Printer Tips
2024-11-25 13:46
printers

OK, printers, they are a huge hassle.
You have cartridge inkjets, which are dirt cheap but you pay an arm and a leg for ink in volume. These are good if you only have small, irregular volume.

For higher volume, there are two very good budget options:
1. Monochrome black-and-white laser printer. Brother works really well for this. D in the model name = has duplex. You can usually score a printer at market price for about $100. Toner and drums are about $10-20 apiece and the toner lasts for thousands of document pages. As an added bonus, the toner doesn't dry out easily.
One caveat of laser printers is they do draw a lot of electricity, so you need to be aware of that and put them on their own circuit, or else turn off heaters when running the printer.

But if you want color...
2. Supertank/Megatank/Ecotank printer or else a CISS (continuous ink supply system). These tank printers get huge print volume, but are technically difficult to manage: If you don't print every week or so, the printheads will get jammed. And then you are on the rope for new printheads, a new printer, or else experimenting with a syringe and cleaning solution ($5-10) to see if you can get the color back.

Epson Ecotanks (like ET2760) have great features for the price (~$100-125), but if you don't print regularly you'll probably have to get a new printer.
Tank inkjet printer ink is extremely inexpensive, like $10-25 for a set which lasts a long time.

3. Finally, color laser printer. This lets you do color without tons of maintenance, but they're expensive and power hungry. Used printers of this type tend to go for around $250-400. And the toner replacements are around $70-130 a pop. But you don't have to worry as much about nozzles going haywire and requiring a printer replacement.


Now for the more recent printers, they have all sorts of tricky stuff like waste ink pads, waste ink counters, toner counters... some of them use gears and can be easily reset by a button combo specific to that printer model. Others use chips and you can either use a chip resetter or it won't let you (no one's cracked it yet and published a solution).

So do be aware of what happens when you need to do a toner reset or a waste ink pad change. That's good to look up for the model you're thinking of buying.