Originally published at: Inkjet cartidges have only 3ml of ink in them, resulting in 45c per page printing cost | Boing Boing
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“other legal recourse”
I bought a laser printer for twice the price of a cheep inkjet decades ago and it still works just fine.
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My brother monochrome laser has been going for years now. I’ve got a spare toner cartrige and am waiting for the original one to run out but it’s showing no signs of stopping. I have only actually really needed to print something in colour two or three times since I bought it, the vast majority has been text
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I quite the home printer thing when buying an extra large, brand name black ink for $65 (canadian) printed 4 pages over two weeks before being empty.
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I just replaced all 4 toner cartridges in my Brother laser printer for $60.
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Always go with a laser printer. You can buy a color Brother for about $250, which is 5-6 inlet refills, and you’ll easily still be on your first set of toner cartridges by the time you print enough to have bought those inkjet refills.
I think I’ve changed toner once in the 5 years I’ve owned mine. I’m not running a business with it or anything, but I print pretty regularly.
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I was surprised that a spare toner cartridge for my lo-cost monochrome laser printer cost almost as much as the printer. I’ll have to see if it was worth the expense when the free toner that came with the machine finally runs out after over a decade or two of sporadic use, and I get to use the replacement. 
@RadioSilence and @WedgeAntilles It appears that I am not alone
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Is it just me who is surprised the laser manufacturers haven’t gone down the same route and put just a sniff of powder in cartridges to ensure they run out in no time?
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“ Once more for the record: Epson Ecotank for inkjets, Brother for laserjets. At least until further notice.”
This ^
My Brother laser printer given to me at an e-waste recycling event is still going strong 2 years in… on its second toner cartridge!
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Even with these you have to be careful. Their “cleaning” process will dump about 1/8-1/4 of the tank of ink into the guts of the machine, which in some models (mine included) consists only of a non-replaceable absorbent pad. Once enough cleaning cycles occur (which will happen with some frequency, as the nozzles regularly clog), the pad becomes saturated and the firmware effectively bricks the printer. Some better models from Epson have an actual dumpable maintenance tank, but you have to do some research to know which is which.
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… enshittificationlightenment 
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I have refilled the cartridges of every inkjet printer I have owned for a long time. Very cost effective and satisfying in a certain way.
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Give the spare the occasional shake to prevent clumping. Because it is going to sit on the shelf for a long time before you’ll need it.
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Annoyingly, I can see the point in a “30 pages or so” cartridge - I do sufficiently little printing, sufficiently infrequently, that half the times I need to print, I wind up with half blocked cartridges that take an age to clean and would probably be better off with a new cartridge anyway.
That, however, is no excuse for not selling them (perhaps with a deposit/return scheme to cover the e-waste associated with cartridges going to landfill) for 5-10p/page sort of prices.
I have a Canon inkjet, and I’m waiting for the black extra-large cartridge to be used up so I can buy a laser. I don’t print a lot.
The “press and hold the Stop button” trick works to force the printer to work even with an empty colour cartridge, but it still tries to use the colour cartridge when printing a page with colour text, leading to some shitty results.
However, I did some digging, and buried deep, deep in the settings, behind a locked door marked “Beware of the Leopard”, I found a setting that tells the printer to use the black cartridge and only the black cartridge for everything. Now text prints just fine. The only downside is that for every print command a little message pops up on the task bar, warning me that I am inadvertently about to make a horrible mistake. Clicking “I know what I said” is all that’s required.
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Have to say, my low-end Dell CT1760nw color laser printer is still hanging in there. Bought some cheapo toner cartridges from Amazon and I’ve hardly made a dent in them. Toner > ink all day long. If you print infrequently then you run the risk of the inkjet print heads getting clogged up with dried-out ink.
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