1y ago

Analysis | Printer ink is a scam. Here’s how to spend less.

Washington Post: Americans waste $10 billion each year on name-brand ink. So we tested low-cost options including remanufactured cartridges, ink injection kits — and even making our own.

My advice: get a mono laser printer. Printing is handy but relatively infrequent for a lot of people these days. If that's your use case, mono laser is the way to go. Toner does not dry out or go bad.

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53 comments

Maybe I'm naive, but what's holding everyone back from living a paperless life or at least attempt to? Other than printing out the occasional return labels for Amazon stuff I return (they offer label free drop offs now), I can't think of anything else I would use it for as most things have gone digital.
- Signatures, people not wanting to rely on phones, paper requires essentially only literacy while phones require more, more privacy with paper, honestly the list is pretty long.
- We use it mainly to print coloring pages for our kids :)
- Student here, journal articles are a lot easier to read on paper than on screen. After the first hour or so of screen reading my eyes get drier than the Sahara and I feel dizzy. I tried reading on my e-reader, but journals like to cram as much text on a page as possible, which doesn't work well on a 6" reader.
  
  It's been a while since I've used an e-reader, but don't they let you change the font size? It's kind of like zooming in, but actually readjusts the words to fit the screen. Again, I might be making this up.
  
  No, you're right! But it's only possible for epub/mobi and txt files.
  Pdfs can be zoomed into, but then you need to scroll around the page and it starts feeling rather like you're looking at the paper through a keyhole. I tried converting pdf to epub, but the formatting/page layout of the original matters and it doesn't translate well.
- Kids in school was the primary reason for a printer, but the need has definitely decreased over the years. Our family is at about 5 prints per year at this point, which is exactly why a laser printer is so valuable. The same Brother printer ($150 in 2012) has worked for us for going on 11 years now with minimal expense on replacement toner. It just works when needed and never dries up or has issues.
  But as much as you would like to be paperless, things come up. Some companies insist on wet signatures, other things need to be mailed in, etc. It's certainly becoming less and less necessary year by year, though.
  I'm not sure if I would replace this printer if it fails, but it sure is nice to have around when I need it, without the hassle of going out to print something at a shop.
- I get wanting to go paper free, but I like to have paper copies of important docs in my file cabinet.
  Also i have an eight year old, so its fun to be able to print out papercrafts, patterns, exercises etc ... having a printer is a good thing to have for a kid.

53 comments