You can buy a SOHO laser printer for $50 more than a home model and then the toner’s cheaper than the printer. 
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Perhaps US prices are very different?
Here:
Colour Laserjet Pro M377dw - £205
Set cartridges - £360 (high capacity a lot more)
Canon LBP7210CDN £166
Set cartridges - £326
I print stuff. Forms that need to be filled out and handed into doctors as paper artifacts, kids homework, paper art cutout projects, shopping lists (I like paper lists at the store so I can mark them with a pen), various art things, and sometimes oddball tickets for shows that still want to scan a paper thing. I don’t print often, which makes a laser printer work much better since it can idle for months without worrying about ink drying and clogging.
I was thinking of B&W printers. Color laser printers need separate CMYK toner and are more complex so they’re a lot more costly, though for my purposes I’d prefer not to have a color anything. Also, my comment was a joke.
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I’m still confused about the need for security updates in the first place. If I have purchased a printer, I need to be in close physical proximity to it in order to load the paper, receive the printout, and fuss with the settings. As long as I can move my document to the printer, there’s no reason for the printer to need to talk to anyone or anything else.
Malware and spam on my general purpose computer, I can sort of grasp how it’s a non-trivial problem, there’s core issues of self and not-self in play, every time I put a new URL in the address bar. But a printer?
Voting machines don’t need to be general purpose computers, and it’s easy to see how they’re doing it wrong by making the machine in software rather than hardware. Seems like printers should be just as easy to evaluate for security.
Am I missing something?
Obviously not a cross-cultural one. In English, “slight smile” means “I’m looking down on you because you’re an idiot, but I’m not going to say it out loud.”
Sorry, my native language is hedgehog so these things are hard.
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I have trained our dog not to bark at hedgehogs; pigeons and cats are fair game. What’s the hedgehog for “please come into our garden, we don’t use pesticides and we would like you to eat the slugs”?
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Does anyone know if HP did something similar with their Simple Save backup drives? About two months ago, mine just stopped working. HP claimed it was because the unit was not designed for Windows 8.1 and one of the recent Windows updates rendered it incompatible. But I’m suspicious. (I originally purchased it for use with my old Vista laptop)
Actually no. A laser printer can quite happily sit in standby mode for a year, not being used, and it will still have just as much toner available as it did 12 months ago. Sure a lot of toner goes into the waste drum when you print, but that’s included in the calculations of how many pages you get per toner cartridge. And toner is ONLY used when printing. With an inkjet, the ink gets used to clean the nozzles to prevent clogging, so the number of pages per cartridge is always a lie. The less often you print, the more of a lie it is. For home use, where these days you will most likely only want to print every so often, inkjets are an incredible waste of money. And business inkjets are even more a bad buy for home use, because they are designed to print hundreds of pages per month, and most home use is going to be far below their intended work load.
We had a very nice business grade HP inkjet for my spouse’s work for several years, it worked well and didn’t need new ink too often, and the cost of the ink was covered by her employer so it was no big deal. Then she went on disability and our printer usage declined from hundreds of pages per month to a dozen or so at most. And the printer soon ceased to print properly because of dried ink in the nozzles. Plus it was eating ink cartridges trying (and failing) to keep the nozzles clear, so our effective pages per cartridge was plummeting from thousands to a few hundred. I looked at the cost of getting new ink cartridges yet again, bought a laser printer instead, and have never once regretted it.
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I love this neologism 
I am not sure about print being in decline. As a printer myself, I can say certainly that is a mature print industry, but talking to paper suppliers while all the variety of specialty papers have declined (ie. fancy colour shades, and various finishes - such as felt, laid, linen, columns etc) the one growth area is in copy and laser papers which are used in offices and homes.
Personally I ran into HP’s proprietary policies years ago when I bought a special colour inkjet proofer for my shop
it was over $5000 at the time (a low end proofer actually, higher end ones were $60,000) it had 4 print heads and 4 cartridges (all around $50 each) and they had a chip so they expired after 6 months. Of course the sales people said none of this when I bought it. It also had an annoying feature of checking on the internet if you were the authorized owner. My favourite line in the instructions was ‘sometimes there is a problem between the computer and printer and it will not print’
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Lots of crafty things. I use my color laser to print signs and billboards for my (yet to be built) model railroad. It’s fun to take old signs and modify them slightly. I think the original for this was an old (possibly Soviet?) anti-drinking poster:
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.[quote=“Keith_McClary, post:20, topic:93500”]
Are there any good reasons for printing?
[/quote]
Yes. For many people, mistakes jump out from the printed page that they don’t notice on a screen, so for proofreading, paper copies are a good idea.
Paper is also good for knowledge workers who have (or are given by their employer) only one modest sized monitor (ie, nearly everyone). You can spread a printout across your desk and have fast random access to several different passages that you need to refer to, without switching away from the document you are creating, and without having to interrupt your train of thought with time spent scrolling through the reference document to get to the next relevant passage
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I like to print out topo maps to use while hiking. Better than looking on a smartphone which might get damaged, or run out of juice, or …
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Oh yes, the OEM Colour Laser prices are extortionate. Good quality 3rd party ones are around a quarter of the price, at the risk of the manufacturers skulduggery though. Samsung are/were bad about firmware updates happening to kill compatibility with other cartridges.
Laser pricing pales in comparison with some large format printers, a full set of 12 Canon 700ml cartridges is in the region of £2500. They last a long time, but that’s a bit of sticker shock when you have to replace them!
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Yes. Most printers these days have embedded computers and many local and Internet-enabled features. Things like Internet printing, P2P printing using technologies like AirPrint, and of course built-in WiFi and/or Ethernet. If you compromise a printer then it’s a pretty easy hop to other machines. As typical for these kind of devices, they are usually a mishmash of outdated open source libraries and purpose-built spaghetti code. Cory also touched on malware being inserted to forward your print jobs or scans to a third party, but I’m not sure if this has been a proven vector or is just more Cory-branded sensationalism, though.
So yes, it is typically necessary to have security updates for printers, just like any other Internet-connected embedded device.
Vastly, apparently? I can nab a home office b&w laser for ~150, and my toner carts are ~30.
You’re paying too much.
Seriously, I have no clue what these people are talking about. Inkjets are designed to dry out and clog, and if they don’t they are designed to report that they are out of ink.
Lasers are superior in every way for everyday use, though I’m fine with a decent giclée print from a printer I can’t afford.
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Layouts and patterns for woodworking come to mind instantly. I just printed a pattern for the backer ring for a deck hatch for my (home-built) sailing skiff.
Epson appears to be into the habit of causing half the usable capacity of your cartridge magically disappear overnight.
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Federal record-keeping laws, for one. As well as just about any legal document (“E-signing” is not universally acceptable".
We’re not going to lose the need for hard-copies any time soon.
