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If you only use your printer occasionally but can't fully get rid of it, like me, I can recommend getting a pocket thermal printer. I got a Peripage A4 sized on
by tomashubelbauer 3y ago
If you only use your printer occasionally but can't fully get rid of it, like me, I can recommend getting a pocket thermal printer. I got a Peripage A4 sized one [1] and I use it whenever I can't fake having printed something (by adding a signature in software and deepfrying the document to look scanned if the other side requires it) or when I want a printed backup (like for travel documents in case my phone died or I lost it).
It has no consumables other than the thermal paper which I believe is easy to come by from any vendor. The printed documents look like trash and obviously aren't in color, but they are readable and frankly, they'll do.
I have yet to run into a situation where this thermal printed document is not accepted by the other party in case the other party requires a printed document and I can't work around that requirement digitally.
Aaand I don't have to deal with any sort of ink or anything of the sort.
Someone downthread mentioned the idea of an open source printer and how complicated it would be for the maker community to build one. I wish people gave building an open source thermal document-sized printer a shot, because the only thing I don't like is that I need to use a Chinese app on my phone to print through this printer. I am sure it would be easy to reverse engineer, though, so I could reuse the hardware and just get a clean app, but I didn't put the effort into that.
[1]: https://www.peripageglobal.com/products/peripage-a40-mini-printer https://www.peripageglobal.com/products/peripage-a40-mini-pr...
- dividedbyzero 3y agoI have (or had) a few thermal prints filed away. After about 10 years they have faded to be unreadable. Not a problem for many applications, but documents meant for the long term probably should not be thermal prints.
- tomashubelbauer 3y agoYou're right - I should have mentioned this in my comment. I would not use a thermal printer for one's own bookkeeping. I solely use it to be able to produce dead tree slices for people who require them and won't relent without having to dedicate desk space for the printer or buy consumables for it. I personally never need to print stuff for myself so this use-case didn't even cross my mind.
- vetinari 3y agoJust remember that thermal print fades, thus is unusable for archival. You can pro-long the time by storage in dark, but it has (low) limits too.