Inkjets are for more than just printing
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
If you don't print frequently, the ink nozzles clog up (and you inevitably use a bunch of ink trying to fix them). For infrequent document printing, a laser printer will Just Print whether it's been sitting unused for an hour or a month. If you occasionally need some photos printed, using one of the myriad services will be better than replacing the inevitably gunked up ink cartridges.
If you print a lot of documents, the laser printer easily outstrips the speed of an inkjet. You'll also run up huge ink fees since the cost per page of ink tends to be higher than toner.
Therefore, the only reason you should get an inkjet printer is if you often need high quality colour prints (photos).
As a single data point, I used a Canon i9990 for many years. It had a very irregular use -- I would print a few 13x19 photos or a tiled panorama, or an occasional school picture of kids for the relatives. Then it would sit unused for days to months until the next job. And even with this supposedly abusive cycle it ran like new until it completely died one day.
I personally had worse luck with image printing services. Maybe the machines are off, maybe the fellow who runs it does not care, but more often than not there is something subtly wrong: either the color is off, or there is a smudge at the edge or some minor artifact. My 2c.
????
Photos is the last thing I’d buy an inkjet printer for. I’d be using a home inkjet to make circuit boards, temporary shirts, screen printing masks, transparencies, stickers, etc.
I've heard of using Laser printers for this but not InkJet
Inkjet printers are used in a direct print to PCB (remember those inkjet printers that could print on CDs back in the day?)
"Agilent developed a way to print strands of DNA from the four nucleic acid bases—cytosine (C), guanine (G), adenine (A), and thymine (T)."
"Inkjet systems are particularly suited for printing drugs in the form of thin films, such as transdermal patches to be applied to the skin and buccal films to be held in the cheek, where drugs can pass directly to the bloodstream without first going through the digestive system."
These applications are from dedicated machines, not available at BestBuy. Though I would like to see a supplier selling conductive inks for circuit board prototyping, and just maybe a home system could be filled with DNA or medicines??
The article also gave an interesting overview of the micro-dosing technology using for example piezo-electrics.
Huh. Printing photos is one of the main areas where inkjets still blow lasers out of the water.
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/epson-workforce-pro-wf-7840-wir...
1) Surprisingly, the running costs, with generic ink, are the same as a laser.
2) The text quality is fine. The image quality is better than a laser. Photos are great.
3) It can do larger formats (up to 13x19), copies, duplex, etc. The cost is literally a fraction of a similar laser. A large format laser is $$$. This one is $250 right now.
4) The speed is similar to a basic laser, but slower than a nice laser. It's rated at 12PPM color and 25PPM mono. It's slower, but it's fast enough.
I used to share your opinion, but ink has come a long ways. Something like this is super-versatile, since it does literally everything for $250.
Just don't get HP.
The real pro-tips are always in the comments.
I've had a cheapish HP Smart Tank for several years, filled it with 3rd party ink, it goes weeks without use and had no problems.
At the time I was buying mine, Epson marketed the WorkForce Series as the ones which didn't rip you off on ink, and WorkForce Pro, I believe, was even better.
Read reviews for printing costs, and adjust for the cost of generic ink. That's even true for lasers now; it's rare, but I've seen models designed to rip you off on toner too.
It has the problem the GP was talking about, increased to complete new levels.
Also laser printers draw a lot of power constantly, you may be confused here. The toner needs to be kept warm.
The heads don't clog on these printers, although perhaps they do need to be continuously powered to pull that trick off. As the sibling comment said, they are cheap to run, and as reliable as a laser. I gather all manufacturers have similar models that work just as well, including HP.
Be warned that since you aren't being ripped off for the ink you will be asked to pay the real cost of the printer. The cost is comparable to a laser, but much higher then their "we are going to gouge you on ink" cousins they will be sitting beside on the store shelf.
The CEO of HP said there is a risk of viruses being transmitted in the ink cartridges:
https://www.wired.com/story/hp-ceo-ink-cartridge-hackers-dyn...
He says you should always buy their special guaranteed virus free ink, but in my opinion it's much easier and safer to avoid the printers completely. You never know when you buy ink online if it's genuine - you could "catch a virus" at any time. It's almost certainly nonsense, but you can't be too careful.
I have also noticed lots of government offices that print a bunch of stuff all put an inkjet on almost every (rather than shared laser printers I'd been expecting to see), and I wondered why. Your explanation may be the key to that too.
There is also the significantly lower price. Although,if you print a lot, you'll eventually make up the price difference in toner. If, like me, you only need to print rarely, it's probably better just to print at a library or FedEx or UPS store when needed. But there is probably somewhere in the middle where a decent inkjet is more economical, especially if you can get one that works with third party ink cartridges.
Not sure about other printers, but I use HP InkJet for a decade, never clogged up, sometimes sits unused for a month or more.
This was true before, but my 10 year old Deskjet 4515 doesn't do that, even if you don't print for a couple of months.
Being an InkAdvantage(TM) printer, cartridges are not expensive either, and while its color inks are dye based (not pigmented), the colors hold up very well even when they are not stored properly (frame the photo up and leave it there).
B&W laser printers are nice, and they're cheap on the long run, but color laser printers polish the paper a lot (4 drums + baking), and reading long papers on that shiny copy is not very comfortable. Pens' handling on that paper also changes after that much heat and processing. Inkjets and B&W lasers doesn't have that problem.
I use my B&W laser for more disposable documents, but for code and papers which contains graphics, I prefer my Inkjet very much.
Lastly, people think that ink is just colored water. It's not. Same is true for toner. They're complex technologies. Yes, cartridges sent for some markup, but ink and toner quality varies. Esp. if you want archival prints.
It just runs and runs and runs.
I've bought a couple more for around the office and recommend them every time the subject of printers comes up.
If you don't want GBs of bullshit malware pretending at being drivers, you're sick of the color ink shenanigans, and you want a printer that wakes up and prints every single time, get a Brother Laser printer. They're amazing.
No affiliation, just a super grateful customer.
I have a beautiful HP Color LaserJet MFP 4301dfw that constantly loses connection to the WiFi access point and requires a reboot and/or logging into the incredibly shitty HP Smart software. I really wish HP had enterprise-grade or at least prosumer software instead of this fucking awful consumer shit. A $599 printer should have a solid software stack, and HP even markets it to small office consumers.
The machine has a beautifully designed exterior and solid internals that are plagued with an absolute shit software stack. Bill Hewlett and David Packard are probably rolling over in their grave at how fucking far their laser printer division has fallen.
HP was once a great company that innovated and made incredible technology.
It was taken over by financial types in the late nineties. They sold off the test equipment core business and leaned into cost cutting. They excised any vestiges of integrity or quality wherever it could be found.
With regard to software, I've long since accepted that HP, Brother, Canon et al can't write drivers to save their lives - and shouldn't have to - in a world where AirPrint, Chrome OS Printing, Windows IPP, or Direct IP printing exist.
It's long past time for printing to be treated as an OS service, where 3rd parties write the smallest possible shim to plug into available devices.
Unlike HP and many others, I've never been forced to install crapware to get it to work from Android, iOS, Mac, Windows or Linux.
It just works and it works every time, whether I have it wired or on WiFi.
I haven’t had an inkjet for 30 years - only black and white lasers. Starting with HL LaserJet 5L in 2000, then Samsung and now Brother (yay for their nice platform independence so they work on Linux).
My Prusa 3D is also arguably spewing a material into a surface so I guess yeah, maybe I should count it as an inkjet as well, though ;-)
For example continuous inkjet printers are used to label packages of many items you buy every day. There's also research about inkjet printing wearable electronics etc. None of which has a lot to do with HP.
A lot of the comments here read like a hobbyist programmer saying “C++ is dead, I haven’t written any C++ in my projects for years and since I’ve switched to Rust, I’ve never looked back”.
Yes, I stand by this analogy because inkjet is that important. The market is doing great and technology is improving at an impressive rate.
To build on your example of continuous IJ presses: more and more applications have lately been switching to drop-on-demand, as those printheads continue to get better (especially piezo IJ) and cheaper (especially thermal IJ).
“Inkjet 3D printing” exists, but it’s something quite different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powder_bed_and_inkjet_head_3D_...
I always wondered if anyone ever tried to make a fuel injector out of one. (the finer the mist you can make your gasoline, the better it combusts).
Source: I looked at thousands of these things under a microscope at a company that makes lots of them. 0/10 would not recommend.
An RC/drone I think that would be neat would be a 'diesel electric' (not diesel) - but a motor utilizing this for injecting into a generator for a gas-electric helicopter. Like a Chinook where the interior is the gas-electric generator, but the overall design modeled after the Chinook given that its the Heavy Lifter of Helos with a payload lift capacity of ~20 tons.?
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In the late 1990s I worked at a company who manufactured a lot of the physical media for various software/games/OS (Intuit/Everquest/SunOS for example)
We manufatered the CDs, copy, manuals, boxes, etc - boxed and shipped it...
All the CDs were printed using Brother inkjets.
My buddy was a fairly famous DJ in the rave scene in the 90s - so in my off hours we would make and print his CDs...
dj morgan...
I designed and printed these logos onto CDs in the 90s
https://i.imgur.com/6VUWeQN.png
(I actually designed the Decepticon Logo in circuitry when I worked at Intel - but we lost the artwork, and that was the cover - the CD was printed with the logo as drawn in circuit traces and was pretty bad ass for the 90s scene...)
(Note: am investor)
BTW since they have basically a positioned spray technology, they could literally "print" things with grass, giving it different nutrients or even dispersing different seeds. Anything from a decorative striped pattern to signs of affiliation and slogans.
But does it really use "inkjet" technology? It looks like an adjustable rate pump with a timing or orientation chip, mapped with an app.
3D Printing with 10,000,000 colors
TIL that some countries use comma and a period for separating numbers and decimals respectively and some other countries use them the other way around.
International standard is space for separators - 1 000 000. That’s a pain on a phone.
(And yes, that’s even more of a pain on a phone.)
The printer experience itself is horrible. I’m constantly having to reboot it, it cannot maintain a WiFi connection, they have crippled usb on it, etc. Reviews back me up, it’s a common experience.
However, it makes beautiful prints. I have printed literally hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pages of full color. And HP dutifully sends me another cartridge without prompting.
Just a couple weeks left on that trial. And the plan? Chunk it in the trash and start over again.
Weird times, friends. :)
I don't know who "most of us" is, but I had to check the year it was published because this is so wrong for everyone I know, home or office.
Black and white laser printers are price competitive with color inkjet printers in the short and long term for home or small office use. Most people don't need color, or if they do, inkjet is slow and low quality and more expensive than retail print shops for things like photos or full page flyers.
Know what's great for printing photos? The Walgreens up the block. It prints them waaaaayyyy more cheaply and nicely than any inkjet I've ever owned. The 2 times a year I want to frame and hang up a nice photo, I upload it to them and then walk over an hour later to pick it up.
There's no plausible reason I'd ever buy an inkjet again.
Yours in particular or generally laser printers? If the last one, that sounds surprising
Is it? Soho color laser printers are calibrated and designed to print color documents, not photos. They use CMYK (4) colors and inkjets designed for photos use 6 or more. It's possible to do photos with it but generally the laser printers most people have are not really designed for high quality photo (where a cheaper inkjet would be), they will show banding and be less color accurate.
Light cyan and light magenta are usually the additional colors added https://www.macworld.com/article/152010/6inkhetprinters.html
There are 7 color printers from Epson that add a dilute black.
It’s perfectly good for photos for elementary-school projects though.
Replacing the color cartridge was like $70. Instead of fixing this problem, I threw the ink jet away, and found a used Samsung ML-2010 on ebay for $60. It prints documents just fine, the only things I ever bother printing are forms that I have to sign.
Now I have a 15 year old HP office printer, also only black and white, and I genuinely like it. If I ever need to print color for whatever reason, I'll walk to one of the print shops a few blocks from me. It's not worth keeping a full color printer in my house that will work exactly once.
I also suspect that some of the applications mentioned in the article aren't using the built-to-a-price-point inkjet printers. Quality varies. Sometimes you have to check the reviews and pay a bit more for that quality.
Would I recommend it? No idea. I'm still new to the inkjet printer market. I'm sure hiccups will pop up along the way. On the other hand: it works in Linux, is quiet, and the lights don't dim when it comes to life. (It is also worth mentioning that it is more of a document printer than a photo printer.)
The resolution is reasonable, though the default color settings produce a blue cast (vs. both on-screen rendering and my Pixma Pro 100, as well as the HP it replaced) that I haven't figured out how to reliably prevent yet. As a photographer this irks me greatly, enough so that I won't print my own work on it until the problem is solved; others may not care.
It tends to go into deep sleep and need a poke to start listening to the network again, which is annoying when it lives with the other printers in the attic. I work around this with a homelab cron job that curls the printer's admin web interface once a minute.
Other than that it's been solid thus far, though admittedly I've only had it a few months. Certainly it'll be a while before I need to refill it.
I got so tired of being asked by friends and family to help them with their shit inkjet printers that I’ll never ever touch one again. I don’t even know when I would HAVE to print color but if I must, and I’m not working in an office, I’ll just go to any store near me and get it done. The laser is painless 99% of the time, where the inkjet is pain 99% of the time.
Before I moved across the country I donated my brother laser printer to the least tech savvy aunt in the family that could NEVER print and I have not heard of a single printing issue in almost a year. Where it was always always something. “Some” cartridge failed, not even 20% used. Didn’t say which one to make you change both. Change one, pray, if you’re lucky it works. A week later, black one fails. Or they get clogged, or they need to clean the whatever, which uses 10% of the ink. Such shit I can’t believe there isn’t a mass lawsuit against this.
If you're returning a package you've got to go somewhere to drop off the package anyway, so may as well print the label there.
> some school papers and resumes which are all black and white. If you’re in college reading lots of papers with graphs in color you can easily print at school.
Again that sounds like like you're getting the worst of both worlds. If you're going to go to the trouble of getting a printer so you can print off papers, you want to be able to print off all your papers, not just the ones that don't have graphs in. If you're just going to print them at school why wouldn't you print them all at school including the black-and-white ones?
(FWIW a CV where I live is expected to have a colour photo embedded)
Thing is, I also own a color scanner. It’s just as easy for me to make a color copy of a doc as a B/W copy. That’s pretty common now. If your bank thinks that a form with red lines on it must be an original, then they suck at technology more than most banks.
An original tax return form.
> If your bank thinks that a form with red lines on it must be an original, then they suck at technology more than most banks.
Be that as it may, I don't have a banking license and wasn't about to turn my nose up at a bank that finally let me open a corporate account after about 4 months of effort.
It's not really a mystery — if your main use case is documents (b&w or color), a laser printer is generally a better choice. If your main use case is photos and photographic imagery (like for stickers), you still need to go inkjet.
My daily driver for the last 7 years has been a Brother color laser, but this year I replaced it with an Epson ET-8500 inkjet because my needs had changed.
Meanwhile my parents have been through roughly a half dozen inkjets in the same time.
It's pretty obvious which is better for most home use cases.
I’ve never had that experience with any inkjet, however expensive. If I don’t use one for several months, it’s always a flip of the coin whether it’ll work without draining half the tank in self-cleaning cycles.
Lasers are just vastly more reliable than inkjets. I can always count on my laser waking up and printing before falling back into a coma. I can’t trust any inkjet.
Shrug. I've used boring consumer HP/Canon/Epsom inkjets and never had a problem. I think the first printer my parents ever had 20 years ago occasionally needed to print a test page, but I haven't had that happen since then.
Meaning, ~75% of us (see pages 14-16): https://o1.rtcdn.net/uploads/2022/04/Issue123EN2205-V4.pdf
I suspect most of us printer owners own inkjets, but people who print a lot of pages use laser, while inkjets are decorative after terrible experience with the first cartridge.
Thank you, you're right — this supports the parent commenter's point for the combined business and home markets. I wasn't able to find any data on the breakdown for the home market specifically, but based on my social circle I'd guess COVID/remote work significantly increased home laser purchases.
> …while inkjets are decorative after terrible experience with the first cartridge.
Having bought an inkjet after a two-decade "only laser/LED" rule, tank/CISS ink is making inkjets nice again. Still, I wouldn't recommend an inkjet if you (1) never intend to print photos/images or (2) regularly go more than a month without printing.
I'd like to know about any projects because a cutter is quite a lot expensive although it seems like the same tech as an inkjet printer.
Even if open offices somehow manage to be louder, it is an entirely different quality of noise.
Peak quietness for offices was, in my experience, in the late 90s or early 2000s. Everyone had separate cubicles with sound-absorbing walls. I really miss those days.
Of course, everyone's experiences will be different. Different companies had different office layouts, though there definitely have been clear trends.
They were relatively easy to find up until the late 90s when I stopped "going in"; maybe if people want to fill their expensive commercial real estate you all can convince the suits to bring them back?
Inkjets produce nicer pictures than toner-based printers (LED, Laser) at great expense and hassle. You're better off using an online service for bulk printing of pictures.
For document printing, they completely lose to toner-based. They are slow. They have to be used regularly or they dry up, which is a hassle to fix and perhaps cannot be.
I can ignore my LED printer for weeks or months, and be confident that when I need to count on it to print something, it will print.
Also, to begin with, inkjet cartridges are tiny compared to toner, and most of the content is the liquid carrier. Toner is 100% solids, and the cartridges are much larger.
Tank-based printers have changed this equation a lot, FWIW. I haven't seen a cartridge-based printer that I'd recommend.