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How to get your lying printer to use up all its ink
- maximilian 18y agoI have just that laser printer in the article. I'll have to bookmark this site for later and keep my black electrical tape at the ready.
- shard 18y agoThis is a major reason why I eBay'd an old LaserJet4 when I needed a printer. It's built like a Mack truck, and it doesn't play games with toner levels.
- pmjordan 18y agoI've got a LaserJet 5 with a duplex unit. The thing weighs a ton, will happily break your back if you try to transport it, and will occasionally get itself into paper jam when you need something printed NOW (mine has thus earned the print queue name of 'satan'), but I still love it. Just gotta keep a parallel port around to plug it into...
- Tichy 18y agoWhat about ozone emissions? Somehow I would feel uneasy around dinosaur printers.
- cstejerean 18y agoI actually went to Best Buy to get some ink when I realized that instead of paying $70 for new ink I could spend $100 and get a wireless laser printer (a Brother 2170w). Sounds like this trick could come in handy.
- zenspider 18y agoafaik, almost all new printers come with half-full ink/toner cartridges.
- gizmo 18y agoThe Brother HL-2040 only costs around $83 or so (newegg). I have one, and I'm very happy with it. Fast. Tidy. Quiet. It's a great printer. For $80 bucks it's an absolute steal. The toners aren't free, but the price per page is very very low. I think it's in the top 5 of home laser printers. We're talking a few cents per copy here (including paper). A great deal once again. I researched the different printers before I bought one, and I knew full well that Brother can't make much profit on the laser printer itself - so the toners are more expensive. This is great, because this way people who print only semi-regularly can still get affordable laser printers. Manjoo the author agrees with me: great printer and very inexpensive. So what makes the author think he is getting cheated? Why does he think Brother owes him anything? Why does he feel so outraged? The guy would be HAPPY if the toner ran out 20% earlier, but then he'd have faded pages for a while. Brother decides to put some more ink in there (doesn't cost them much) so the quality is high all the way to the end, and then the toner shuts down. "Fight back against the lying infuriating evil ink-and-toner cabal?". Please. Thanks to companies like Brother you can get great printers for less than $100. Your efforts to put them out of business by cheating their business model are petty. Who is -really- the greedy and infuriating party here?
- josefresco 18y agoBrother.
- gizmo 18y agoDon't like 'em? Don't buy their products.
- davidw 18y ago> so the quality is high all the way to the end, and then the toner shuts down. I think most people are aware that the ink is a finite resource, and are happy to change it when they see the level is getting low and not producing good results. Let them judge when that is.
- gizmo 18y agoThe ink is not the expensive part. Brother could probably cut the price of toners in half and still make a profit. But by doing so, they'd get fewer recurring revenues, which means that the price of the printer itself would have to go up. Either that, or they lose out on profits. You wouldn't be angry if the toner contained less fuel. If you could print only 2000 pages instead of 3000, you would think you got a great deal. But if you can print 2000 pages, and the printer then refuses to print the last 1000, you're suddenly upset? Makes no sense. You're still getting essentially the same deal: 2000 pages for $60.
- kenver 18y agoIt's a bit absurd that in many cases it's actually cheaper to throw your printer away and buy a new one, rather than replace a multicolour cartridge.
- gizmo 18y agoAnd a single dvd can cost $30. I've seen DVD players for less.
- netcan 18y agoIf only they came with a free sample dvd.
- dmpayton 18y agoIndeed. I recently bought an HP D2400 printer at Big Lots for $30. The color/black cartridges come out to around $40. Go figure.
- maryrosecook 18y agoThe practice of charging more for the media than the device is not uncommon. Example: Polaroid.
- kenver 18y agoYea thats true, but if buying a polaroid camera and getting say 10 pictures with it included was cheaper than buying 10 of the media seperately it would be a bit crazy, and thats exactly what I've seen with some printers recently.
- pmorici 18y agoThis is so true. When I first bought my printer 3 years ago the guy at the store told me the ink cartridge was a small one so it was going to run out fast so I should buy an extra. my low ink light has been on for over a year now yet the print outs still look great.
- JMiao 18y agoremember when creed from the office dyed his hair w/ the office inkjet?
- dhimes 18y agoI also wonder about that "engine maintenance" light in our cars, too. It's almost always for maintenance stuff which is, for lack of another word, "elective" (at least at the time).
- mattmaroon 18y agoI love my Canon I860 mainly because it's easy to override the nag screen, and it breaks the colors down into multiple cartridges meaning I don't have to replace the whole thing just because blue ran out. That always pissed me off.
- mleonhard 18y agoI want an ink-jet printer with a very large ink canister, enough to print 20,000 pages. Then we could have competition to see who can make those 20,000 pages of ink fit in a smaller canister.