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The article opens with a hint at another possible course of action: buy a cheap Brother laser printer, which currently go for about $129 in the US. Read the beginning of the article for the testimony, which many people have found for themselves.

What you actually need to avoid are manufacturers like HP, unless the idea of an “ink subscription” appeals to you. It’s also best to avoid ink jets both because of ink costs but also because they’re much less reliable especially if you don’t use them often - the ink dries up and the autoclean option never quite works right.

I happen to have an HP inkjet printer which I use every three or so months, and never had the dried ink problem. Always works reliably, including the display ink level function.

I think this "the ink dries up!" mantra is either outdated, doesn't affect HP anymore, or I got extremely lucky with my HP printers since 2014

Same here. I’m on the third cartridge in almost 3 years.

Counterpoint annecdata - my cheap HP injet printer dried up. I got what I paid for (I guess even less).

Same here .. and it was super cheap. Their subscription is a dollar a month and they mail me inks when I’m about to run out of — happened once

The reason I posted is that I'm about to throw out an HP OfficeJet Pro with that issue. It's a few years old but it hasn't worked properly for a while now, and given the costs of ink it's not worth repairing. I used to have a laser and I'm planning to switch back.

>This story tells me I made the right decision: Never ever buy a printer.

If it's that easy for you, great.

Fact is that desktop printers offer a service that is so valuable to some people/professions that manufacturers can be as outwardly customer-hostile as they please and still ship plenty of product.

I have a home office, and life without my printer would be terribly inconvenient. Driving to the library or copy center every time I need to print something is a nonstarter.

What're you printing? At some point I realised it was extremely rare that I printed anything other than a return label (and was doing so at the office while largely working from home, not that convenient), so I just got a label printer.

If you do anything financial, legal, or business frequently you have to provide PDFs of signed physical documents.

Every quarter I have to print->sign->scan->email multiple forms.

Inefficient and wasteful? Yes. Also required by law.

Most places (government included) accept e-signature now, don't they? You might need to upload the PDF to docusign to make it a "legit" e-signature, but that sounds better than the absurdity of printing and rescanning an originally digital document.

Nope. Many places will still require a physical signature on a scanned document. Why?

Because on their end, they print it back out and keep a physical copy. That is their workflow. Many offices are still paper based.

Even at my work, we use docusign for some stuff, but will require physical signatures for others.

Printing and rescanning is absurd, but also very easy for anyone. Especially now, it’s less “print and rescan” and more “print and send me a photo with your phone”.

Tried this with a couple of forms in Alaska and they were rejected because the signature looked like a digital one. (Even though my digital signature is a scan of an actual signature)

The E-SIGN act says that e-signatures are valid, with the main caveat being both parties need to opt into doing business electronically. Unfortunately that doesn't mean that every agency must accept e-signatures.

I had this with the IRS. Someone hand reviewed the form and used a highlighter to highlight the two digital signatures that were identical (they were, but not placed exactly the same, so im surprised they noticed) and said “this is not a legal signature, please sign again in ink and return”.

Me too. I however scanned my signature years ago and insert it in, along with my name. I use my iPad and Apple Pencil for dates or any other data.

In thousands of official documents, nobody has called it out. When asked "did you print and scan this?" I lie.

Eventually the world will catch up, but there's no need to participate in their bullshit in the meantime.

I don't think I do any less (or more) of that than normal/average. I managed to buy a house without one (by which I mean it never came up, not that I could work around it).

https://gitlab.com/edouardklein/falsisign (can't reply to comment below) that's useful to add signatures to documents

Documents that require physical signatures.

> Never ever buy a printer

Change that to "Only buy a laser printer" or "Never ever buy an inkjet printer" and you're closer to the truth. Better still, "Only buy an older - but no too old - office-type laser printer at the thrift store" or something along those lines and you're golden. Cheap toner which lasts for years, the machine has a network connection so you can just wire it to a switch or router somewhere where it is convenient. The "not too old" is mostly because really old laser printers are power hogs, get one with a power-saving mode. It might take a few more seconds before the first page comes out when it as to heat the fuser first but who cares?

I have a HP Laserjet 2200dtn and a Canon MF9220Cdn in different locations, both of them switched off but ready for use after being switched on. Toner does not dry out like ink does, nozzles do not get clogged, the things tend to just work when needed. With enough toner for at least 3 years (and more to be had for cheap on eBay et al) we're set and we do not need to go to any library - which would be a long cycle ride seeing how as we're living on a farm in the Swedish countryside - to print out those stupid forms, schematic diagrams and presentations.

For those of us who need to print a bit more often, my advice is to buy a black and white laser printer for ~$40 on Craigslist and you'll get years of cheap, reliable occasional printing in your own home while you use up the rest of the toner cartridge that came with it. When it breaks you can probably find another one in the same price range.

I'm going to advise against this. Most people selling their printer are doing so out of frustration due to paper jams or other nonsense. I have gotten 2 used printers out of not wanting to generate e-waste, only to have constant printer jams and other frustrations leading to me having to just print at the grocery store instead.

"That Brother printer" will cost you more (and be Yet Another Plastic Thing To Go To A Landfill Later), but will ... print every time. Sure, after a while you might need to clean the rollers or something, but at least you know it will be that and not some random bricking.

I got a Brother laser printer (HL-3170CDW) and in terms of economy it's hard to beat. (Never buy an ink printer though. That advice holds.)

About the random bricking though… While this printer doesn't actually brick itself, it does have a very curious failure state where if you leave it off, but plugged into the mains, it will eventually refuse to boot up until you unplug it, wait for ten minutes, and plug it back in. No error message, no blinking lights, nothing to indicate that something is wrong, just nothing until you let it reset itself by removing the power cable for a while. I just leave it unplugged most of the time now.

Epson have a line called ecoTank that let allows you to refill from a bottle which are also economical.

I did buy a (Brother DCP-J4120DW) colour inkjet printer all-in-one device. And (surprisingly to me) it actually doesn't suck. The Linux drivers work. Sure, the ink is pricey, but it has generally been trouble-free. I left it for a couple of years without printing anything and it clogged up, but when the pandemic hit and I started having to print at home again, it cleared up with a couple of head-cleaning operations. I'm not printing much - maybe a double-sided sheet a week.

So yeah, the advice to never buy an inkjet - it's true but not disastrously true all the time.

I second the trouble-free experience with the dcp-j4120. Printing from Android works fine as well. It does seem there are Linux problems ahead though, as the drivers seem to support only some deprecated CUPS driver version...

Is it properly grounded?

Perfectly. At least from the cable onwards. This seems to be a fairly common problem for Brother printers, oddly enough. I eventually figured out the issue from one of several Youtube videos addressing it.

Perhaps you can restart it faster if you:

    1. unplug the printer
    2. press the power button
    3. plug in the printer
    4. press the power button

(Step 2 could discharge some capacitors.)

> Never buy an ink printer though. That advice holds.

With traditional ink printers, yes.

With the new tank-based printers? No. That advice no longer holds.

Tank-based printers separate out the tank that holds the ink from the nozzle that sprays the ink. This allows the printer to fully seal off the tank when the printer is not in use, preventing the ink from drying up. The traditional ink cartridges are not able to do that, which is what causes so much frustration and wastage.

I have a few clients with the tank-based printers, and these products seem to have solved the last major objections against inkjet printers. FWIHS, they tend to work quite well.

How do they keep the ink from drying up in the nozzles? That, in my experience, is the problem. There's always leftover ink in the nozzles from the last print operation.

I wonder if Brother knows of its growing positive reputation over the past ~15 years, and whether there are internal pressures within Brother's C-execs to capitalize on this through 'successful' tactics that others are employing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

they pissed it all away recently. they joined the league of evil printer makers.

Maybe they know, and it's a better business model for them. I don't know how the costs break down. Anti-consumer shenanigans cost money -- first they have to be engineered, then it probably generates a certain amount of after market support issues even when it works perfectly. A shenanigan-free product could be cheaper to design and quicker to market in the first place.

Its just the lasers though. I had a brother inkjet and it was a short lived disaster. I don't print much and the heads dried up a bit and then in 'cleaning mode' it blasts out most of the ink of the cartridges, but doesn't fix the problem. Other inkjets have the print heads on the catridges so you get new ones when they are replaced. Brother inkjet heads are part of the printer which means they can be a better quality head, but if there is a problem then its much harder to fix. In the end the printer didn't last a year because it heads got fouled and couldn't easily be cleaned/replaced.

> Most people selling their printer are doing so out of frustration due to paper jams or other nonsense.

Consumer printers? Sure. Highly likely. That stuff was designed to be disposable.

Business-class or Enterprise-class printers that had been used in larger offices or have low page counts? A much lower probability.

The business/enterprise stuff is meant to last because they cost a lot going out the door, and so are built robustly. You just have to ensure either a low page count, or some sort of proof that the machine had been serviced regularly by properly-certified printer techs.

Yes, it is still possible to get a lemon. But if you live somewhere with any sort of a significant metro region, you only need a little patience to find older pre-DRM hardware that is still performing well.

I have had a second-hand 4050DTN for about two decades now (liquidation sale, IIRC), and while it’s hurting for a maintenance kit (already have one, albeit in storage somewhere), it’s still running very well in all other aspects.

> The business/enterprise stuff is meant to last because they cost a lot going out the door, and so are built robustly. You just have to ensure either a low page count, or some sort of proof that the machine had been serviced regularly by properly-certified printer techs.

On the large format side, OG DesignJet 750Cs were pretty dang serviceable for the longest time. The first one I had to repair took a good day or so to disassemble/reassemble, but the next 2 I was able to handle in the second half of a workday.

(Also, they're built better than the newer ones)

I do think that used enterprise things will be likely to work well.

I do not live in a place that can fit an “enterprise” printer though, and I think for many people living in apartments it’s a bit of an ask. But it’s also pretty dependent on both the value of the surface area required to you and your printing needs.

One problem with those older office-size laser printers is the standby power consumption is pretty terrible.

I've done it four times. One printer had an issue but was still usable, the other three didn't. It's very common for students and other folks to sell perfectly fine printers when they move.

My latest one is a brother printer that I bought on Craigslist.

My laserjet 1020 is messed up and gets jammed up if put more than one sheet into the tray. So I need to print the pages one by one by waiting until the status led flashes orange, then load the next sheet and click next / briefly opening the top lid. But I rather keep just doing this than dealing with any of that modern drm crap.

Sounds like you need to purchase the laserjet 1020 maintenance kit. It has these replacement pickup rollers that are supposed to be replaced after x number of years/x number of prints.

Another thing I've been told by a manufacturer: paper quality is apparently the biggest factor in longevity of a printer. To the point they custom order "the worst paper" for testing purposes (which apparently a speciality paper mill agreed to do, but absolutely refused to put their name on).

I don't know the specifics of this, beyond if you buy the cheapest paper you can probably expect your printer to jam up sooner.

Used to work for a BigCo printer maker. This is true. You wouldn’t believe the things people print on, there are racks and racks of weird papers from around the world. Tested at different temps/humidities (matters for the electrostatic process in laser printers).

Bamboo paper is a thing.

And how does bamboo paper behave?

I spent a "happy" 20 minutes peeling semi-molten polyester labels off a fuser belt a few months back. (Lesson learned, I duly told the machine it was printing on a thinner paper stock, and ran the rest of the job without issue...)

I never get why people get so angry about this.

I’m a stupid consumer with printers. I have a HP office jet and pay like $5/month for their ink subscription. I print 30-80 pages a month. The economics work. I have a cheap capable inkjet MFP in the same cost envelope of a bigger, lower toner cost laser.

The printer talks PCL and works with anything I’ve tried including Linux.

It works for you because you print a lot (1-3 pages per day!). OP prints fewer than 10 pages per year.

There’s a $1/month subscription. You get 10 pages a month.

The author would pay $12/year for 10 pages per year, without the cost of the cartridge. You need 20 years before you reach the cost of a $240 cartridge. The cartridge would’ve dried out before then.

This entire article is an exercise in “I can’t do math”

Are you talking about something else? The article is about region locking which means, by definition, that the ink available in North America won’t work. Money isn’t the only consideration in these situations anyways. For some people it’s the principle.

More directly to your point - the author plainly acknowledges the sunk cost fallacy at play here. I’m pretty sure he can do the math.

I’m talking about the snide remarks towards InstankInk throughout the article. The GP says that because the author prints 10 pages a year it’s a bad deal. I’m arguing that InstantInk is a great deal for someone that prints 10 pages a year. The author should’ve said “yea, I followed principles here, but honestly I should’ve gotten InstankInk from the very beginning” instead of crapping on it

How would he get instant ink in North America with an EU region printer? Would you trust an org this incompetent to do that properly... or at all?

Anyways, he plainly acknowledges the sunk cost fallacy at play here.

guys, we've found the HP CEO

Lol. Wait till you have a bunch of kids who want to print color.

Have you tried telling them "no"?

Yes, until they need it for school.

Same here, except I print way less, so I’m on a dollar per month sub, and just pay for overages sometimes.

I think instant ink is a better product in terms of money saved, especially when you account for the risk of cartridges drying out.

Now, to be clear, when it first came out, I thought “evil capitalists” just like everyone else in this thread. But I think it’s wrong, there’s just a yuckiness factor associated with paying monthly for something you theoretically own.

I think we should just move on as a society from the idea that you somehow “own” cheap personal property like phones and printers and fridges, etc.

Everything is perpetually leased

> I think instant ink is a better product in terms of money saved, especially when you account for the risk of cartridges drying out.

They created a problem for which the solution was a subscription. Laser toner doesn't have this issue.

> I think we should just move on as a society from the idea that you somehow “own” cheap personal property like phones and printers and fridges, etc.

You do own it. If you want to pay someone a monthly fee to help you manage it, that's your choice. But to say that everyone else should "move on as a society" because of your personal choices is very arrogant.