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Comment by ivolimmen | Hacker News Reader

As I told here before; buy a printer, don't rent it. Get yourself a EPSON EcoTank. Yes they are pricy, yes they require some more maintenance but you BUY the printer. EPSON does not care if you buy ink from them of another party. No chips in the cartridges because there are non. It works with tanks. You can fill it with the ink you want. When I use a online store to buy ink that has clone-cartridges for each type of printer on the planet they do not have a replacement for the ink for my printer as they can not supply cheaper ones than the one EPSON sells. €40 for a set of four. And they last for about 3 years. And since I do not print that much... way longer...

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I'd recommend a color laser for most people, unless they print a pretty high volume. Ink goes bad over time.

Why is a color laser not suitable for high volume? What is "high volume" in this case? (100 pages per week? day?) Laser printers are cheaper than inkjet on a per-page basis.

You're misreading the comment. The parent commenter is trying to say that since ink goes bad over time, it doesn't make sense to use inkjet printers unless you have high print volume to justify it. Therefore, the logical replacement is laser printers, which do not go bad over time (or at least at a much slower rate).

You're correct that if you're printing 100s of pages per week, laser is the way to go. That wasn't really what I was talking about, although I realize I was not very specific.

Most people just print a few pages every few weeks, and I'm arguing that those are also good use cases for laser. The upfront cost of laser is pretty low these days. You can often get a color all-in-one laser, with duplexer, for under $200.

The sweet spot for ink is somewhere in the middle. Printing regularly, but not high volume.

Honestly, I would say _most_ people could get buy on black and white laser. If you absolutely need or want color then get it.

If you're high volume, I'd still go laser. Toner is expensive, yes, but you get far more pages per dollar.

AFAIK, the only reason to go inkjet is if you're regularly printing photos, as inkjets typically produce better photos than laser.

I probably print 20 pages per year. I bought a Brother monochrome laser printer because I want the convenience of printing from home but got tired of my inkjet cartridges clogging and drying up.

I have an EcoTank and it is great and I would recommend it to anyone but there is a small catch of the maintenance box which is where ink goes when cleaning is being done inside the printer. If you don't print often you are more likely to use the maintenance box.

I have not looked at how easy it would be to clean out, reuse and reset the box but I suspect it is possible.

https://www.printerpotty.com/

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