Epson ditches lasers and goes all in on inkjet | Hacker News Reader

Epson ditches lasers and goes all in on inkjet

techradar.com

19 pointsmikece15 comments

More energy has been wasted and more harm to the environment has been done from inkjet cartridges that dried out and stopped working when mostly full than from laser printers by a long shot.

I remember having to replace inkjet cartridges several times a year even if I only printed a few pages and having to replace the printers themselves often. I've owned two printers in the last 13 years. Both are Brother laser printers, and I only bought the second because I wanted duplex and Wifi and my old one didn't support them. As far as I know, the old one is still running for the person I sold it to.

On a commercial level, even if you run the printer constantly and consumables don't matter, the energy spent by people waiting for slow inkjets to print almost certainly has a bigger impact than power consumption.

Color laser printers have only recently become reasonably priced for a home user though, and are still a bit more expensive up front. Plus, they emit particles into the air, and for some reason I have never heard of one with any kind of filtration feature to stop that.

How often are people printing in color? I print 3-4 things in color per year, and I just go to FedEx when necessary

Almost everything I print is color, usually things like signs, decorations, letters with photos, etc.

If I printed documents regularly I suppose I'd probably want a laser, but it's not a very common thing for me, maybe twice a year, generally 1 or 2 pages at most.

>> Epson confirmed in July 2022(opens in new tab) that some of its printers are designed to stop working after a certain period of time, forcing customers to either replace the hardware or pay for it to be survived by an authorized repair person.

Personally, I'm done playing the ink cartridge game. Laser all the way!

“sustainability issues”

Instead goes full in on making printers that self destruct, ink cartridges that self destruct and ink that self destructs.

Selling a printer that keeps on printing doesn't sustain sales.

I bought an ET-12000 this year, and Epson has the absolute worst out of box experience of all the printers I have ever bought. After powering the printer up for the first time, one has to press and hold a button on the front panel for several seconds. The ridiculous part is that the instructions on the screen don't tell you to do that: the setup instructions are only on one of the printed cards that come with the printer. #FAIL

Somehow every other inkjet I have ever used displays the next step of the step by step setup instruction on the display. I have no idea what sort of crack monkeys Epson hired to come up with that brilliant procedure.

I’ve been using computers for 30 years and have never met a reliable printer.

I’ve been using computers for 40 years and never had a laser printer completely die on me. Nor a dot matrix printer, for that matter. Just throwaway inkjets.

The IBM 3800 was a highly reliable laser printer. It was first deployed 46 years ago.

What a coincidence! I’m ditching Epson and going all in on Brother.

I've had great experiences with Kyocera laser printers.

Phrenzy ditches Epson.

This is a mistake.

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