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Printer cartridges are emblematic of the (sadly widespread) tendency for companies to build things that are obviously wasteful, and clear alternatives should be

Printer cartridges are emblematic of the (sadly widespread) tendency for companies to build things that are obviously wasteful, and clear alternatives should be available. Every time you have to “throw away” something that looks 70% reusable (or in the case of printer ink, not even fully empty), it’s aggravating. We really need to push all companies to build reuse deeply into their products so that none of them feels pressured to go that route just to stay competitive. And if competition is not an issue, and it really is just a scam for more money, executives need to be going to jail. It is not hard to imagine a slightly modified printer cartridge that saves virtually all of the electronics and casing, and just plugs in a new ink pod; or, one that has a “gas tank” kind of port where you can add more ink. They just need to do it.

icefo 10y ago
Epson did it: http://www.epson.com/ecotank http://www.epson.com/ecotank I didn't bought it because it was too big to fit on my desk and I don't know if I will buy an other Epson because they drivers are bad on my Debian. I should try to upgrade them. HP is pretty terrible but the Linux drivers are impressive.
- untothebreach 10y ago
  I have had great luck with Brother drivers on all the linux machines I've ever tried to use them with, so I would consider that a good option as well.
  - branchless 10y ago
    Agreed, run 100% linux with a brother printer, works great. Setting it up was very simple. I didn't consider buying HP for a second not because of their drivers but because I have an association of HP producing total garbage.
    - robotresearcher 10y ago
      > I have an association of HP producing total garbage. It's so sad what they did to their brand. A cheapish HP laser has been our main lab printer for 14 years and zillions of pages. When I bought it HP was the no-brainer buy. Is it really true that if I bought one now it'd be no good?
  - willismichael 10y ago
    Another thumbs up for Brother, their consumer laser printers are now comparable in price to inkjet printers, and the toner is much less hassle and significantly less expensive per print. I've had no trouble with drivers on Linux either.
    - mrec 10y ago
      I've been hearing good things about Brother, but all their (and AFAIK everyone else's) laser printers are still pretty hefty compared to inkjets, aren't they? Being very space-constrained (London) and looking at very occasional use (I've managed without owning a printer at all so far) that's a bit offputting.
      - initram 10y ago
        Yes, they are hefty. I don't know if you can find one that's only a printer. We have a printer/fax/scanner model that's now around 10-15 years old. I can tell it's getting ready to give up the ghost soon. We have actually had to use the fax part of it recently, too. The scanner in it is terrible for anything other than scanning documents to PDF. Completely unusable for photos. (Taking a few photos of a photo with my DSLR and doing an HDR merge produces great results, whereas using the scanner produces crushed blacks and blown-out whites with no way to fix them.)
        willismichael 10y ago
        Yes, you can buy just a printer. I'm not really fond of the all-in-one devices because they tend to be a mediocre everything and not a really good anything.
        manyxcxi 10y ago
        I will say this about my Brother all in one black and white laser- it does everything I need it to do well enough and I don't have to fiddle around with it to get it to work. Multi-page scan direct to PDF, fax, printing over WiFi (thanks to my router for that and Brother with some decent Linux drivers)- it does everything I want it to do and pretty good.
  - alphapapa 10y ago
    I have a Brother HL2270DW printer, does duplexing and wireless, looks nice, doesn't take up much space. Got it on sale at NewEgg for less than $100. Replaced the toner cartridge once with a third-party brand. It's been great. I use Debian and Ubuntu, and the driver has mostly worked very well. However, there have been a few times when, after upgrading Ubuntu, which upgrades CUPS, some very obscure thing in the driver was incompatible with something else in the chain of commands used to print a job (ghostscript, etc--there's quite a pipeline), and suddenly the duplexing would print an extra, blank page between pages, and every page was offset by about an inch to the side. I was able to find a bug report on Launchpad and manually edit one of the driver files myself to work around it, but it took several hours of fiddling, and it's nothing any "average user" would be able to do. And, sadly, Brother hasn't released updated drivers for this printer in many years; they don't seem to care about keeping up with newer versions of Ubuntu or CUPS, etc.--at least, not for this printer. And I haven't been able to get it to print on envelopes correctly, no matter what I tried. It just prints as if it's printing on a normal sheet of paper. So, anyway, whenever it needs replacing, I will probably try to get a printer that just does plain old PostScript. I'm no expert, but my understanding is that if a printer correctly handles PS, then basically anything can print to it correctly, without having to worry about arcane, manufacturer-specific drivers.
  - manyxcxi 10y ago
    +1 Brother I've got a 7 year old black and white laser multi-function and am on toner cartridge number two. Never had a problem and it plays with my router for printing over WiFi. I've had good luck with it in Ubuntu, OSX, and Windows. Pretty sure I spent $149 with it on sale at Fry's when I bought it nearly a decade ago.
- RRWagner 10y ago
  I have the Epson L210 Ecotank and have been very happy with it for my use, which is printing lots of pages (1000s). I would much rather pay for what I'm getting directly ($300 for the printer, $13 for 70ml bottle of ink) than plans for an "almost-free" printer and $60 cartridges to subsidize the printer. The problem with "free" in everything is that it's not and costs more than paying for what you really want to buy. As someone once said, "Expensive is expensive once. Cheap is expensive over and over again."
- rihac 10y ago
  rihac.com.au - if you already have a printer we have ink tanks CISS systems that fit to most models. We are also annoyed about HP's little trick but its not the first time a printer manufacturer has tried something like this. there are always little obstacles that we have to tackle. With a decade of experience our tech team know all the tricks to get around these barriers.
zwieback 10y ago
I've spent the last 16 years at HP in inkjet printhead manufacturing and R&D. Roughly speaking, we've come up with two models: - disposable cartridges with printheads (what most people have at home), here we have to recoup the cost of the disposed silicon printhead and the low initial price of the printer - permanent printheads (what you're asking for) and disposable ink "tanks" of various capacities, here the challenge is to make sure the printhead doesn't get ruined before the printer gets replaced. Third party ink can be a contributing factor to printhead health We now also have an ink-subscription model where you pay at some anticipated level of ink use and you get a replacement cartridge when we think you need it.
- anexprogrammer 10y ago
  Obviously I'm older, but I'd prefer to pay a little more, and give you some profit, for a printer that's built to last, with some metal, rather than <£100 for a near cost pile of fragile plastic as the foundation of my ink subscription - with ink cartridges that seem to get smaller but more expensive with each passing year. Then pay a reasonable price for cartridge with printhead ongoing, otherwise, if I'm successful keeping the printer as long as possible, I'm still recouping the low cost of the printer long past the point I bought enough ink to do so. I don't need high throughput, heavy duty, as I don't print that much any more, so buying from the business range isn't usually sensible.
  - wvenable 10y ago
    I bought a color laser printer for a few hundred bucks and despite almost never having to print anything it's one of the better purchases I've made. It just works. It's not wasteful. And it won't dry out from lack of use. I figure I'll break even over buying ink-jet printers and cartridges in another year or so. Even if everything costs more in short term, it's so much less wasteful.
    - EvanAnderson 10y ago
      Same here. Purchased a workgroup color laser almost 7 years ago. My printing volume is fairly low (around 500 pages / year) and I'm still on the original set of cartridges. The amortized cost of this printer has been amazing-- under $75 / year. It uses the PCL protocol and has an Ethernet connection, so it's a long way off from practical obsolescence, too. I'll likely be using this printer in another 7 years.
anexprogrammer 10y ago
It's a facet of current business. They're ALL trying to give us subscriptions for everything. The "subscription" created by the Gillette safety razor wasn't outrageously priced or terribly wasteful compared to modern blades, and was a fairly good idea over cut-throat razors. Modern product (as opposed to service) subscriptions exist to extract more cash from the consumer rather than a real tangible benefit (I don't count the marketing benefit). Printer ink (especially HP as the ink cartridge usually contains the print head too), coffee pods (complete with DRM!), air fresheners (at least one brand has DRM here too), sealed laptop and phone batteries and dozens of others are designed to get lock in and more sales/profit. Other industries and products are adopting the same model. Ties in well with the materials used in consumer products to ensure they need periodic replacement. eg 60s Hoovers were rubbish, but could easily last 50 years, current Hoovers are far better vacuums thanks to Dyson, but are near (or past) end of life by 5 years as the plastic is disintigrating. They're often real terms cheaper, but now objectively too cheap, and there's no better made alternative offered. Even premium brands are now "cheap". It's a profligate waste of money, packaging and environment. If a product isn't under this model it's easy to get the feeling it's only because they haven't figured out how to get away with it yet. I'd prefer a saner balance on most of these things.
jahewson 10y ago
Brother's toner cartridges come with a return shipping label in the box, so you can send back your old cartridge from them to recycle. I assume they refurbish and refill them and then sell them again.
- ghostly_s 10y ago
  AFAIK all toner cartridges are sold this way. I believe it's simply because there's no practical way to refill toner, which is an extremely messy indelible powder. There are also environmental regulations regarding the disposal of toner.

icefo 10y ago

Epson did it: http://www.epson.com/ecotank http://www.epson.com/ecotank I didn't bought it because it was too big to fit on my desk and I don't know if I will buy an other Epson because they drivers are bad on my Debian. I should try to upgrade them. HP is pretty terrible but the Linux drivers are impressive.

untothebreach 10y ago
I have had great luck with Brother drivers on all the linux machines I've ever tried to use them with, so I would consider that a good option as well.
- branchless 10y ago
  Agreed, run 100% linux with a brother printer, works great. Setting it up was very simple. I didn't consider buying HP for a second not because of their drivers but because I have an association of HP producing total garbage.
  - robotresearcher 10y ago
    > I have an association of HP producing total garbage. It's so sad what they did to their brand. A cheapish HP laser has been our main lab printer for 14 years and zillions of pages. When I bought it HP was the no-brainer buy. Is it really true that if I bought one now it'd be no good?
- willismichael 10y ago
  Another thumbs up for Brother, their consumer laser printers are now comparable in price to inkjet printers, and the toner is much less hassle and significantly less expensive per print. I've had no trouble with drivers on Linux either.
  - mrec 10y ago
    I've been hearing good things about Brother, but all their (and AFAIK everyone else's) laser printers are still pretty hefty compared to inkjets, aren't they? Being very space-constrained (London) and looking at very occasional use (I've managed without owning a printer at all so far) that's a bit offputting.
    - initram 10y ago
      Yes, they are hefty. I don't know if you can find one that's only a printer. We have a printer/fax/scanner model that's now around 10-15 years old. I can tell it's getting ready to give up the ghost soon. We have actually had to use the fax part of it recently, too. The scanner in it is terrible for anything other than scanning documents to PDF. Completely unusable for photos. (Taking a few photos of a photo with my DSLR and doing an HDR merge produces great results, whereas using the scanner produces crushed blacks and blown-out whites with no way to fix them.)
      - willismichael 10y ago
        Yes, you can buy just a printer. I'm not really fond of the all-in-one devices because they tend to be a mediocre everything and not a really good anything.
        manyxcxi 10y ago
        I will say this about my Brother all in one black and white laser- it does everything I need it to do well enough and I don't have to fiddle around with it to get it to work. Multi-page scan direct to PDF, fax, printing over WiFi (thanks to my router for that and Brother with some decent Linux drivers)- it does everything I want it to do and pretty good.
- alphapapa 10y ago
  I have a Brother HL2270DW printer, does duplexing and wireless, looks nice, doesn't take up much space. Got it on sale at NewEgg for less than $100. Replaced the toner cartridge once with a third-party brand. It's been great. I use Debian and Ubuntu, and the driver has mostly worked very well. However, there have been a few times when, after upgrading Ubuntu, which upgrades CUPS, some very obscure thing in the driver was incompatible with something else in the chain of commands used to print a job (ghostscript, etc--there's quite a pipeline), and suddenly the duplexing would print an extra, blank page between pages, and every page was offset by about an inch to the side. I was able to find a bug report on Launchpad and manually edit one of the driver files myself to work around it, but it took several hours of fiddling, and it's nothing any "average user" would be able to do. And, sadly, Brother hasn't released updated drivers for this printer in many years; they don't seem to care about keeping up with newer versions of Ubuntu or CUPS, etc.--at least, not for this printer. And I haven't been able to get it to print on envelopes correctly, no matter what I tried. It just prints as if it's printing on a normal sheet of paper. So, anyway, whenever it needs replacing, I will probably try to get a printer that just does plain old PostScript. I'm no expert, but my understanding is that if a printer correctly handles PS, then basically anything can print to it correctly, without having to worry about arcane, manufacturer-specific drivers.
- manyxcxi 10y ago
  +1 Brother I've got a 7 year old black and white laser multi-function and am on toner cartridge number two. Never had a problem and it plays with my router for printing over WiFi. I've had good luck with it in Ubuntu, OSX, and Windows. Pretty sure I spent $149 with it on sale at Fry's when I bought it nearly a decade ago.
RRWagner 10y ago
I have the Epson L210 Ecotank and have been very happy with it for my use, which is printing lots of pages (1000s). I would much rather pay for what I'm getting directly ($300 for the printer, $13 for 70ml bottle of ink) than plans for an "almost-free" printer and $60 cartridges to subsidize the printer. The problem with "free" in everything is that it's not and costs more than paying for what you really want to buy. As someone once said, "Expensive is expensive once. Cheap is expensive over and over again."
rihac 10y ago
rihac.com.au - if you already have a printer we have ink tanks CISS systems that fit to most models. We are also annoyed about HP's little trick but its not the first time a printer manufacturer has tried something like this. there are always little obstacles that we have to tackle. With a decade of experience our tech team know all the tricks to get around these barriers.

zwieback 10y ago

I've spent the last 16 years at HP in inkjet printhead manufacturing and R&D. Roughly speaking, we've come up with two models: - disposable cartridges with printheads (what most people have at home), here we have to recoup the cost of the disposed silicon printhead and the low initial price of the printer - permanent printheads (what you're asking for) and disposable ink "tanks" of various capacities, here the challenge is to make sure the printhead doesn't get ruined before the printer gets replaced. Third party ink can be a contributing factor to printhead health We now also have an ink-subscription model where you pay at some anticipated level of ink use and you get a replacement cartridge when we think you need it.

anexprogrammer 10y ago
Obviously I'm older, but I'd prefer to pay a little more, and give you some profit, for a printer that's built to last, with some metal, rather than <£100 for a near cost pile of fragile plastic as the foundation of my ink subscription - with ink cartridges that seem to get smaller but more expensive with each passing year. Then pay a reasonable price for cartridge with printhead ongoing, otherwise, if I'm successful keeping the printer as long as possible, I'm still recouping the low cost of the printer long past the point I bought enough ink to do so. I don't need high throughput, heavy duty, as I don't print that much any more, so buying from the business range isn't usually sensible.
- wvenable 10y ago
  I bought a color laser printer for a few hundred bucks and despite almost never having to print anything it's one of the better purchases I've made. It just works. It's not wasteful. And it won't dry out from lack of use. I figure I'll break even over buying ink-jet printers and cartridges in another year or so. Even if everything costs more in short term, it's so much less wasteful.
  - EvanAnderson 10y ago
    Same here. Purchased a workgroup color laser almost 7 years ago. My printing volume is fairly low (around 500 pages / year) and I'm still on the original set of cartridges. The amortized cost of this printer has been amazing-- under $75 / year. It uses the PCL protocol and has an Ethernet connection, so it's a long way off from practical obsolescence, too. I'll likely be using this printer in another 7 years.

anexprogrammer 10y ago

It's a facet of current business. They're ALL trying to give us subscriptions for everything. The "subscription" created by the Gillette safety razor wasn't outrageously priced or terribly wasteful compared to modern blades, and was a fairly good idea over cut-throat razors. Modern product (as opposed to service) subscriptions exist to extract more cash from the consumer rather than a real tangible benefit (I don't count the marketing benefit). Printer ink (especially HP as the ink cartridge usually contains the print head too), coffee pods (complete with DRM!), air fresheners (at least one brand has DRM here too), sealed laptop and phone batteries and dozens of others are designed to get lock in and more sales/profit. Other industries and products are adopting the same model. Ties in well with the materials used in consumer products to ensure they need periodic replacement. eg 60s Hoovers were rubbish, but could easily last 50 years, current Hoovers are far better vacuums thanks to Dyson, but are near (or past) end of life by 5 years as the plastic is disintigrating. They're often real terms cheaper, but now objectively too cheap, and there's no better made alternative offered. Even premium brands are now "cheap". It's a profligate waste of money, packaging and environment. If a product isn't under this model it's easy to get the feeling it's only because they haven't figured out how to get away with it yet. I'd prefer a saner balance on most of these things.

jahewson 10y ago

Brother's toner cartridges come with a return shipping label in the box, so you can send back your old cartridge from them to recycle. I assume they refurbish and refill them and then sell them again.

ghostly_s 10y ago
AFAIK all toner cartridges are sold this way. I believe it's simply because there's no practical way to refill toner, which is an extremely messy indelible powder. There are also environmental regulations regarding the disposal of toner.