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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

I think that not buying printers is the correct answer, difficult to get everyone to do it, but it is the metric most likely to change behavior.

Inkjet technology is fine, it was the exploitation of it by HP which lead to copy cats that really made it ridiculous.

I've got an HP inkjet wide format plotter (36" wide) that was built both before HP was all in on ink as a profit center and built by a different division (plotter division). It has been a reliable workhorse for over 20 years now and while I don't use HP ink any more (they don't sell it) third party ink works fine.

I replaced my desktop printer with an Epson Eco-tank printer. They claim it comes with 2 years of ink (at my rate that is probably 4 years :-) and they the ink is not expensive. So there are people trying this model of "let's not bother screwing people on ink" and I'm trying to reward them by buying their printer.

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Can second the praise for the Epson Eco-Tank printers. Ink is cheap and lasts extremely long. Also I never had any problem with clogged nozzles etc which I used to face frequently on the cheaper printers. (though my Eco-Tank printer is black-and-white only which maybe alleviates many of those problems).

Also the integrated scanner worked out-of-the box for me under Debian, after I compiled and installed utsushi [1] from sources (edit: I'm only scanning from the utsushi command-line, no experience WRT integration with sane etc.).

[1] https://gitlab.com/utsushi/utsushi

Also a fan of the Epson Eco-tank. No nozzle clogging, even with infrequent use. The model I have is colour, Epson ET-7700.

I was at the point of swearing never to buy Epson inkjets, or any inkjet again. Then they released the eco-tank. I reluctantly made the purchase, almost expecting to be let down, but glad to say all is well.

The comedian Jimeoin even did a TV ad for the eco-tank range (here in Australia at least). It became a worldwide joke about tossing out printers when ink ran out. Maybe that's why they chose him for the eco-tank campaign.

I don't think I've ever seen an inkjet plotter in action. Does the paper go through a single pass? I was always fascinated by pen plotters, especially when drawing diagonal lines or changing pens.

Yes it is single pass, this particular model is an HP750C+. I had a wide format pen plotter before it and it would send the paper back and forth which was pretty mesmerizing but it required a lot of maintenance on the paper handling system so that the paper wouldn't slip.

The HP inkjet "plotter" works by rasterizing the plot in the host computer's memory and then sending strips of raster to the plotter. The dot resolution of the print head (replaceable, but not part of the ink system) matches the 0.7mm resolution of the pen plotters it replaced.

It's called a plotter but it's really just a large inkjet printer these days.

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