Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcshicks | Hacker News Reader

I love my brother black and white laser printer. But I print infrequently. The problem I had with inkjets for years and years was dealing with clogging if I used them infrequently. Does anyone know if the color canon eco tanks work if you only print infrequently? Or do they clog? Some cursory searching sounds like clogging is still a problem for infrequent users.

https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/kjxd45/do_these_n...

View on HN

You'd think you could flush with water or some such after orint, as long as it was pure h2o (no minerals, etc) One flush after each print, but sadly, no manufacturer cares I guess.

I expect the Venn diagram of people who own a printer but may not print for a few months at a time is fairly small.

Every now and then I'd like to print out a map or whatever in color but it's just not often enough to maintain an inkjet printer.

Yeah, I only print every few months so I just use staples. Not sure why you would want a printer with such infrequent usage, you're not really saving money doing it yourself

Driving to a Staples to print a recipe or some travel information every week or two sounds incredibly painful and inefficient (admittedly we're not talking months). (But I admit I don't like to be dependent on information on my phone for everything.) A laser printer connected to my computer at home is essentially free.

No I think it’s actually the majority of printer users who go months without printing. The reason inkjets still exist is because these folks keep buying new ones when their old one clogs up (or the ink dries up completely) in between prints. They don’t buy lasers because inkjets hit the very lowest price point.

If everyone who did that just bought a brother B&W laser just once instead of re-upping their inkjet I bet anything the consumer market for cheap inkjet printers would disappear forever. Inkjets would only survive as a high end commercial colour technology.

I suspect that there are a lot of people with kids in school and various other use cases where color printing isn't really optional. (Though color laser isn't all that unreasonable these days.)

I think that assumption is wrong. For me I have had my printer since 2011 and have printed less than 4,000 pages. I often go months between print jobs. Sometimes I print, sometimes I scan, and sometimes I photocopy.

Basically a ream of paper a year sounds like not a lot by office printer standards but not a trivial amount either. With travel, I probably can go months without printing, but I'd still say I print "regularly."

Water = moisture = mold. Not exactly ideal, either.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com