I stopped buying inkjet printers. They are a scam, the ink costs a fortune and they are built as cheap as they can, meaning that they will break and you have to throw them away because they are impossible to repair, they are slow and when you need them they don't work because they were not used for too much time.
After having 5 broken printers in the garage I said enough, that is a useless waste, and invested some money in a mid range laser printer (only b/w, but I don't need to print in color anyway) that doesn't give me any problem, and with a toner that costs 10$ on Amazon (not original, but who cares?) I print 2000 pages. That means that in 5 years that I own it I only changed it 2 times.
I really don't see a reason for inkjet printers to exist, I hope they will disappear from the market.
I got my first printer in high school, around 90-91. It was an HP laserjet printer, when they were first going mainstream. I loved it, it always printed well, and the toner seemed to last forever. Of course, it was B/W, but that was all I needed.
Fast forward to today, I have never owned an inkjet printer. Over the past 30 years I’ve owned a total of 3 laser printers. The second was in 2005, because I wanted a scanner. The third in 2014, because I wanted network. So each one has lasted around 10 years each, and not because they broke, but because I wanted new features.
I have forever told anyone asking my advice on printers to avoid inkjets. When they do, they have problems with the ink, either drying out or having to replace them all the time.
I agree, inkjets should’ve died a long time ago. The only reason to buy one in the past was if you were on a tight budget and had to have color. But nowadays, color lasers are dropping, or it’s super easy to send something off to X to print it for you.
Fed a diet of the necessary consumables-- toners/drums, fusers, rollers, separation pads, etc-- a 1990s LaserJet will outlive us all. For me, "peak LaserJet" was probably the LaserJet 4 w/ an integral JetDirect. The 4000 that followed was pretty solid and faster but more plastic-ey than the 4.
Not surprising at all--HP in the early 1990s was still very much an engineering-focused company (both H and P were on the board until `93) that made high-quality, durable products. This was right before it got gobbled up by MBAs and celebrity CEOs, who spun it off into a hundred subunits hawking flimsy plastic trinkets and "business consulting".
What happened to HP is so sad. They made fantastic products, especially their high precision stuff. Those oscilloscopes still fetch a decent price on ebay because they're so dang good.
Up where I live there were a lot of HP employees in the LAN party scene pre broadband. Anyone would be frustrated and angry over layoffs, but what happened locally was a different level of disillusion and disappointment. It was brutal to just watch as someone adjacent, not going through it.
Fiorina got a lot of sexist nonsense thrown her direction, but at the end of the day, was still a terrible CEO. HP's capitalization grew by 3 billion dollars in a single day when it was announced she was on the way out. Markets certainly aren't oracles, but that's one hell of a shift.
I got an HP Laserjet in the late 80s for a computer center I ran at the University of Washington in Seattle. It was the best piece of hardware I've ever purchased. The clincher was the care with which they packed it and the simple instructions to take it out of the box and get it running.
I knew it was going to be great before even powering up for the first time.
Agreed. I used to have a DeskJet 500 which I sadly got rid of years ago. It had much better build quality than modern inkjet printers.
> This was right before it got gobbled up by MBAs and celebrity CEOs, who spun it off into a hundred subunits hawking flimsy plastic trinkets and "business consulting".
I have a 15 year old Wi-Fi Brother Laser that is still going strong. I’ve replaced toners a few times and the drum once. I’m sure it will last another 10 years. They still sell a brand new model that is almost identical.
Brother makes surprisingly solid machines for their low cost. I've got a Customer w/ a few of the small Brother machines (HL-L6200DW) on a factory floor printing hundreds of pages / day each. One of the units finally failed w/ >200,000 page count. Being a ~$250 printer and I didn't feel at all bad about them throwing it away.
I can perhaps give the model number of mine — it’s a Brother HL-2270DW laser I purchased in 2014, has wired ethernet in, wifi connection, and has been in use ever since. Most of the time it was on wifi and I can confirm wifi also works without any glitches or problems.
The 5mp was a straightforward parallel printer that fully supported both PCL5 and Postscript and was affordable. I think that was the peak.
Nowadays I get by with a P2015dn because you have to have Ethernet, and it suffers from the wake-on-lan issue but it's tolerable. I'm afraid to try anything more recent.
But the thing I miss most is that it used to be cool to be a fan of HP. Now that's just nostalgia.
Agreed on the 4, those things were indestructible. I had two in the office in IJmuiden, ended up donating one when our main HQ moved to Canada. Both the donated one and the one that I still have are still running today. Toner cartridges are still available, both the originals (a bit pricey) and lots of aftermarket options for about half the price of the branded one.
I fully expect the one I have to outlast me, the other is in a more hostile environment and might not, but it too seems to be doing just fine, print quality is still excellent.
Check the alignment of the paper feed sprockets, likely there is some remnant of an old sheet of paper in there or a bunch of lint. You do need to maintain such a device over the longer period, it's not exactly magic!
Ah, just out of warranty... too bad, really! But do not despair, you could probably fix it if you set your mind to it, or make one working one out of two broken ones, assuming you can find another broken one.
This was years ago. I went without for a while but recently decided my demand for color printing and scanning in my home exceeded my supply of cash needed to get a crappy injket. Even used color laserjets are hard to come by for mortal prices.
Keep an eye on bankruptcy auctions, those tend to have lots of good hardware which gets sold at very low prices. The more obscure the auction house the bigger the chance that you will score cheaply.
Cheap laser printers, like cheap inkjets, use the cheap razor/expensive blades model, too (and leverage the popular understanding of the semi-knowledgeable that that is an inkjet but not laser issue to get away with it.)
HP LaserJet print quality these days is worse than their laser printers back in the early 2000s. It’s quite sad. The products are flimsy and under engineered. The prints aren’t as sharp and the inks are as expensive (sometimes even more than) as before. They rev versions of printers and make them incompatible with previous cartridges that technically fit, but are no longer in the supported model list. Scammy as hell.
Funny enough I had bought my fair share of inkjets and had been disappointed for the obvious reasons stated here. However one day somewhere around 2005 I found an HP LaserJet III on garbage day near my house and took it home. To my surprise it worked fine and even had toner. I was STILL using it without a toner change 10 years later when I moved cities, and gave it to someone. I could leave it off for a year and print 50 pages. Never a problem. Pretty good for free.
I ran an LJ-III for a fair few years while I still have an inkjet for colour bits. Got it free when a local company was upgrading and going to bin it. Despite the heavy service it had done in the previous environment it still worked like a charm. It was eventually getting close to needing a new drum and so forth which might have been relatively expensive, but at the point I bought an inexpensive colour laser, gave the LJ-III away and took a lump hammer to the inkjet.
Consumer grade lasers these days aren't quite the same creature as the tanks of old, but I see little reason to own an inkjet. For basic colour a laser does perfectly well, for many photos they do pretty good (inkjets are better for photos but only if you feed them expensive paper - output from a laser is sharp even on cheap bog-standard paper which an inkjet is actually worse on, and unless you print lots or often need hen now it works out better to get things printer elsewhere). Inexpensive lasers can be a minefield (some of the cheap ones are cheap for a reason...) and are more expensive to run than those tanks of old, but get a reasonable one and you'll be happy with it for years and they are a lot cheaper than running a 'jet for any use case.
Nice! I like how you describe them as tanks of old. Very apt description. :)
I agree with you about the inkjets, I had one of these "photo" printers -- it may have even been from Kodak or something or Fuji. Great results, but since I printed 10 photos a year, same problem as the usual inkjets...and eventually I found the special ink and paper to be unlocateable.
That’s exactly what we’ve done. Threw a HomeKit controlled plug behind it, added automations for it to be on when high probability of being used and off otherwise. Beyond that, it’s only a, “Hey Siri, turn on the printer” to start printing.
Funny enough, I never owned an inkjet. My parents bought a HP LaserJet 5 when I was 13. That thing was a tank. It lasted a good 15 years before it finally broke. I think in that time, we only changed the cartridge less than 10 times.
Sure, but as I said above, unless you're printing a lot of photos, you're better of sticking to photo printer services (online or in-store) for printing photos.
Most people don't print enough photos to justify the pain of owning an inkjet printer.
On some toner cartridges you can even tape a piece of paper over the sensor window on the side, that is used to determine fill state with an optical sensor, to get another ~500 pages.
I do not understand how the other printer brands are even in business when Brother is an option. I feel like their reputation for being the best in the consumer space would have spread far and wide by now.
I have been able to scan all of my documents with their MFC line directly to my Dropbox (or box or drive or onedrive) account for over 6 years now, AND Brother Web Connect automatically OCR’s them.
There are a lot of people out there that haven’t figured out the scam yet, and new ones minted every day. And those brands will sell 5 of these rip-off inkjets to someone at high margin before they figure it out and buy a brother once - for 1/5 of the total profit to brother.
But between Consumer Reports, Wirecutter, the 18 million review websites, Costco, I feel like such an obviously superior brand and product should have had its reputation widely known by now, like Toyota/Honda.
I think you highly overestimate the amount of research the average person does on a printer purchase. Yes, some people will buy a CR magazine or ask their friends/relatives opinion for a $30k car, but will they do that before buying a $60 printer?
You are right. I remember in particular when the company I was with sold the Panasonic home printer. For a student is was great, but ALL the parts were made of the type of plastic that could not take heat in the long run.
The user manual clearly said no more than 100 pages at a time and less than a 1000 a day, no problem for a student.
Yet time after time someone would come in and want one for office work. We would point them to the better printers that have hard metal parts in all the key areas and would print all day nonstop if needed. Yet time after time they insisted on the cheap home Panasonic printer.
Then a few months later they would show up screaming and yelling that we sold them a piece of junk. Shame that the printer kept track of how many pages it printed. And the manual clearly stated the limits. We never saw the court cases they threaten us with. :)
Yep. Duty cycle, as an engineering concept, is notoriously misunderstood by the general public.
It seems every day that there's some sort of outrage in a blog or article: "Did you know that [large organization] spends $[x] for their [equipment]? Wow, you can buy [consumer version] at Walmart for 1/100th of that price!"
No, outraged taxpayer, your school district isn't wasting money by purchasing a $10,000 copier. Your HP all-in-one can't replace their use-case, despite how you imagine it could.
I am still skeptic, honestly, are some metal gears worth the 20x-10x cost increase? Yes, you can make it more suited for long term use for _some_ cost, but that much? At what point is is actually fleecing customers? Some products surely are just fleecing, but how can you tell? Usually, you can't.
All three of those are machines with fundamentally different functions and capabilities.
I have (long ago) supported consumer grade printers in an enterprise environment. They're so bad as to be unusable. You spend way more than the $10,000 on the nice copier in lost productivity due to poor reliability and additional IT labor required to fix a fleet of inkjets.
With a $10,000 copier, you push out an group policy to install it on everyone's PC and it runs pretty smoothly and can take the load. If you put $100 inkjets on 80 different desks, you end up having to hire another FTE just to manage the cartridge replacements, driver installations, head cleanings, paper jams, etc. And the experience is worse for the end users too. If they need 250 handouts printed in the next 10 minutes, they simply can't do it.
There is obviously a difference between the three, but is it that much? And how much is it really because of underlying technology and how much is it because of artificial market segmenting?
I also take offense with he fact that the 3rd example does not even have a listed price - that is a BIG red flag for the habit of making the customer pay as much as possible.
And the HW cost is justified, the SW cost is NOT, the interface should be simple and clean. Why is it not? No, here vendors are to blame.
Yes, the functional difference between those items is staggering.
The difference in capacity alone between the HP all-in-one and the Xerox copier is literally the same in magnitude (60-80x) as the difference in capacity between a semi truck and a passenger vehicle.
These are different tools that literally do different things. You can't print 250 handouts with that HP all-in-one, and you can't transport 25,000 lbs of freight in a Camry.
A routine use-case for one of those large copiers is something like a person needing to give a 25 page document to 10 people on short notice. Not only is it not practical, it's not even possible with a consumer inkjet. A high end workgroup copier will spit them out in a short moment, already stapled (or bound!) and ready to go. Do you realize how silly it would be to make 10 people with 6-figure salaries stand around waiting for a consumer inkjet, even just one time? You'd be wasting thousands of dollars to save pennies.... and that's assuming you don't consequentially impact your ability to generate revenue. I certainly wouldn't want to be responsible for a b2b sales team relying on a consumer inkjet to submit proposals on time.
> And the HW cost is justified, the SW cost is NOT
These aren't separate itemized costs when you buy a printer. You either get the Xerox printer with the Xerox software, or you get the HP Deskjet with the Deskjet software. You don't get to choose to use the DeskJet Printer with the Kerberos integration from the Xerox software. The teenager working at Best Buy is not going to be able to help you find a copier with software that is HIPAA compliant.
> I also take offense with he fact that the 3rd example does not even have a listed price - that is a BIG red flag for the habit of making the customer pay as much as possible.
It's an example of a ~$10000 copier. The price isn't listed because customers don't buy this type of machine directly through Xerox anyway. These types of purchases are done through formal proposals through Xerox vendors.
Large businesses don't buy things the way you do. They submit RFP/RFQs to vendors.
25 page X 10 is a total of just 250 pages, a desktop Inkjet printer (the kind that uses ink tanks, not cartridges) can handle it no sweat, if a bit slower. Probably takes half an hour to complete.
When you hit 100 pages for 20 people though... ;-)
But I agree with the general gist of your post. Desktop personal printers are simply not built for _regular_ high load.
The DeskJet I linked wouldn't be able to complete that print job, under any circumstance. Besides running out of paper, and overflowing the output tray -- the cartridges would run out before you finished the print job. The newer consumer inkjets with tanks will have enough ink, but likely won't have the tray capacity either. Most consumer printers are made to max-out around the length of a long school paper or a family's tax return.
It isn’t that the metal gears alone are worth 10-20x. It is that if you do the math over a long period of time, use it somewhat often, and include things like your time (at any reasonable labor rate) fixing issues, tracking down replacements, etc. it almost always makes sense to have something that will have fewer issues, last longer, and is designed to be more durable even at greater expense. In things with moving parts, that may mean metal gears and reinforcement in wear areas, but not always.
This of course depends on how frequently you are going to use it, how hard, for what, and how severe or expensive the consequences of it breaking on you unexpectedly are.
‘Commercial’ or ‘pro grade’ is usually more durable and expensive because the market demands it - employees are often harder on equipment than someone who bought it directly, it gets used at a much higher duty cycle, maintenance is often neglected at least as much as a residential user, etc. and the market is willing to pay more because it breaking stops them from making money, or requires them to spend more money on labor getting it fixed.
They also tend to have horrible UX or require specific steps to work, since they know it is being bought for it’s utility not because it is pretty (most of the time), and someone will have to figure out how to use it or get figured after the company is already paid.
They still do get scammed sometimes of course.
The printer equivalent of harbor freight tools has a place if you’re going to toss it in a year anyway due to a move, or need it for a single job and then never again, as long as it isn’t a safety/critical path item anyway.
True, but I would have figured that by now, so many people would have had bad experiences with inkjet printers from HP/epson/canon that they would have sought out that information. Or maybe even retailers would promote it so people are more satisfied with their purchases.
Yup, though those tend to be purchased by large corps in bulk via industrial channels, so the companies still make good money.
Most large corps have done the math and know their TCO all in is much lower (since they have the scale that they need to hire staff and explicitly account for dealing with issues like printer problems).
The printer companies have also done their market research and math, and know how much they can squeeze out of these corps while still having the math clearly make sense for them.
Can you imagine the logistical and end user support nightmare if they gave everyone their own cheap inkjets? Lolz.
It’s bad enough as it is, and per-page the problems are way less frequent.
Reviews and anecdotes can be misleading in some cases. I bought a cheap secondhand Xerox Phaser printer, which has some horrible reviews online, and its previous owner was getting rid of it because of network connection issues. The network connectivity issue was fixed with a firmware update, and I've found it to be an excellent printer - useful documentation, supports every printing protocol under the sun, and the cost of aftermarket drum/toner replacements work out to less than half a cent per page.
If the average consumer can't be bothered to read a review before making a purchase, they're certainly not reading about firmware updates, or buying a secondhand Phaser.
Regular people go to a big box store, look at the items on the shelf, read the marketing material on the box, and fork out $79.99.
Meh. Knowing about “the scam” is not enough to avoid it. People already know ink cartridges are expensive.
To get a good deal you have to calculate TCO which requires understanding consumable prices, yields, and print volumes, and doing the math to figure out all of your options.
Being mad is easy. Being analytical requires work.
I don't think it's that complicated in that case as you just need to know how many pages you are going to print. If the amount is greater than the one provided for in your inkjet starter pack, go buy Brother. Any other option will make you suffer as these cheap laser printers are disposable pieces of junk designed only to sell ink.
> need to know how many pages you are going to print. If the amount is greater than the one provided for in your inkjet starter pack
aka print volumes and cartridge yields, as I said.
In any case, if you're not calculating TCO, then you're not calculating TCO. Brand loyalty is just brand loyalty, even when tech savvy people do it. There are economical and uneconomical printers from nearly any brand depending on use-case.
It's not a bad idea. Prepare a few memes about this and post it to anti-vaxx and conspiracy groups - they will take care of the rest. And they will do it well - making sure the message gets right through to your parents and grandparents.
Plenty of folks still buying GM, Ford, and a hundred other brands based on the market data though right?
If it takes a decade for someone to figure this out, and most people are buying things like this in the late teens to early thirties, then no matter what you’re going to have ~2/3 of the market who hasn’t figured it out.
Also, a lot of folks get drawn like a magnet to new and shiny, or whatever the latest marketing spiel is and don’t even think of the long term impact. Like the vast majority.
I have a Brother inkjet all-in-one, and it works great, BUT...
Problem is that it needs to "clean" the print heads frequently. It uses up ink every time it cleans. So if you're not printing frequently, 95% of your ink will be used up by letting the printer do its thing.
I tried just leaving it unplugged for a long time once, and sure enough the print head clogged. It took a lot of printing and cleaning (and wasted ink) before it became 99% usable again.
They can be surprisingly hard to get in some areas of the world. For example, I live in Portugal and larger shops like Worten, Fnac, El Corte Ingles have anything but Brother printers. Even IT providers for business and PC shops rarely have them in stock. You can mail-order them from Brother Portugal but not many people know that and will do that.
It's quite mysterious and I'd like to know the reasons.
FWIW I was totally set on picking up a Brother B&W Laser a few months ago to replace my crappy inkjet because I've had great experiences with them in the past.
I wanted it now though, and locally could only really find a good deal on a Canon. I'm extremely happy with it, prints great, fast enough for me, can get knockoff toner for cheap on Amazon that hasn't given me any issues, and the wifi networking is rock solid. Duplex printing, flatbed scanner, the works etc for $100.
It also has a pretty thorough administration panel built in, though as a home user I only clicked around it for fun.
So now both Canon & Brother are on my recommendations list when anyone asks me what printer to buy.
I haven’t installed drivers or software for any printer (inkjet or laser) I’ve used in the past like 10-12 years. They just work across all my devices automatically (windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, android). So no idea how Canon’s software is.
The days of needing drivers & manufacturer specific software are long gone at this point unless you have a very weird or specific setup. Heck, I can even scan without any special software. They all still prompt you to install their junk in the manuals, but you don’t need to.
Brother makes good hardware but bad software. They recently gave up support on newer versions MacOS. They have an android printing driving with 100+ reviews @ 1.X out of 5 stars. It not longer works on newer android phones. I've tried for years to get my networked brother multifunction laster printer working with my chromebook to no avail. If it somewhat works its printing things slightly incorrectly, running out of memory, etc...
Because most non-tech people don't know, they really have no way of knowing until they get burnt or someone tells them and at the end of the day a cheap inkjet is 60-80$.
No. I have two Brother laser printers here (HL-L8360CDW and HL-5470DW) and have been using generic toners since the OEM toner cartridges ran out. I have never seen any warnings.
Yep. Have had a Brother HL-2270 (b&w laser printing) for years, and couldn't be happier with it, especially coupled with a PI-based CUPS server for AirPrint capability and the like.
The only thing I miss about not having an inkjet is color printing and at-home photo printing, but there are so many on-demand online print shops nowadays, I can't say it's a big deal.
It was going to cost me $100+ to refill the inks on my large format HP inkjet photo printer. I took it up to the attic a few months back from whence it will likely go in the trash in a few years. I have the same Brother printer and it just works for occasional B&W printing. The rare color photo prints I want are easily handled (better) online and, while I'd like to print a color map or something now and then, it's not worth having an inkjet printer that will be used so seldom the ink will dry out.
Occasionally needing to print musical scores on large-format papers is what keeps me chained to inkjets. The price bump from inkjet to laser is significantly steeper for wide-format printers compared with letter/a4 printers. IIRC, instead of $90 vs $150, it's up to $200 vs $700.
If I were in need of a new laser printer I'd probably consider color at this point, but it's not worth replacing my existing B&W printer for a once in a blue moon color print.
why waste the effort of taking it to the attic to just add to the clutter? Reminds me of the users that put things in the trash can/recylce bin but don't empty it "just in case".
Because I have the space, it takes a minute, and maybe (though probably not) my needs will change some day. I'm not going to argue it's completely rational but I do occasionally dust things off that I have put into storage.
I do go through the attic every now and then and toss stuff that hasn't been used for ages.
If you need a large format color print in the next year or two before it rots, you can change your mind and buy the ink and avoid buying another $700+ large format printer. Option value.
I battled with colour HP, Canon and Epson inkjets for so many years, then eventually snapped 2 years ago and bought a mono Brother laser MFD for a ridiculously cheap £150 - wow, no more buying ink every month, no more "head cleaning" or "head alignment" every.single.time I want to print something, no paper jams, no stress when you just want to print one damned page!
Just... a perfectly working device! And the ink lasts ages too - the smaller cartridge that came with it lasted a year, then I bought a standard sized one that's still going strong. I really can't rate Brother highly enough - zero issues, everything works perfectly.
My only mistake was not switching to a mono laser printer sooner!
Same here. The other problem I found with HP was software: Their drivers were ridiculous multi-gigabyte downloads and they would often be buggy and either bring my Mac to a crawl or just outright crash. This was several years ago; it might be better now, but I swore off HP because of it.
HP accidentally revoked a code signing certificate recently. Since certificates are regularly checked for revocation by macOS, suddenly all HP printers stopped working on macOS.
It took a few weeks until everything was fixed again for me, I had to reinstall drivers from Apple and HP multiple times. But my mom still hasn't gotten her HP inkjet to work since then.
Add to that the fact that they sent firmware updates that caused printers to stop working with 3rd party ink -- I'm never buying anything from HP again.
I went with a Brother Laserjet after reading a recommendation comment here.
Amazon has cheap cartridges for it, too. The only issue I've had is wifi network connectivity. When it was plugged in worked flawlessly. This is a buy it for life product.
Me too but almost makes me want to buy a second one and just put it in storage in case the day comes when Brother too succumbs to corporate pressure to “improve products”.
I think that not buying printers is the correct answer, difficult to get everyone to do it, but it is the metric most likely to change behavior.
Inkjet technology is fine, it was the exploitation of it by HP which lead to copy cats that really made it ridiculous.
I've got an HP inkjet wide format plotter (36" wide) that was built both before HP was all in on ink as a profit center and built by a different division (plotter division). It has been a reliable workhorse for over 20 years now and while I don't use HP ink any more (they don't sell it) third party ink works fine.
I replaced my desktop printer with an Epson Eco-tank printer. They claim it comes with 2 years of ink (at my rate that is probably 4 years :-) and they the ink is not expensive. So there are people trying this model of "let's not bother screwing people on ink" and I'm trying to reward them by buying their printer.
Can second the praise for the Epson Eco-Tank printers. Ink is cheap and lasts extremely long. Also I never had any problem with clogged nozzles etc which I used to face frequently on the cheaper printers. (though my Eco-Tank printer is black-and-white only which maybe alleviates many of those problems).
Also the integrated scanner worked out-of-the box for me under Debian, after I compiled and installed utsushi [1] from sources (edit: I'm only scanning from the utsushi command-line, no experience WRT integration with sane etc.).
Also a fan of the Epson Eco-tank. No nozzle clogging, even with infrequent use. The model I have is colour, Epson ET-7700.
I was at the point of swearing never to buy Epson inkjets, or any inkjet again. Then they released the eco-tank. I reluctantly made the purchase, almost expecting to be let down, but glad to say all is well.
The comedian Jimeoin even did a TV ad for the eco-tank range (here in Australia at least). It became a worldwide joke about tossing out printers when ink ran out. Maybe that's why they chose him for the eco-tank campaign.
I don't think I've ever seen an inkjet plotter in action. Does the paper go through a single pass? I was always fascinated by pen plotters, especially when drawing diagonal lines or changing pens.
Yes it is single pass, this particular model is an HP750C+. I had a wide format pen plotter before it and it would send the paper back and forth which was pretty mesmerizing but it required a lot of maintenance on the paper handling system so that the paper wouldn't slip.
The HP inkjet "plotter" works by rasterizing the plot in the host computer's memory and then sending strips of raster to the plotter. The dot resolution of the print head (replaceable, but not part of the ink system) matches the 0.7mm resolution of the pen plotters it replaced.
Since I've seen this many times before, I would be willing to pet you were buying "cheap" inkjet printers. By "cheap" I mean they take ink cartridges.
Never ever ever buy a cartridge inkjet printer.
instead buy a tank printer (eg Epson Eco-Tank). They are more expensive. You fill up the ink from a bottle.
Cartridge printers are sold at a loss and designed to make a profit from the cartridges. This is why printer manufacturers are constantly fighting third-party cartridges with unnecessary firmware "upgrades". Additionally, the printer will use some of that ink to clean the printer heads so the printer will run out of ink even if you don't print anything.
Also, retail printers are typically sold with less-than-full ink cartridges.
It's a good example of how consumers buy based on price rather than value. But don't confuse cartridge vs tank inkjet printers. They're completely different beasts.
At the low number of pages printed at home, I don’t mind buying the actual name-brand toner. If you’re only changing it every 2 years, the cost doesn’t matter much, and at least the company (i.e. Brother) gets some profit from being a good citizen. Going with non-OEM toner in that situation just drives the company into needing to find more revenue streams, such as locking down the cartridges, which undermines you. At some point people need to be willing to pay a little more to a company that treats them with respect.
I put a piece of black tape over the window on my Brother starter toner like 4 years ago. Print quality is still good enough for anything I print at home (which is obviously very little).
It’s has historically proven difficult to sustain that model because the consumer printer market for the past 20 years has been race to the bottom. It’s hard to compete when competitors are selling their printers at or below cost.
Consumers mostly tend to make their purchase decisions on the margin, and so the razors-and-blades model works well.
I guess there may be a few recent exceptions to this like the Epson Ecotank, although I don’t know how profitable that has been for them.
In my country, it seems inkjet printers with tanks are quick replacing printers with cartridges.
The reason being people in my country don't really care about warranty, would go out and buy a cheap cartridge-based printer, then bring that printer to some hack shops that will "convert" that printer into a tank-based one, allowing you to use any third-party ink.
So manufacturers keep absorbing loss on their lower-than-cost printers and couldn't make a profit from ink sales.
That's why cartridge-based printers are slowly being phased out for ink tank printers... So manufacturers can grab profit directly from printer sales :-)
Well, the EcoTanks are pretty expensive to begin with. They also have some colour quality issues that requires you to waste ink to like… recalibrate every so often, or something thing like that?
But most of the time, it's fine, and the ink is cheap.
I'm using a 10 year old Brother with the starter toner. Still going strong, but I haven't given Brother a cent since I bought it for $100. Can they survive off that? Hopefully.
I switched to OEM toner after using up some generic stuff I'd been working on for two years. It's barely more expensive and it was nice they included a prepaid shipping label for me to return the used cartridge to them.
Let's not throw the baby with the bathwater. Injket printers have advantages and can be cheap if we dismantle the highway robbery of inks. Just because inks are expensive does not mean that we should get rid of inkjet technology.
> I really don't see a reason for inkjet printers to exist, I hope they will disappear from the market.
Perhaps you should investigate why they exist. Seems too naive to wish for their disappearance due to lack of knowledge.
I've been using these for years for Photo printing. Can vouch for excellent quality and affordable price. You need a color calibrator to calibrate these inks + paper.
We solved the similar problem for exchangeable storage media in the form of SD-Cards. Before SD Cards, the whole thing was fragmented like the printer industry. CF cards, minidisks, and proprietary memory sticks. It can be done.
Yeah I badly want revenge on the whole industry, or at least a way of banishing them from my life forever, but the local maximum I've attained thus far is to buy bottles of ink, drill small holes in the top of the cartridges, inject ink and cover the holes. The printer still complains of low ink (i.e. it's lying and probably always was), but you can suppress the warning. So it costs me one sheet of paper to find out the truth about my ink levels, and I haven't bought a cartridge in years. I have two color & two black, so I can swap a full one in and refill the empty one at my convenience.
Inkjet printers can do a fantastic job of printing photos and color documents, and maybe four times a year I would really like to do that at home. Unfortunately nobody seems to have built an inkjet printer with nozzles that don't gunk up, and cleaning the nozzles doesn't work very well and uses more ink and time than the document you wanted to print in the first place.
It's probably possible to design an inkjet printer that actually works as well in the real world as a laser printer, but it would threaten the business model of all the printer manufacturers so I'm not holding my breath.
It is rather easy to keep an inkjet printer from gunking up if you buy a set of refillable cartridges, fill them with a 50/50 mix of demineralized water and inkjet cleaning fluid, install them and run a cleaning cycle after you finished a printing session. No ink in the nozzle means no gunk. This trick also works well for cleaning nozzles, since the cleaning fluid is a surfactant and it breaks up clumps of dried pigment better than just a stream of ink.
If your only color print needs are for photos, look into dye sub printers. You can go years in between printing, and use the same roll with no issues. These are pretty much what you get when you order from any brick&mortar store printing from digital files or any modern photobooth kiosk
Yes dye subs do a great job and they don't gunk up. But unfortunately as you said they are only for photos, they require special paper, and they only print in smaller sizes (i.e. you cannot use one to print a color page of a business report). Their supply costs are high too but that's not a big deal if you use them rarely.
Why did you feel the need to explain this when as you've said I've already stated for photos? Nobody made a reco to use for doing a report.
Not sure if you are aware, but you can get 8x10 prints from a dye sub. For the dye sub market, their prices have definitely gotten much cheaper relative to themselves. They are more expensive that shitting $99 ink jet, but that's the point of this thread.
Inkjets work ok and get a lot less gunky if you use them frequently. The problem that I have (and I assume you do too), is if I'm printing a couple of times a year, it's hard to spend two or three times the amount on a laser printer than a cheak inkjet. Even though the laser printer is the right answer. I did end up getting a laser printer last year when my child was printing a lot from chromebooks and Chrome OS stopped supporting cloud print, but also didn't support my inkjet (via network or usb). Shopping at CDW Outlet helped a bunch with pricing, but you have to be in the shopping phase when the right inventory is there.
Canon's imagePrograf series don't gunk up, but they will use a lot of ink cleaning. It's also their most expensive model of inkjet (my Pro 1000 will print 17" wide, but is $1,300).
Careful with off-brand toner. The toner particles are often jagged rather than smooth, which can damage the fuser roller, requiring replacement. This happened to me after a few years of using off-brand toner. I was able to perform the repair myself, and granted the cost wasn't as much as buying on-brand toner, but it was challenging (lots of delicate parts) and I don't wish to repeat the experience.
The bigger problem I've seen w/ off-brand toner are refilled cartridges that are poorly plugged and end up leaking toner all over the inside of the printer. Toner is a nightmare to clean up, and once you get toner deep into the nooks and crannies of a printer you'll never get clean paper output again.
Inkjet printers are fine, so long as you don't need or buy the terrible low-end consumer offerings. As an occasional-use around the house printer, I agree they're absolutely terrible, even without the scammy behavior of virtually every manufacturer. Just inkjet head clogging alone is enough to put anyone off. Inexpensive laser printers have been cheaper, more reliable, and much faster for a decade or more. Pay a bit more these days and you get a nice color laser printer with duplex printing. It's worth noting that even low-end lasers aren't immune to scammy behavior. Manufacturers have pulled sleazy tricks like hard page counts for the toner cartridges, so that even if the cart is still good it won't print. At least in the past, there are often embarrassingly easy workarounds (e.g. a minute to Google, then another minute with a sharpie).
That said, once you get up into the (semi-)pro photo/art printers, they're fantastic for that application. i.e. very much not an office printer. The ink per ml in the bigger cart sizes is often one or more orders of magnitude cheaper. You still need to run them enough to keep the heads nice and clean, but they also usually have decent auto-cleaning support built in to help maintain the print head so long as it's getting used periodically.
My friend, if you have the time, learn to refill your cartridges on your own. I own one of them cheap HP 25XX for home use, I simply refuse to buy new cartridges and give in, I instead got a refill kit with 100ml bottles of all colours for ~9$, and now all I need is 15 min of time for refill and the slight risk of creating a mess during the process.
The HP cartridge holds an approx 9ml, so that gives an idea of how long those bottles should last(Also colour is 9/3 ml colours). Once these are done, I can just go ahead and get just a few more bottles which drives the price down further.
I've had no issues in printing apart from the first time I had done it. I obviously would recommend getting one of those brother Ink tank ones, but there's no need to trash an HP if you can figure to do this and keep a backup cheap maintenance printer.
Btw, I still use the stock cartridges that came with the printer, saving on a ton of cash and pain of hunting for cartridges.
P.S: I've tried this on 2 other models too with no issues
15mins here and there, isn't much, but I still paying slightly more for a laser printer and changing the toner cartridge once per year. It takes one minute, and I really dont mind being limited to black/white.
My brother MFC has lasted over 10 years now - no repairs needed. It's so old it only allows WEP wifi connection and my kid loves the beeping noises the fax button makes.
I constantly print with heavy color usage as a Junior in a graphic design/interaction design BFA program. After painstaking research, I bought a Canon and some refillable ink cartridges. I pay more for paper than ink, which I get for about $15/liter! The print drivers don't accept CMYK— they only accept RGB and do their own internal conversion— so exact color correction is a challenge. Even still, it's passable for proofing/critique prints without fussing or even decent prints of photographs. It would absolutely meet the needs of a casual user.
The thing is pretty cheaply built so it's janky as all get-out, but ink included, I haven't touched the expense of the cheapest laser printers— maybe half. I'll upgrade when its limitations outweigh the benefits.
(watch out— it won't work on every model. It looks like some cartridge companies sell refillables for models they know won't work without official cartridges, so do some reading!)
I felt lucky in Japan in that you can print at every convenience store so I'd just walk 1-2 mins to the local store when I needed to print. 10 cents for B/W, 50 for color.
In SF you can print at the library which I've done once.
Has it not caught on in the US? You can print as a service nearly everywhere in the country, at places like Fedex Office, Staples, Office Depot, etc. Photo prints can be done at drug stores like CVS and Wallgreen’s (not all locations, though).
Inkjet printers that use ink tanks are more "honest". In fact, such kind of Inkjet printers are fast replacing the cartridge-based ones in my country.
The ink is very inexpensive, you can purchase individual ink bottles (about $3 per bottle, and on average will last about 1000-2000 pages) and not the whole set, and the printers actually were built quite tough.
Sure, they're more expensive than the cartridge-based ones (4-5x the price), but one gains economy of operation + more well-built devices.
I've got two A3 inkjets, an older Epson Stylus Photo 1410 with 3rd party ink tanks installed and externalized waste ink container mod, and a newer Epson L1800 with built-in ink tanks, at my workplace. Both are 6 color photo printers. I've kept them running for years with few problems. Long-term maintenance consists in keeping the nozzle clear of dried pigment, chaniging the rubber paper feed roller every couple of years, and keeping an eye on the ink levels in the tanks and the waste ink container. The 1410 had printed over 110,000 pages by now and is stil going strong. Printing with 3rd party inks is incredibly cheap, I use Korean Ink-mate ink with these two and it costs a fraction of a cent per page.
Now, it is true that inkjets are fussy and you need to keep printing with them to keep them operational, but I managed to clean out a very dry nozzle twice with nothing more than a pack of lint-free paper, some specialized cleaning fluids, a pack of syringes, and a thin rubber tube, simply using guides found on the Internet. And I haven't had any mechanical failures yet that weren't caused by the paper feed roller being worn out (which is expected) despite both printers being used daily for years.
Maybe I'm just lucky, or maybe Epson did really good with these two models in particular, I don't know.
I was recommended this ink by local printer servicemen. It turns out they really don't like working on broken inkjets (it's really messy and it's not guaranteed that a dirty nozzle will work even after ultrasonic cleaning), so they tend to give sound advice on how best to keep them running, including ink choice. It really depends on the printer manufacturer and model so YMMV.
The last time I bought one, a new printer and ink cost less than just refilling ink. That was a very long time ago.
I print infrequently, but need to have color prints available at any time for family, so I got a color laser printer something like 15 years ago. It has wireless so it's on our wifi and I've never had any issues with it, nor have I even run out of the original toner.
It was definitely worth it, I never want an inkjet again.
There really is no reason to be printing photos on your own printer (for consumers, though I suspect it’s similar for pros). Every corner drug store (in the US) can print them with better quality and at a lower cost. Maybe it’s a slight hassle, but how many people are printing a significant quantity of photos anymore?
What you say is not true for professional photographers or designers. For one thing, pro-level printers are in fact better than what the drug store has, which are optimized for speed, economy, and vibrancy — none of which are major concerns for professionals. They want accuracy and quality above all else.
For another thing, being able to print proofs in your own office is important. Having to run to the drug store to check color output is an awful pain.
Lastly, professional photo printers are often larger than what a drug store has, or at least higher quality at that large size.
American society in a nutshell. Need to drive 20 min to reach civilization so instead you end up buying inkjet printers that are likely end up in the trash every year due to their low quality production and because the corporation is scamming you with overpriced cartridges.
Yup. Socio-economic and geographic forces are powerful, and there is a reason why many things are different in the US from denser locales with historically stable and established urban centers like Europe or Asia.
Have two of them, youngest under 3, and a full time single parent. If you don’t plan ahead and direct them usefully, they’ll roll you hard (not out of malice, but because they’re kids) and everyone has a much tougher time.
My middle schooler often doesn't have more than a couple days between when he has everything necessary to complete an assignment, and when it is due. He has other workload, too, so there's no guarantee he's working on it that night. Getting to the one drugstore with a remaining photocenter near me in the evening is a pain. Even with notice, it's a pain.
People have legitimate reasons to want their own high quality color printers, even if that is its own pain, too.
I’ve done extensive price comparisons based the cost of paper and ink. For different brands and models of printer, I’ve done comparisons of the number of pictures you have to print to break even, compared to the cost of taking it to a shop and having them print it for you. I included discount online printers as well.
These comparisons include the cost of paying for all consumables—usually ink, but some printer models have additional consumables which you have to include. These comparisons also factor in the difference between the included inks and the ink refills (some printers ship with ink cartridges that are less full than the refills).
It is not hard to come out ahead, doing your own prints. When I was doing this comparison, it was only economical to go to the store if you were sporadically printing the smallest picture sizes. For a medium picture size like 8"x10", you could be using high-quality paper and inks at home and still spend less money than bargain online print services.
As a rough estimate, printing yourself with high-quality inks and papers can come out to around $0.02 per square inch, or $1.60 for an 8"x10" photo. Right now, an 8x10 is $3.56 on Shutterfly, or $2.99 on Snapfish. That’s a pretty stark difference.
So you save about $1.40 per photo, and you can use this to calculate how long it takes to amortize the cost of the printer hardware. For a $250 printer, like a reasonable low-end Epson or Canon photo printer, that’s just 180 prints.
YMMV. I expect most people don’t print photos at all these days, and only put photos on their phone. I personally don’t see the point in printing out 3.5"x5" photos if I own a tablet or phone with a screen that large. So, my expectation is that people who print photos are making albums of family photos, or perhaps they’re amateur photographers or digital artists. Someone with a passing interest in photography or making photo albums, who prints, can easily blow through 180 prints to break even on a printer purchase. If you just have a few picture frames around the house you want to fill, obviously just go to a shop.
When I purchased my printer, I was comparing against more expensive local photo labs, rather than the cheapest online services. I was also comparing 11"x14" prints, which typically cost around $10 each, versus $3 at home. The purchase of a $700 printer is amortized after only 100 such prints, in this scenario.
Color laser printers don't have acceptable quality for photos, IMO. I used to work as a tech in a lab with tons of these printers and, unless laser printing technology has changed a lot, it just doesn’t cut it for photos.
I mean, you can see the photos, and they’re clear enough, it's just nowhere near the quality that you can get for the same price.
Every Walmart can print photos in a hour for cheap, and if that’s not an option Shutterfly and friends are always doing sales (or free with shipping prints).
If you’re doing more printing, you’ll come out ahead buying inkjets + ink + paper (factoring cost of all the consumables, here). Except for the smallest sizes (like 3.5"x5") which can be churned out by Noritsu machines at high speed—it’s hard to beat the price of 3.5"x5" lab prints.
There some thermal dye sublimation printers targeted at the home market for making 4x6" prints. The cost-per-print is pretty hideous compared to a local store's photo dept. or online photo printing services, but the quality is pretty good and the units seem to get good reviews. I've seen them used for print-on-demand at events (think "photo booths", etc).
Dye sub at home is more expensive, per photo, than going to the lab.
You might get refill for 100 photos for like $40, maybe a bit less. Then you pay for the paper. Limited size options. Looks great, though. Drugstore prices are around $0.25 and local labs are around $0.40, which are more economical options.
I’ve only ever used dye sub for photos that needed immediate turnaround.
If you need to print photos is cheaper to get them printed by a photograph shop or if you need a lot of them even order from a service that prints them and sends it to you. Not only it's cheaper, but it's a far better quality than the shitty quality of consumer inkjet printers.
If you print photos yourself then you are doing it wrong. Send them to a service that actually has a photo printer that is not a piece of shit and you will find your prints actually lasting longer than the ink cartridge you used to print them with.
A photo service is just somebody else who owns printers and charges you a markup. If you print one-off photos of decent quality, probably going to be RA-4, inkjet, or dye sub. This is true whether or not you own the printer yourself.
> It's somebody else who owns much hiqher quality printers that you would buy,…
This is just completely untrue. What kind of machines do you think they have back there?
Photo labs typically have two types of machines: something like a Noritsu which prints onto standard RA-4 paper with lasers, and ordinary inkjet printers, like the ones from Epson or Canon (like what I’ve purchased for myself—I’ve occasionally seen the same exact model behind the counter at photo labs—the same printer I have at home).
The advantage of the Noritsu style machines is that you can churn out hundreds of 4"x6" photos per hour. It’s not higher-quality than inkjet… actually, inkjet prints are better, and you can do that at home. If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense—the Noritsu is constrained by RA-4 chemistry, but the Epson / Canon ink can be anything that you can squirt out an inkjet head.
You can calculate the break even point for inkjet printers. If you’re printing, say, 8x10s, then break-even is somewhere around 200 prints, over the lifetime of the printer, compared to using the cheapest discount services online. This is if you decide to get a photo inkjet printer (around $300), account for the cost of ink ($0.01 per square inch) and high-quality paper (also around $0.01 per square inch) and compare it against online services (around $3 for the cheapest 8x10s).
If you aren’t printing many photos or are sticking to the super-cheap 4"x6" size, go ahead and take your photos to the lab. But the photo lab ain’t magic—it’s mostly just equipment that you could reasonably buy for your home.
Dunno, I have the same cheap HP DeskJet 6940 for 14 years, just buy non-brand b/w ink[head] every 2 years or so and it works fine for occasional home use.
I had a laser printer before at home before, and it's slow to warm up, tonner is 10x as expensive as refilled ink head and I kinda fear the tonner particles getting into the air and I breathing them. Page output is similar for much higher price.
Quality is better, but for home use I'd only consider laser printer if I was still making PCBs at home.
I have been fairly lucky, I guess, with Canon printers.
I purchased a large format printer in 2007 to print tabloid size photos. And then I purchased another in 2015 with a scanner. I believe the large format one still worked, but it was large (obviously) and I had less need for it or space for it with kids around.
The current one is almost 7 years old. I keep looking at laser printers, but until this one actually dies, there is no point to replace it and I would lose the option to print photos.
>After having 5 broken printers in the garage I said enough ... I really don't see a reason for inkjet printers to exist, I hope they will disappear from the market.
Since I've seen a few negative experiences in this topic, as a contrasting anecdote I've had the one inkjet (Epson) for the past 15 years which has worked fine all through and been useful for printing images and also for the time I used the feature printing on discs.
I disagree. A few years ago I bought Epson XP-6000 after a few years of laser printers. It's the best printer I ever had. Ink is ok in price but I don't use the printer much. It works whenever I need it though. On top of it, it's also a great photo printer. Printed tens of photos to date and all come out ok - comparable to consumer shop photo printers (the ones you can use in big shops).
If you haven't tried replacing toner without replacing cartridge (the only way to achieve this level of cost efficiency), there may be some intermediate steps that are good to know about:
I've got a 20 year old Xerox Laser that's rock solid. Picked it up second hand. I print so little that I'm still on the first toner cartridge I bought. The scanner works well and gets lots of use (only downside is that it doesn't work over the network on Mac, which I can live with)
Despite costing more than traditional inkjet printers, I find that build quality is not that great (cheap creaking plastic, scanner bed occasionally detatching from its hinge).
Another issue I have with it is that ink level reporting is inaccurate; indeed, the manual itself recommends to visually inspect the tanks, which are semi-transparent and can be observed without opening the printer. However, I found that it's impossible to do that because dried ink covering the inner surface of the tank makes it impossible to distinguish the actual ink level line. Because of that, I have to remember to look inside the tanks to check if a refill is needed from time to time.
That said, ink lasts ages and refilling is cheap compared to cartridges, so overall I'm happier with it than with any other traditional inkjet printer.
If you don't need color printing, laser is the way.
I have a Brother printer. The ink bottles are so cheap I don't think twice about buying original ink (only saves me less than £0.50 if I buy a third-party ink, not worth it.)
The printer itself is quite well-built, never clogged even if I don't use it for weeks. (I do cover it with a table cloth if not in use, though)
In short, I'm quite satisfied and will definitely recommend Brother printers to others.
I had a contrary experience and I stopped buying laser printers. I had to toss two Brother lasers in the trash because Brother's customer service on warranty repairs required more hoops than I was willing to deal with.
Meanwhile, I ended up with an HP OfficeJet Pro 8620 that was recommended years ago by The Wirecutter and I use HP's ink subscription service. It's never failed on me. It never jams. No fuser or toner to worry about. Ink just magically shows up at my house when I need it. The old cartridges go back to HP for recycling. It is the most reliable printer I have ever owned, and I've owned dozens of printers since the early 1980s of almost every technology. I love it. It is one of the few devices in my home that I can say it Just Works. I will be sad if it ever dies and I can't fix it.
Edit: I purchased the HP for $150 in May 2016 on closeout from Office Depot. I've been on the $5/mo or $10/mo plan since then depending upon family needs, so let's say I've spent another $500 since then on ink costs, so I'm at ~ $650 since May 2016. I've printed 16,083 pages, so my lifetime per-page cost is ~ $0.04.
Maybe my mistake was going with a cheap color laser. But I've been thrilled with this particular HP and the convenience of their ink subscription program. Meanwhile, Brother's customer service on the laser printers which failed under warranty was terrible. It was the Brother HL-3170CDW. This isn't my review, but it matched my experience, except I mistakenly bought a second printer so I could re-use supplies I already had for the model:
You probably print a lot if an ink cartridge service is cost effective for you.
I’ve had 2 b&w laser printers my entire life, both Brother (after getting annoyed with Epson inkjet printers that were “affordable” in high school). The first got me through engineering school printing maybe 300+ pages a year, so like 2000 pages. Did not replace the toner once and don’t recall any meaningful problems. That printer stayed with my mom and works to this day for her odds and ends (maybe has had one toner replacement). The second is a printer I bought after I moved to California when I ended up needing a printer (went without for a while). It has also lasted a very long time without issues although maybe the toner hasn’t lasted quite as long (but I’ve done things like print out game manuals). It sucks that Google cloud print went away but that’s not Brother’s fault. The wifi connectivity is serviceable although a PITA to set up after a move. Other than that, works flawlessly. No drivers, no maintenance, nothing. Just print, wait ~10s and the printer starts printing at a quick pace.
My point is we all have our stories about the printers that work or don’t for us. Objectively though laser printers have lower maintenance on all fronts and used to have a higher upfront cost (although these days, they seem competitive). I’m not sure why you got a couple of lemons. I don’t claim the entire Brother product line is gems either. But I do my research and look for a no-frills standalone H&M’s laser printer that seems particularly beloved by the community. Some times you might need to look for it second hand if it’s not being sold right now or look for it’s spiritual successor. Hasn’t failed me yet but I also don’t buy and use enough printers at volume to have a complete comparative picture.
> You probably print a lot if an ink cartridge service is cost effective for you.
HP's service bills by page count, not by ink usage. So as you increase print volume, the unit economics get worse. I use it for photo print applications that don't require high quality or a print size greater than US letter. For that, which maximizes the ink-to-paper ratio, it works out splendidly.
(I suspect it works out as well for HP as for me, because the program also requires spent cartridges be returned in prepaid packaging. This allows them, and their expensively precision-manufactured print heads, to be refilled and reused.)
> You probably print a lot if an ink cartridge service is cost effective for you.
I did the math and showed my work. $0.04/page over the last 5 years.
Meanwhile, I had spent $400 on the Brother laser $199 each, and $70 on a full set of 3rd party toner cartridges. So, $470 on the Brothers out of which I got less than 3 years. No idea how many pages, or time lost in frustration dealing with Brother customer service.
What I noticed when you buy the printer is that for cheap laser printers, included tonner sometimes has just 1000 pages rating or so, and replacement tonners are rated for 2000 or more. Manufacturer is probably hoping people will not notice.
Since you’ve updated your comment, I think the key difference is that most people try to stick to B&W laser printers as those seem to be rock solid. Rather than going for new printers or printers that have an insane sale like a $450 for $150, look for reviews from forums for people who have been using the printer model for years (or join and ask on such forums if you can’t find anything). It sounds like the printer you happened to pick had a known design/manufacturing flaw and whose service life wasn’t up to snuff, which probably explains the huge discount. Remember. Laser printers make money on the printer, not the toner so much. That means if a printer is getting a huge discount, it probably has some kind of problem.
Color laser printers are also pretty solid these days without paying through the roof. It sounds more like OP just got unlucky with two lemons in a row.
For the amount I print, I will never have to replace the fuser in a lifetime probably. The toner I can get it cheap enough on Amazon, and I don't care if isn't original because it works just fine. I chose on purpose a printer that allows you to install third party toner without complaining.
I 5 years that I want to a laser printer I spent 100$ for the printer itself, and 20$ for 2 toner from Amazon, and I'm on the second one and it's still half full.
After having 5 broken printers in the garage I said enough, that is a useless waste, and invested some money in a mid range laser printer (only b/w, but I don't need to print in color anyway) that doesn't give me any problem, and with a toner that costs 10$ on Amazon (not original, but who cares?) I print 2000 pages. That means that in 5 years that I own it I only changed it 2 times.
I really don't see a reason for inkjet printers to exist, I hope they will disappear from the market.