this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
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Not OP but I only use a brother MFC black&white laser printer for printing documents at home. It addresses the HP issue in 2 ways. 1 - The genuine brother toner costs much less per page to the point that it's not terrible to have to buy it if necessary. And 2 - brother does not put DRM on their printer and there are tons of 3rd party toners available at about 1/3rd the price. Generally brother printers cost more up front, but basically last a lifetime, and the toner is pretty cheap. I've had the same printer for around 12 years now, and it still prints fine. I don't print a lot at home so I've only had to buy 4 3rd-party replacement toners, which have cost around $80 altogether. I think the printer was $200 when I originally bought it.
Also I want to add that if you need color inkjet printing, the Canon Megatank and Epson Ecotank printers are an awesome option for most home printing. I use a Canon g6020 at home for photo printing and I love the photos that come out of it.
Brother printers aren't even that much more expensive than HP. I think you break even by the time you have to buy like 2 HP ink cartridges. Even the toner cartridges that the brother printers come with last what feels like forever and they're not even filled up all the way.
Yeah it's definitely cost effective over time, and the printers generally seem to be higher quality. I've heard about inkjet printers breaking a lot during moves, but I've moved with my brother printer like 5-6 times and it's been fine through everything.
Epson seems like a great choice, until you learn about the ecotank sponge issue.
You can buy a new waste ink sponge for next to nothing, but the firmware counter needs to be reset. That requires either a sketchy piece of software from some Russian hacker, or shipping the printer to epson and then paying epson for 5min of work and return shipping. The latter is rumored to be about the same price as a new ecotank.
But you're happy with your megatank? I might look into that... I stopped looking at inkjets after hearing about the ecotank.
Wait, I thought the counter can be reset with some specific button presses only. I've seen the video guides on YouTube.
w00t? I will really have to look into that. There's a reasonably priced 2nd hand A3 ecotank in my vicinity, and I've been avoiding it because of this.
Do you have sources?
Dang, I can't find it anymore. I swear I watched a video about an ecotank counter reset once, since I was also interested in buying it one time. I'll have to dig into my YouTube history.
That can be quite the adventure, which I won't ask you to undertake. Because google returned a result from the site with the subs, where someone has gotten a copy of the original epson maintenance software ;)
Oh nice, so no more sketchy Russian software?
I don't know, it's in an encrypted zip-file, so it doesn't bode well. I'll have to put it on a VM on an old host, and see what happens when I upload it to virustotal. But it should be the original piece of software at least.
Yeah the Canon has been pretty good. I've had it for around a year now. I sort of print in batches, like I'll have a week where I print a few photos then nothing for a month or so. When I had a long break once (2-3 months), the printer started printing streaks so I had to run some sort of fixing cleanup cycle which fixed the issue although it wasted some ink. I haven't had to buy any replacement ink yet because again I don't print a lot, but I'm sure if I was using a traditional inkjet I would've had to buy replacement ink cartridges a few times already.