L4sBotHP wants you to pay up to $36/month to rent a printer that it monitors
makingStuffForFunPrinting is dead removed. Die with it and scrabble for your final pennies
sleenPrinting will never die, there will always be a need to put stuff on paper. What needs to die is the shady practices like this.
Fair comment. I’d just love to see those sleezy evil evilcorps burn.
Luckily there are a few printer companies who are moving in the right direction. Epson started selling printers a while back where you can just refill the ink without the need of a cartridge and brands like lexmark and brother also make printers that aren’t manufactured landfill like hp‘s offerings.
I recently had to buy a printer. I do civil engineering for a utility company and need the ability to print in color on 11"x17" paper. I looked into the Epson Eco-Tank printers but they are very expensive. Based on my printing volume it would take me years to make up the cost difference between the lower end printers that use cartridges vs the eco-tank. It might have made more sense if I didn’t need the 11"x17" capability. Unfortunately, I think this is where all printer companies will end up going. Hopefully I’ll be retired and no longer need to print by the time this mentality takes over the entire business.
The reason for that is, that printers are usually sold via the razor blade principle: gift them the razor, sell them the blades at twice the price. With no overpriced cartridges to substitute the printers they usually make a loss on, they have to increase the price of the printer.
For A4 paper, the Eco-Tank printers actually aren’t much more expensive than regular printers though.
Though honestly, if I had to buy a printer, it would be a laser printer for sure. Yes, they are a little more expensive but I print very little and every inkjet I’ve owned has dried up between using them and having to buy new ink cartridges for every print job is wasteful and expensive…