My previous inkjet printer wasn’t even a bargain basement model - it was a top teir HP. Yet after just over a year it stopped feeding paper. I took it apart and some cheap plastic gear in the feeding mechanism had broken rendering it useless. Inkjet printers seem to be made to be disposable garbage and not built to last.
I relented and bought a new HP laser printer. The quality difference is staggering. Sure the printers are pricier, and toner is expensive, but it’s totally worth it. They print extremely fast and reliably with great detail and are built to last.
ETA while toner is way more expensive than inkjet ink, it lasts way longer and doesn’t dry out.
I bought a Brother and I agree. This laser printer is amazingly better than an inkjet. Not just because I don’t have to buy $75 of ink cartridges everytime I want to print something. It’s better, faster, cheaper, and just works. I would never go back to inkjet.
Let Hanlon’s Razor do its job – this is the 6th Circuit we’re talking about here; the place where bad decisions get their gladiator training before being gutted in the arena by the Supremes. (Most recent example: the gay marriage ruling was based on two cases from the 6th Circuit, one in Michigan and one in Ohio.)
(And yeah, I know that this case will never actually get to the 6th Circuit, since it involves patents. But the Districts aren’t really any better than the Circuit; SCOTUS will be just as happy to eat this District’s lunch.)
If you can’t beat them, eat them.
Mind you, although Lexmark products used to be rock solid if expensive to operate - banks loved them - if they disappeared tomorrow I doubt they would be missed.
This after all is the company that reported its cartridges needed replacing when they were still 19% full.
My B&W Samsung was on sale for $100, but I had a $50 coupon for anything in the store. Then I charged a buddy $50 to do his taxes, and six pages later, I had a free printer. It’s been chugging along for so long, I don’t think they make the toners any more, and finding a driver for Win8 was a serious scavenger hunt.
A patent gives limited rights for production and sale. If the agreement is a rental agreement or lease then this must be explicitly stated and a signature would be required. To simply state we own this after a sale is not a common law interpretation of ownership and would be disruptive to all commerce.
If the judge states that the corporation owns something after a sale, then this judge should be impeached, removed from office and disbarred from practicing law.
For a while, my protest against the ink cost was to just buy a new printer on sale somewhere, as it was about the same cost as new ink. Then I noticed that they had started shipping the printers with much less ink than the standard cartridges. Next, I went through a phase where I bought lots of cheap knockoff cartridges off of ebay. Now I have moved up to a large format printer, and the price of ink is unbelievable. I now use a special cartridge that feeds off of big ink reservoirs, and has a little pc board with a button to give the printer a signal that new cartridges have been installed.
It is an escalating technological war. I am not trying to take advantage of them. I don’t expect ink to be free. They are trying to cheat all of us, and they are not even trying to be subtle about it. The ink is the same. They just want to use software and patent law to make us buy it at $10,000 per gallon, even though the cost to manufacture it is almost zero. To me, it seems almost Un-American to not fight back. I guess if it is worth it for them to send a SWAT team up here, or call in a drone strike over my use of cheap printer ink, or the modifications we made to our tractors, then they know where to find me. it seems kind of pointless and stupid, though.
The European Union also frowns upon this, and passed regulation in 2007 that was supposed to forbid one-way cartridges. I haven’t tested it, as I use a laser printer and haven’t had to swap the toner in the 5 years that I have had it.
As for printing photos, well, I get them printed on glass nowadays to hang on the wall.
It was a big problem for Lexmark.
I’d love to print some of the research I did back then on laser printers, but (a) it’s the IP of a former company and (b) I suspect I’d get sued.
I ran an old Samsung laser printer through about ten refills of toner per cartridge till it basically died of old age, and I’ve just had to replace a Ricoh because somebody managed to get a piece of wool (go figure) in the fan hole, which ended up damaging too many internal parts to repair. New Epsons, however, have refillable ink tanks down to quite modest models,so if you’re doing 10 000 or more pages a year they are worth looking at.
Basically support manufacturers that charge you a fair price for the printer and the ink, and perhaps the message will get through.
I still inkjet for photos. The cost-quality ratio is too high for lasers, especially when I’m doing 11x17 prints, home laser printers simply don’t have the ability to print for long-term use the way inkjets do.
That said, the other thing is not to buy a shitty Lexmark printer in the first place. I don’t have any issues with my Epson print heads over the past five years.
The Big Showdown was Lexmark International v. Static Control Components. Went to the supreme court, the justices didn’t buy the ‘some copyrighted software is in our product therefore doing anything violates the DMCA’ argument. Apparently they’ve produced a respin with patents.
MrsTobinL is fond of hardcopy. Me not so much. I am quite torn between having a bookshelf full of books or an ereader full of books. I love both options for different reasons.
99% of what I print out anymore is the Friday and Saturday NYT crosswords because I like to work those out old school and they get handed to MrsTobinL and back as we get stuck.
You may be surprised to learn this, but laser toner has a best before date. In a domestic environment it may go years without clumping but if the humidity varies then it can cluimp, which affects print quality. Ten years ago laser printers were mostly far more solidly made and also used a lot more power, so they tended to keep their insides dry by simple heat generation. Modern ones in the cheap price range may not perform as well.
Anybody doing so little printing that an inkjet head blocks up, should perhaps rethink what they are doing. If you buy an inkjet with a cartridge size between 2000 and 4000 pages - of which there are plenty nowadays - and print a Windows test page once a week, the whole thing should still be working just fine in ten years and will have cost a lot less than an equivalent colour laser. The important thing is to get a printer which isn’t a horrible GDI printer - if it has GCP or a CUPs profile you’re fine - and has decent ink tank sizes. Currently the Epson WorkForce Pro WF-5110DW is a real bargain, there are plenty of others. (I am not only retired, I have never worked for Epson.)
Laser printers can’t produce the print quality of the best inkjets. DesignJets and the Epson equivalents are still the top devices for proofing, and some of them have as many as 78 inks. Toner has to be fused onto the page and that causes problems for a lot of dyes, whereas inkjets can work with almost anything that can be suspended in a carrier. Plus, of course, there’s the problem of the sheer size and hence cost of the mirror assemblies used in 11 by 17 printers, and keeping them registered.
The laser printer has been a very successful technology but it has also basically been obsolete for years; nobody wants to disrupt the industry and the income flow by a widespread change to inkjet and wax.
That (11) isn’t a proofing printer. (I just noticed the newish DJ6100 has 8 inks, so I am wrong, but it is hardly “low-end”) Perhaps I should have been more clear but I thought I was obviously referring to proofing printers, not photo printers. Unless you have a DJ6100 and your idea of budget is a bit different from mine.
10-unit commercial presses can in theory provide a very wide gamut but they tend to work with CMYK + spot colours, which is rather different, and the setup is expensive. That’s why high quality production inkjets are able to get away with fewer inks.
The Epson P400 has 8 and is a photo printer and certainly less than a lot of lenses. The 11 color I was thinking of was one of their larger plotter-sized units which I know a few people have squirreled away in their studios.
I think we’re both saying saying that lasers can’t even compete with a $600 printer, let alone a proofing printer, in either quality or longevity.
