windows driver quality.
At least, that's how I see it.
If you don't like getting ripped off this way, it's really easy to avoid: buy a business-class printer, and not some cheap-o consumer printer.
Bought an HP LaserJet P1606DN and a Fuji ScanSnap scanner a few years ago and never looked back. Amazing.
(a) you can refill cartridges, you know that?
(b) printers will ask you "foreign cartridge detected, accept? yes/no", and it works
(c) refill ink goes for a few cents per liter
(d) the printer works fine without some cartridges, just press "yes" when it asks you "print with just black?"
(e) I print 400 pages university books on one set of cartridges once a semester usually, and have enough left to print another whole semester my homework.
I've actually experienced this on HP printer, and quick Google search shows that I'm not alone in this: http://www.gadgetspage.com/comps-peripheral/hp-printer-consp...
"I am going to spend the rest of my career focusing on the hard problems of computer science: printers, projectors, and screen sharing."
By getting rid of crap devices, putting the good, self-service management system in solution in place, and proactively replacing consumables, we took something like 75k annual printing tickets down to around 300.
Those support interactions and dispatch cost like $1M/year, so eliminating them paid for 100% printer replacement in about 18 months.
Because we bought thousands of printers at once, we made the vendors quarter and were able to extract additional concessions re:reliability guarantees, etc. So if our estimation of the quality of the devices are wrong, we're shipping a lot of printers back.
Nobody can afford garbage equipment. You're better off doing without.
I never heard of startups making printers, not even those dreamy kickstart projects.
Why we have this product that annoy People for ages and no one fix it? Anyone could give me any insight?
To make this work, the printer needs to be cheaper than alternatives (I even had situation when I was buying a computer that came with printer, when I told them I don't want the printer the price was higher!)
Those printers are made as cheap as they can make them, they don't bother about their quality, because it cost to you as much as one or two cartridges.
Also the issues the author of the article has are simply are to force you to buy more ink (the printer doesn't need color cartridges to print black, but still requires them, and once you put color cartridges in and don't use they'll dry out)
Years ago we had a professor (I forget the name) from MIT come to our Research Labs and give a talk on his research. He was using game theory to study product research, development, and manufacturing. When all was said and done, he concluded that if you were not first or second to market, you spent significantly more money to enter the market and your probability of being profitable was much lower.
The ones you reference are aptly called disposable razors and electric razors. Disposables are sham products through and through, but a large portion of the electrics market is high utility, fairly inexpensive basic function devices, like trimmers.
A Fill-ups(tm) that pre-warms the lotion it squirts on your face and starts your car for you on cold days for an extra $150 over the previous model is a bit of a gimmick, but there are plenty of standard models that are low cost, long lasting, and well priced if you know what you're shopping for, which was part of your point about cheap vs quality printers.
You can get a good printer. It just doesn't cost $79.99.
1) Going to an office supply store, library, or university with the PDF of what I need to print on a USB drive.
2) My workplace providing a printer for work-related printing.
I can imagine good reasons why someone would need to own a printer, but it seems almost like a car these days. If you don't want to deal with one, and you can live your life effectively without, it might be better to rely on services to print for you.
I own a printer, because I need to print shipping labels. I didn't own one until I started doing a lot of shipping. Even in college the CS lab let us print for free (the library charged) so I used that to print out assignments. I bought the cheapest black and white only laser printer in existence - $25.
1. Complete and free Linux support
2. Wireless
3. Affordable - remember, we are competing with a printer that regularly retails for $40 and whose cartridges cost around $10 per set. "Just buy the $200 Brother with $40 a set toner" isn't satisfactory to the people I recommend printers to.
HP printers are known to be draconian with their cartridge DRM, and their Linux support is kind of a PITA with how they use their own protocol and suite of tools and every HP printer I have tried has never played nice with Cups management.
If you don't need wireless, bump down to $68 for the HL-L2320D. For both printers, good 3rd party toner is about $10 for 1000+ pages to save even more. I listed only first-party numbers above.
If you really want to print pictures at home, you can on a "cheap" inkjet. But it'll cost you overall more per print (due to ink drying out, etc) and be worse quality than you can get from a local pharmacy, office store, or printer. A good quality inkjet for photos is another story, but quite a bit pricier.
In many cases, it is hard enough to get them even remember what the print icon looks like, how to use ctrl-p, or that the word "Print" is in the file menu. Trying to get the tech illiterate to not only manage two printers, but also replace ink and toner for both of them, is crazy.
And the thing is nobody in this is printing often. Frequent printers should always buy laser, we know that, that is established. But we are talking about the once a week printers who just want everything for cheap. What better alternatives are there for that use case than an Epson 420?
And you caught my copy pasta error. The first reference was indeed to the 2340D not the 2320D.
For $100, you get a wireless/ethernet dual sided printer that can also has a sheet fed scanner.
The main downside of the HPs is the cartridge cost, along with the DRM and the annoying "this cartridge is expired" messages you need to click through.
I have an HP Officejet 6700 Premium right behind me that works the exact same way. If I run out of Magenta, it won't even print in black.
I've been thinking of trying to find a way to inject some water or something into the empty cartridges to trick it. The strange thing is - I almost never print in color, yet somehow, I run out of color ink. I don't get it. And it's costing me way more than I want to spend to print.
Cheaper prices? I doubt it, you're not going to be at the same scale as the big players and will pay a ton more for parts. Not to mention you're going to have major upfront costs for tooling, molds, etc. unless this thing is going to look like an erector set.
Higher quality? Again doubtful, unless you've been researching inkjet technology for years and have some incredible breakthough. If you're asking how hard it is to make a printer I doubt you have some special tech ready to revolutionize the industry (no offense).
Cheaper ink? If you want to cheap out you can already refill ink cartridges or even buy recycled / dirt cheap ink for most printers. There are plenty of knockoff cartridges and even brick and mortar stores (look at any mall) that sell those cheap cartridges. Or just go laser and never worry about stupid cartridges again.
Better support? Not on a Kickstarter project budget. Have fun dealing with crazy customers freaking out that their 15 year old Windows 2000 box won't use your printer.
Just an example: I've got an Epson Workforce Pro 5620. It's an inkjet, color all-in-one printer with double sided printing and scanning. It works great, the price-per-page using original Epson cartridges is on par with most non-heavy duty color laser printers (i.e. those in the $400-$600 range) but it's much cheaper ($280 on Amazon right now).
Don't cry for something we all know about.
At least the Epson stuff I've owned is easy to install with Linux and doesn't break after a few months of use (contrary to various Canon and HP devices). If there exists a non-terrible printer manufacturer (in a consumer budget range) do tell me.
Sure toner costs about double what ink does, but with the very occasional printing I do it's actually much cheaper since I don't have to replace the ink or print heads from disuse whenever I need to print something. The laser printer is always ready and will go years on the same toner cartridges.
Forget black & white. Having a color laser at home is one of the best computer purchases I've made. I had a cheap Canon USB Scanner in the closet for the once or twice a year I need that function.
(they also allow me to do high-res (4800dpi) scans of money without any issue, in hilarious contrast to photoshop, which refuses to open them)
The reason I was buying cheap printers is that they were the only ones locally available, other than one very expensive model, the epson XP800. Apparently the market has been shrunk to only people that don't care about quality. They give the printer away and make a killing on the ink.
In the end I bought the expensive Epson and have been very happy with it. I'm not happy about the state of the market though.
Along with non-apple laptops and notebooks, printers seem to be one of the things people complain about the most.
Injects can be refilled at home with a simple injection and syringe! All you need to buy is some good quality ink from eBay (or aliexpress)
If not that There are "compatible oem cartridges" at 1/4 the cost available EVERYWHERE!
or if you do the slightest bit of printing : Invest in a CISS (Continuous ink supply system).. Even Epson makes original CISS systems.
A decent printer? Sure, I'd like one. Just.. where do I find one? And how would I be sure it's not one of bad ones?
If you want a nice printer that is reliable, has ultra-cheap cost-per-page, is rated for 50,000 pages per month, uses Postscript, etc., they're out there, but you're not going to find one for less than $50. But you can find one for $300-1000 (depending on if you want color or B&W). Your kickstarter project isn't going to be able to beat that.
Needs to work fine under Linux.
Any suggestions?
Have a look on the Open Printing site to see if there's a driver that can be used with CUPS. Then have a look on toner seller sites to see if the carts can be refilled cheaply.
The Open Printing site tends to list any problems some printers / mutli-function devices have.
http://www.openprinting.org/printers
Check the wider www too, because OpenPrinting is user generated and might not be up to date.
The Arch wiki has some nice documentation for CUPS: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/CUPS
So does FreeBSD: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/cups/
I'm (almost unfortunately) not in the market for a new laser printer. My current Brother HL-2150N still works like a (one-sided) charm.
+ For printing documents laser printers are by far the best choice for reliability, economy and quality of output. Color lasers have become quite reasonably priced, so if color printing is needed, no need to get something less.
+ For photos, nothing beats a high-quality pigment inkjet printer, but they can be expensive, especially large-format models.
About 12 years ago I bought an Epson Pro 4000, with 17x22in capability, it was at the time used leading edge tech. It required 8 ink cartridges. I preferred the 220 ml size, but those cost ~$100 each. The main problem with the 4000 was the heads clogging easily, a big annoyance and costly too.
But the Pro 4000 made absolutely gorgeous prints. Now it needs to be replaced, though spending >$2000 is not a pleasant prospect. Newer machines no doubt have much better print heads, probably lower TCO.
AS many here point out, small desktop inkjets can be expensive to operate and document output quality is often poor vs. laser.
+ It's been pretty consistent, printers and printer drivers cause 90% of system admin problems. Windows has always been by far the worst on this score. Amazingly, I had tremendous issues with a 6 year old Ricoh under Windows, but absolutely no driver problems with Linux. The customary Postscript-based printing in the Unix world is a predictable standard and usually easy to work with.
Many laser printers have built-in Postscript emulation, though a PS option for high-end printers or plotters can cost upward of $1000. Still might be worth it to avoid the Windows printer driver hell.
So I carry with me a cheap printer that's light to carry. If it takes a fast-moving ball that breaks off a part, or it gets overloaded with sand, dust, destroyed by rain, whatever, it's no skin off my back, since it was just $30.
So far the same crappy printer has been serving me for about 4 years in this capacity.
Toting around a laser printer would be a huge pain in the ass.
Otherwise, I'm completely onboard with the overarching sentiment: there's not a lot of reason to own an inkjet printer.
[1] My flagship product (http://bracketpal.com) is a tournament management system, and beach volleyball is the niche I focus primarily on.
The software on it is absolutely brutal too, it has a resistive touch screen as it's primary input and it's incredibly slow to page through. On top of that, if you try to speed things along (for example, pre-opening the paper roll cover before manually paging through to the 'replace paper' menu link) it will complain and refuse to do what you ask until you start back at the beginning.
I have had nothing but trouble, and these are multi-thousand dollar printers.
I personally just have a B&W Dell laserprinter that cost almost nothing. It's fast, prints everytime, and one cartridge lasts very long time.
Before my Dell, I had a 3-in-1 HP printer. It was the worst printer I've ever had. Paper jammed all the time. And half of the time it wouldn't pick up the paper, and told that there was no paper in it even though the paper tray was completely full. And those problems started on day one.
I'm still looking forward to seeing a printer that's really useful and user friendly. Silent. Easy to replace cartridges. One that doesn't jam paper every second page. we need the iPhone of printers.
I don't see why. If you want a better printer, you just have to pay more money and get one aimed at the SOHO (small office) market, which isn't subsidized by ink cartridge prices as the guy above notes.
The home printer market is like this because it's highly profitable. What you're probably thinking is that these printers need to be more like SOHO printers: cartridges that last a long time, ability to print tens of thousands of pages without any reliability problems, etc. They already have these printers: they're sold to people who have small offices and small businesses or workgroups.
The problem is people who seem to think that they should be able to get a business-class printer for $39.99. There's a reason they're that cheap. This is one of those cases where you really get what you pay for.
>I'm still looking forward to seeing a printer that's really useful and user friendly. Silent. Easy to replace cartridges. One that doesn't jam paper every second page. we need the iPhone of printers.
We've had those for a long, long time now. My HP LaserJet 2300 is mostly like that, except maybe the silent bit (you're never going to get a printer that's totally silent; mechanical contraptions that move things around with motors are going to make noise), and I think it's about 13 years old now. But that printer probably cost around $600 when it was new. You're not going to get the "iPhone of printers" at feature-phone prices.
I think the guts of it are actually Lexmark.
I have to hack the driver for it on new versions of OS X, but it runs fine without it.
It's just to control some of the optional print features.
I had a Lexmark S605[1], unfortunately the black side of the head got clogged, making it almost useless, unless cheating by printing in blue.
[1] the best AIO wireless printer I had. Solid build, not noisy, consistent throughput. My mother had to buy a quick replacement, a HP envy4500, it's a cheap piece of crap. Even the motors sucks. Slow, noisy, random.
I get their usefulness in some aspects of business operations but I'm a bit at a loss as to why an individual would purchase one.
What are the use cases now? The only two I can think of are printing photos, which I get but it seems better handled either through a photo printer or an outside service or for printing 'offical' documents to fill out manually, but I've completed many such transactions by digitally filling out and signing a pdf.
Tickets. Boarding Passes. Government forms that cannot be filed electronically. Carrying information you need where you don't want to reply on a phone whose battery could run out.
To read something in a focused way, with no internet to distract you.
I printed out a plane ticket today to fly in a country where waving your phone with the same ticket is apparently not satisfactory.
All of my boarding passes are covered via phone but on the occasion that I need a pass for an airline that doesn't have that option I would just spend 5 minutes at a kiosk to get it.
On the occasion I have to file a gov form that isn't available digitally or I can't fax (via email), I'll just get it printed at whatever local place can do so.
Point is that home printing really isn't a necessity anymore, and depending on circumstance it's debatable if it's a time/cost savings. As a result I would expect the home printing market to get more and more expensive.
The home printing market is only going to get more and more expensive if consumers are so stupid they can't go buy small business printers on Ebay that are a few years old and off-lease.
Given most of us have a printer at work, it may be environmentally more efficient if we just print stuff at work.
That said I am disorganized enough that being able to print at the very last minute is kind of handy!
Printer makers must hate people who buy a $50 and use it once in a blue moon and hardly ever buy a cartridge.
* Printing tax forms (even if you do them electronically it is much easier to have a file folder of all your info should you get a query from the government) * Printing homework or practice questions for my kids * Printing registration forms for the many places that aren't computerized * Faxed identification for various purposes * Faxed contracts for real estate * Scanned documents and identification for people that accept them over email * Scanned expenses
And that's not including my wife's use of it, who is a student and will regularly print off stuff to mark up by hand.
I store them as PDFs and put them on a NAS that with backups to S3
> Printing registration forms for the many places that aren't computerized
Generally have found I can fill out the PDF and stamp a signature on it and it's fine.
> Faxed contracts for real estate
Same as above.
> Scanned *
Not a printer, I just use a phone app for 'scanning' documents.
At work I've actually printed out database queries before so I could take a pen and mark them all up.
at home i print things like movie and event tickets. i don't like fumbling around on my phone for tickets because sometimes there's no reception and the email or whatever isn't cached. occasionally i will have government paperwork or something to print from home also. i will also print out maps and lists when i know reception will be crappy.
basically, mandatory paperwork and shitty cell reception are my use cases.
For maps, there are plenty with offline support: Google Maps, HERE, OsmAnd, etc.
I'm not criticizing your approach, just saying that I've never felt that need. Official paperwork, on the other hand, is still a pain; our local governments seem particularly adverse to digital documents.
how do you think i know of all these terrible scenarios?
i'd rather hang on to a piece of paper, and if i lose it, then i have nobody to blame but myself. call me a luddite.
But in my Epson XP-200, if my black cartidge runs out, it tells me that I can use a 'composite black' mode where it blends the ink from the colour cartridges to form black. And vice versa - when the colour ink runs out and black ink still remains, you can continue printing temporarily with black ink only.
So there are always those options if you need to get something printed.
Canon, the print head or logic board dies and unless you replace one and it works or fails you don't know which - sorry.
HP - built like a tank - ink priced like mil-spec.
Dell/Lexmark shiny logo in place of compatibility.
Never buy a network printer without an LCD display to read error messages/input IP addresses.
Beware of printers that can't use card stock - at all (Yeah, Canon, you and your latest inkjets).
Might try Brother next.
For the record, it's always government paperwork. Always. If you work for government, I have this super-neat thing called Flask to tell you about, you're gonna lose your shit when you find out!
Paying more upfront for a printer saves you in the long run. Avoid cheap multi-function printers like the plague.
That being said, I've yet to see a laser printer with grayscale rendering approaching that of a garden variety inkjet.
Although manufacturers might pick up on that and start doing the same for laser printers...
I remember loving Gutenprint (née Gimp-Print) back when I printed