Also my vet once told me he replaces his home printer every time it runs out of ink, because replacing the cartridge costs the same order of magnitude as a new printer and this he can always have the latest and greatest.
Pages per dollar means something if you're printing in bulk. Otherwise, its trouble-free-printing-per-dollar. Which may be improved by buying a new printer periodically as a sort of prophylactic maintenance.
You can also still buy parts for these printers as well reasonably cheap. I was able to find a plastic gear that got stripped due to an object falling into the paper tray - cost me about $8 and 20 minutes of repair time and it's good as new.
The average person doesn't print much, but when they do they really need it right now (e.g. boarding passes, legal document to sign, concert tickets, whatever) and having a rock-solid printer that you know just works every time even if you haven't printed in 6 months is great.
Any printing functionality is entirely incidental, especially on inkjets.
If you need something printed urgently, you can guarantee that one of the following will happen: drivers need updating (=> 400MB download, if you can even find the file on the site), drivers don't work, out of ink, clogged nozzles that need cleaning (followed by out of ink), paper jam, file prints landscape instead of portrait, or vice versa, and there's no obvious way to fix this.
Its like mean-time-between-failure, excepts more like chance-of-succeeding: multiply all the probabilities of success at a stage together, you get the total chance of success. It becomes diminishingly small the more screw-ups are possible. Inkjet has two or three more places to fail, so.
When you rarely print, having a laser is better as they can sit a long time and not dry out or gum up like the ink printers.
A valid concern though, it's been shown those MFDs keep junk around in their buffers forever
Now cartridges needing to be replaced prematurely 'because we haven't figured out a technology to prevent them drying up' does sound suspicious.
My printers sit idle. First it was the price of ink. Then I just found I didn't like fiddling with them. Then I just got used to not using them.
I think the printing industry is in a huge hole, and it will take a lot of ass kissing, and honest innovation, that benefits the consumer, to bring home printing back.
Good luck-
You can buy cheap chips to put into the printer if you want to risk it - search for "drum reset refill chip".
The drum reset refill chip is not even a chip, it's a 56 ohm resistor that acts like a fuse. The drum has two resistors in parallel, one with very low resistance and one that's like 200 000 ohm. If the printer sees a high current when you turn on the printer, the firmware thinks it's a new drum and resets the page counter. After a short while the 100 ohm resistor burns (quite literally), and from that point on the firmware will only see a low current when you turn on the printer, and it will not reset the page counter.
So the drum reset refill chip lets you connect the two pads where the printer applies the current with a resistor like the one on a new drum. You can buy a 56 ohm resistor yourself to achieve the same effect.
It's literally a resistor and some plastic, only usable once, and they sell it to you for $10, which makes it much more of a scam than anything printer manufacturers do.
It's a printer, what more innovation do you need?
The printer I bought was a Samsung and cost right around $100. Compare that to my old HP inkjet that cost more than that and required upwards of 5 ink cartridges.
I don't get color printing out of this but I can't recall the last time I needed to print in color. If I want to print photos, it's cheaper and easier to just order them.
I ended up buying an used, better model, which had more generic toners available.
I hope HP doesn't start doing that crap.
Yeah, a lot of people also said that about cellphones and then the iPhone came out. :)
- Mobile internet access was prohibitively expensive (sometimes as high as a penny per kilobyte), browsers were terrible, and some even pushed for an alternative language to HTML for the mobile web. [0]
- Every phone was running a mobile JVM, but apps still had compatibility issues across models and carriers.
- Camera quality was horrid.
- Many phones had poor or inconsistent support for MMS, group texts, and visual voicemail. Even the iPhone itself didn't support MMS at first.
And these were problems even with the devices that were marketed as "smartphones" back then. Mobile phones were awful.
After a while, the printer started complaining on the beautiful big touch screen display, and said "Service cartridges" or print head or something along those lines (my mom might have put in non-"genuine" replacement cartridges, I seem to recall, but not sure). Fair enough - we had gotten her a cheap laser for printing anyway by that time, as it's really cheaper and far less trouble.
However, this stupid Lexmark thingy would not allow you to acknowledge that warning and then start up, so mom could at least still scan and fax - no, it would just sit there and complain about the print head or ink or what have you and refuse to do anything!
Needless to say, we tossed it. Still need to get a scanner and fax now :-/