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What's a good printer for minimal usage ?
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themadhippy:

--- Quote ---And lasers are just as bad about including tiny “starter” cartridges. (In fact, they may be worse.)
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wouldn't call 1000 pages tiny ,yea its 40% of a new  cartridge,but 7 years on  the black tonner is still at 6 bars out of 10   cyan yellow and magenta at 8 out of 10.
james_s:
The inkjet printers I had were HP and Epson, they were decent midrange stuff at the time.

Then I had a used Xerox 6100 color laser that I paid $40 for, I used that nearly 15 years before it was having too many issues. Replaced it with the HP M254dw I have now which I absolutely love. It was under $300, prints amazing quality, text superior to inkjet and photos nearly as good, and they're waterproof and stable so that wins for me every time. If I need *really* top notch photos I can send out for them.

It does duplex printing which no inkjet I ever owned could do, I use that feature frequently. The toner is waterproof so I use it to print waterslide decals for models, I use it for toner transfer PCB etching albeit not very often anymore due to the extremely low cost of sending out for PCBs. It will print on the nice thin laser paper rather than needing the thick inkjet stuff which is nice when printing a lot of pages. I'm still on the original cartridges that came in it and it has performed flawlessly so I couldn't be happier. Just the peace of mind of knowing I can let it sit for 6 months and when I fire off a page to print I know it will wake up and print without issues is well worth it to me.
tooki:

--- Quote from: nctnico on February 05, 2023, 06:25:31 pm ---
--- Quote from: tooki on February 05, 2023, 05:46:50 pm ---
--- Quote from: nctnico on February 05, 2023, 04:33:40 pm ---I doubt that. I always buy the largest B&W toner cartridge that fits the printer and it takes me years before it is empty.

--- End quote ---
You doubt that laser could be more expensive than inkjet? Don’t be so sure! The toner cartridges for the cheapest black and white lasers are very expensive. For example, for HP’s entry level models, that’s $45 for just 950 pages. There are many cartridge inkjets with ink cheaper than that (not entry level, but not expensive, either), and ink tank printers are orders of magnitude cheaper to run.

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I think you forgot to add a 0 in there. I recently paid 121 euro for an original cartridge for my HP printer. HP says it is good for 6300 pages but from experience I know it is more like 7000 pages or more. That is way cheaper than your 4.5 cents per page. The aftermarket cartridges with even higher printing capacity cost half of the original HP cartridge.

--- End quote ---
Nope, 950 pages. For real. Cheap lasers are super expensive to run.
james_s:

--- Quote from: tooki on February 05, 2023, 06:35:10 pm ---Nope, 950 pages. For real. Cheap lasers are super expensive to run.

--- End quote ---

You have a strange definition of "super expensive".

950 pages is more than I have printed in ~4 years. You mentioned a cost of $50, that's ~$12 per year, $1 a month, that's not "very expensive", that's nothing.

Maybe we are just looking at totally different use cases here, but I think my use is typical of someone with a printer at home using it for personal use. There may be a sweet spot in the middle of the road where inkjet is cheaper for someone that needs color and doesn't need moisture resistance or long term archiving, but for the typical home user that prints maybe a couple hundred pages a year laser is a winner, and for a business that prints thousands of pages a year laser is a clear winner there too.
nctnico:
Still a laserjet is way more likely to just work compared to an inkjet. However I strongly suggest not to go for the cheapest laserprinter but buy one for business/office use. I have owned a laserprinter for nearly 30 years now. My current one is the second printer I got. I have tried inkjet because it would be nice to have schematics printed in color but I found out inkjet is just too cumbersome.
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