Had a problem with an old printer. Each time we went to print it had pretty much dried out - new cartridges or ink. 3rd party cartidges were really hit and miss, refilling original cartidges were also the same and often resulted in a new cartridge or set.

When our son was doing his GCSE's and A levels it was getting ridiculous in costs as while we may not have so many dry out, the rate he could use them was mad.

I went out and bought a colour laser instead. Only last year (year 4) did I need to replace the cartidges it came with and not too bad for all inks. Reckon I have another 5/6 years before the cartidges need replacing again

Absolutely.

If you use your inkjet once a week, it's pretty much guaranteed in my experience that your print heads will dry up before the cartridge empties out.

I put up with this nuisance for more than a decade until I got fed up with the endless head cycling and wasted ink and paper and just bought a laser printer instead.

One of the best purchases I have ever made. I bought it in September 2010 and it's still working fine.

Laser printers are really affordable now, and you don't to need to print in colour as much as you think you do. Buy one that does scanner at the same time and you'll be able to use it for a decade or more.

My B/W HP laser printer is much older than that & still going strong. I'm not sure I'd say the same thing about a newer HP.

The trouble is that many people turn their printer on only to print, so it doesn't get to perform the normal inkjet maintenance cycle.

Yes I know this consumes ink, but I've rarely had the problem (dried out ink head) on my home inkjet, whereas my inlaws are always having this problem; fortunately due to CoViD alcohol cleaner/hand sanitiser (need to avoid the variants with moisturisers etc.) is usually to hand.

Through the high usage years, I switched to a continuous ink system. Which works well, unless you have small children with fingers into everything...

I bought a post lease colour laser printer in 2014 for £50. I only had to replace the toner few months ago.

Best investment ever.

We had always had inkjets. First, HP, then we tried an Epson. Always the same issue: whenever we wanted to print: ink problems. Either plugged orifices or "empty" cartridges, and even though 90% of the printing was in black, you always found that the other cartridges had to be replaced as well. We just did not print frequently enough to keep the ink system operational.

Lasers were expensive, so we mostly ended up with Dad printing the stuff at work. Then came WFH. Several years ago, I had rescued a "free for the taking" LJ5 off the front porch of a legal office in town, and this seemed like a good time to try my hand at getting it working. The legendary repairability of the LJ5 was not exaggerated. I spent several weeks with screwdriver in hand, browsing the Web, watching YouTube videos and ordering parts. It ended up needing a new gear set, rebuilt fuser assembly and a new (refilled) cartridge, all of which were easily found online (there were a LOT of these printers made). While I was inside, I maxed out the RAM ($30) and added an Ethernet card ($15). I have to say, the LJ5 is a wonderfully maintainable product.

Now, I have a network-connected, always on (it draws 7 watts on standby), reliable printer. It works with Linux, Apple and (with a bit of effort) my work Win10 laptop (I needed to find a working PCL5 driver -- HP seems to be trying to make the LJ5 obsolete). Couldn't be happier. Even with weeks between prints, it's perfect copy every time, and I'm still on my first cartridge (have 2 more Goodwill finds, NIB, waiting to be used).

Thanks to Bill, Dave, and Canon, for a quality printer that still hasn't gone out of style!

That comment is arse about face: it is the inks which are designed to work with the printers, not the other way round.

If some third party makes an ink that confirms to the printer spec - then it can be used. The printer should not care.

Imagine the brouhaha if Ford cars only worked with Ford petrol, Ford oils, Ford tyres, ...

(Other car makes are available)

The problem is that not enough people react on this. They just accept the cost, shrug and get on with their lives.

Look how long it's taken to start hearing about the Right to Repair (and people were getting riled up about that).

This kind of news needs to repeated every day, every where, until people wake up and realize that ink is the new mafia domain, and we're all being held at gunpoint until we hand over the dosh.

No mention of the nasty little manufacturers trick of supplying the printer with "setup" cartridges. Get barely 10 pages then off to buy ink paying more than you just paid for the printer.

I have used 3rd party cartridges over the years with minimal issues. For my Canon the 3rd party cost less than 20% of the genuine ones. Mine nags they are non-genuine when you put them but after that all is good.

On the other hand, that's why one can pick up a little domestic printer with embedded server, WiFi, scanner, NFC, and all the other crap for about thirty quid. What they lose on the printer they make on the inks.

I think the use of setup cartridges, nasty as it is, is because once upon a time the lower end printers came with regular ink cartridges, and it was actually cheaper to buy an entire printer (and throw away the old one) than to buy a set of replacement cartridges. The whole thing was ridiculous (and still is).

"I have used 3rd party cartridges over the years with minimal issues. For my Canon the 3rd party cost less than 20% of the genuine ones. Mine nags they are non-genuine when you put them but after that all is good"

My canon does the same with the non genuine cartridges, but absolutely refuses to use the non-genuine cartridges from my old canon printer- that are identical other than the identifying chip. Annoying as when my old canon printer died I bought another hoping that the box of cartridges I already had wouldn't be wasted. Got round it by swapping the chip from the empty cartridge to the full one whenever I change them. The printer just thinks it's empty but luckily lets me continue printing.

I had a friend who was just buying a new printer every time it ran out. He believed that if he buys just the ink, it will last the same time and since printer with ink was cheaper...

For some printers, those with separate print heads and ink reservoirs, the setup cartridges are to fill the ink lines. Personally, I would rather have a printer supplied without ink and take the hit on the first set of cartridges not lasting as long as subsequent cartridges.

The ink mafia is the reason why I switched to a laser printer as they are now affordable.

With ink printers, each time I needed to print I had to either buy new cartridges because they weren't working any more or a new printer because it was cheaper than to buy new cartridges. This time is over.

Ditto that. I dumped HP inkjet printers years ago due to the extortionate price of ink and their blocking use of third party inks. I happily use a Brother laser printer now. Its only black and white but don't really miss colour for my needs. It is vastly cheaper than HP ink. No more blocked nozzles either and similar problems.

Me too - I got rid of HP inkjet for a Samsung b/w laser printer - though HP is determined not to let me go and promptly went and bought Samsung's printer operations. Needless to say, support and everything is now down to the usual HP customer-hostile standard.

£1.99 a month for 50 pages (and I think you can roll 100 over between months) - and easily covers my occasional printing needs.

I know I could print pages cheaper using 3rd-party carts and a less draconian manufacturer - but it nicely shifts annoyances with one colour running out before the others, blocked nozzles etc onto HP.

I pay £24 a year - and I have one less thing to worry about.

Just wait until you need to contact HP. I turned on my printer last night and the colour cartridge (a few months old, nearly full) had failed. A lot of faffing around and a previous cartridge works (surprisingly, given its been sat in a box for a while), so it's not the printer.

I'll have to phone somebody when I get home. Ugh, phoning people. :-/

I just hope, since it's probably their paranoid DRM that is acting up, that they'll get a replacement in the post really quickly. Luckily I have a basic cheap laser, so I'm not printerless. Still, to just die like that with no warning... Grrr...

I should add, simple things get sent to the laser, the Instant Ink is used for colour and since I'm not directly paying for the ink, there's no difference between an A5 print to plain paper and a full colour photo print. So my fiver a month is a lot less than it used to cost to feed the thing.

It may sound reasonable for first two years of use, but then this cost just adds up. I bought a laser printer in 2014 for £50 and only this year I had to replace toner that cost me about £30.

I got fed up with the hassle of inkjets and their costs when I was at university, and switched to a small Samsung Laser printer (monochrome). I can't remember the exact model, but it was a great little printer. The ink lasted for ages, and it had an "eco" mode you could switch on with a little button on the top, that used less ink. Print quality looked identical between eco and normal modes as long as it wasn't low on ink.I think I used it for a decade, with a few years of continuous printing of lecture notes and coursework while at uni. In the end the rollers wore out, and it couldn't pick up paper anymore. I probably could have kept it going but I passed it on to someone who was going to try and repair it for their own use.

Last year just as lockdowns started, I bought a Brother DCP-L8410CDW - colour laser with scanner built in. Totally inappropriate for a home office, it just takes up too much space!

But the printing quality has been fantastic. and it's been great both for work and also for home schooling. I've looked at costs for buying new ink for it, and while it will be expensive to get all the different colour cartridges (are they still called cartridges for laser printers?) as a one off payment, current estimates show I would only need to purchase it once every 24 months, which will make it very economical from a print per page perspective.

I too, after my 15 year old canon had a gravity related incident, went for a brother laser printer. Quality is excellent, and it's even a colour, for less money than refilling the canon with genuine ink

And, as it's a laser, I know the toner will be good for ages.

I've had to throw catridges away because they "dried up"

The brother sits there in Deep Sleep, but the second I print something from the iPhone, it's awake and printing within 15 seconds :-)

Had I not "lovingly restored" my LJ5, I would have bought a Brother laser. They come highly recommended, but you do need to make sure the one you buy has a network interface (it's an option on some of them)

Also, beware that some laser manufacturers have "intelligent" cartridges that "expire". I'm looking at you, HP! (which might be why they are trying to remove drivers for the old LJs from Windows...cartridges don't expire)

Bought my HP laserjet 1320n duplex mono in something like 2007 for something like 300 quid. Still going strong, even though it nowadays prints about one page/month. Never dries out nor fails, although the 16MB RAM may be a bit of a limit.

Apple seemed to remove the drivers with Catalina (and MS have also done so), but I just switched to a generic driver and carried on. Toner cartridges aren't chip-locked, so I'm able to refill them a few times - bought a soldering-iron hole borer and a bottle of toner powder & some bungs from one of the emporia who supply such things, and get about 4 fills per cartridge before the overflow chamber fills up. Makes them even cheaper.

Sadly, cartridges for the 1320n are getting hard to find now. Whatever people think of HP nowadays, this printer's been brilliant value.

We have a huge Brother MFC-J6530DW from my dad's business after he retired. Inkjet, but no cynical pricing from Brother. Never had to worry about anything wearing out so far, and it does A3!

We gave up on third party suppliers for our Dell Laser printers after several companies' 'long life' cartridges gave up after less than 200 sheets of sparsely printed A4. Sadly resigned to paying Dell 75% of the cost of a new printer on each set of CYM and B cartridges.

Any recommendations?

And while we are moaning about printer rip-offs

I only want to print in black/white - I even checked the box in the printer config. Why lock me out when only the f£*%ing magenta is gone! Let me guess...$$$$$

Thank you.

.

"Consumer advocate Which? has found that ink bought from printer manufactures can be up to 286 per cent more expensive than third-party alternatives."

Film at 11.

Fun fact, I've just weighed a Gilette razor blade - somewhere between 2 and 3g. They would be cheaper if it were made of solid silver.

At work we gave up on inkjets as soon as colour lasers came down in price to be Opex rather than Capex.

My home printer is a Ricoh GelJet so I'm tied to manufacturers cartridges but the prints are more robust (used mainly for model buildings).

The main reason for buying a inkjet printer is that they are cheap. This is however offset by the fact that a set of cartridges can cost (as per article) £107.98; and the cartridges supplied with the device will be a fifth of the size of the normal ones.

Laser printers are more expensive, but at a rough guide to costs:-

An ink printer will cost something like 8-20p per page

A desktop laser will cost around 2-10p per page

A network laser will cost around 0.2 - 1p per page

So succinctly; in almost all cases it's cheaper to buy a second hand laser printer from ebay than buy a replacement inkjet cartridge.

There's your problem right there. Who is a reputable supplier?

My laser (Samsung MW2022 or something like that) is on it's second toner cartridge from Amazon. The first arrived broken (thankfully a paid return as I use Prime by preference for this reason). The one in it now promised 1000 pages. It is reading 44% after about 300 regular pages of text. Okay, it's pretty cheap (sixteen euros for about 800 pages comes to 2¢ a page), but still, the unmarked cartridge in it when I got it (second hand) promised 1000 pages and according to the counter racked up nearly 1200 before it ran out.

So... Who is "reputable" in this market?

I also got a Samsung a few years ago, the M2070W, just a B&W laser with scanner.

I print occasionally, might be months with no printing, and then lots all at once. Not a good use case for an inkjet, which constantly jammed up, hence the switch to a laser.

Had the printer a few years now, and I'm still on the original cartridge! Although I'm sure I should be close to needing a new one at some point.

Lately when ordering a new cartridge online I order two, one from two different suppliers.

That way I figure one will get approx the rated pages and the other will still work just less ambitiously. Both together still less than half HP's opinion of themselves.

"Who is a reputable supplier?"

OTOH, what's a page? Some might use a lot more ink than others.

I switched to a laser printer at home years ago after several years of inkjet printers drying out and/or using up loads of ink to get ready to print. Inkjets survive as their initial cost is much lower than an equivalent colour-laser, and people only see the sticker price, not the running costs. Of course, they are then caught out by the never-ending cycle of expensive inks, and they give-up and buy a new printer because it is cheaper. Nice little racket you have there!

I always recommend people who print infrequently to purchase a laser printer (colour MFPs were quite were quite reasonably priced - before Covid!). The toner will happily sit there for yonks and simply print when you need it; plus the paper is usually contained and protected in a tray; and if you are clever, your MFP has a nice dust cover. Of course, the manufacturers have cottoned-on and the printers only include "shipping toner", which is usually 25% of a full cartridge. A full set of colour toner cartridges will also have you thinking of simply replacing the printer - once you have recovered from the heart attack! There is also the issue of obsolescence. By the time you have printed enough to need new toner cartridges, you may struggle to replace them.

It's not that inkjet ink has to be expensive either. Ink for commercial sign-making printers are in the region of £60 for a single colour, but that's 220ml of ink. In bigger quantities it's £125 for a one litre cartridge (although you'll need six per machine; cyan, yellow, magenta, black, and also light magenta and light cyan and white for better colour accuracy).

These printers print on all sorts of materials, much of which is destined to be used outside on signs, so it has to be as UV proof as possible, so it's at least as specialised as ink for a desktop printer.

I would like to be able to buy inks from a reputable source that can warrant the characteristics of the inks they sell. I use an inkjet printer - a Canon pro photo printer - just to print photos, often in A3 format, on expensive paper too. The last thing I need is to risk non-reliable inks, in non-reliable cartridges, maybe recycled somehow several times. It looks that you have only expensive original inks, or very cheap ones from unknown brands.

I agree that printer manufactures should publish the required specs, and allow to produce compatible cartridges, but I'd really wish to see reputable third-party inks brands - I know some in the US probably exists, in other countries I see mostly unknown brands, and if inks change enough between different batches it can be an issue - it means re-profile each paper used - and that has a cost too. And hoping they last as the original inks, as tested by third parties. Otherwise I prefer to buy the bullet and keep on using original inks with which I had no issues till now.

In the film era you could choose from different suppliers of film and papers - and you knew all the major brands delivered reliable results. and you can use them in any camera because there were standards.

I would like to be able to buy inks from a reputable source that can warrant the characteristics of the inks they sell.

Many years ago (before affordable colour lasers) we had a company push their "guaranteed" third party cartridges for HP inkjets, of which we had several. They even supplied some free samples which worked very well so we placed an order.

A few weeks later I had to tell them to come and collect the cartridges and immediately process a full refund, failure to do so would result in a report to the Police for fraud.

I could never prove it of course but they were repackaging genuine HP cartridges for the samples then sending their refilled ones when you ordered, they had the common problem of using a thin ink for ease of refilling with the resultant splatters on the printed pages.

This is actually a really big problem. The 3rd party ink realm has turned into a race to the bottom. There appear to be very few good quality 3rd party inks, or at least they are invisible in the sea of mediocrity.

Despite the ear-wateringly high price of OEM ink, it does tend to be very good quality. If their ink was reasonably priced, then I would buy it every time.

"In addition, the use of third party inks invalidates the warranty of the printer."

This probably also goes someway to explaining why people stick with the higher priced "original" inks. Printers are notoriously unreliable. If you have a relatively expensive printer, having a working warranty is an important consideration.

You might get cheaper ink, but if the printer than fails, and they refuse the warranty, you'll be significantly more out of pocket. That they can waive the warranty away like that just because of the ink used is really something that needs to be fixed in legislation. Imagine if the car company's tried to fix it so that if you bought one of their cars, you had to stick to one brand of petrol, or you invalidate your warranty. People would be in uproar (not to mention prices would skyrocket like ink prices have!).

I have an Epson inkjet MFD. It moans about non-Epson carts and warranties. It is also seven years old. What warranty? The warranty died years ago. Worse for Epson, I can get an eight pack of ink (two each cyan, magenta, yellow and black, all high capacity, from Amazon for under $40, while a three pack of cyan, magenta and yellow Official Epson Ink is $60 and a one pack of black OEI is $30. I can get twice as much ink for half the price from Amazon. The printer cost $160 or so, on sale at Walmart. Buying three sets of Amazon ink would keep enough money in my pocket to get a new printer. Spending a bit more would get a Brother colour laser, which I probably will get when the Epson dies. Their ink shenanigans have ensured that I won’t be buying another Epson.

Don't let my local know. Beer's expensive enough there already.

I'll stick with the LaserJet 2100 I pulled out of a skip 10 years ago, thanks (although the DeskJet 840 I had before that was built like a tank).

My criteria were a free software driver and 3rd party inks. Apart from the mostly empty cartridges the printer came with it has only been fed third party inks. The box of inks I bought about 5 years ago is running low and cartridges are now £7/set but there are continuous ink supply upgrades available...

I had bought into the subscription plan, everything was fine. Worked out cheaper than new inks from the local shop. The cost went on my expenses…

When I got made redundant I left the scheme. Luckily I had lots of ink left and a few ‘spare’ cartridges from the plan. Though it would tide me over tor a bit.

The printer immediately refused to use genuine HP cartridges supplied under the plan! Scandalous! What a scam!

Soon enough your petrol will have RFID nanobots a-swimmin' that will self-destruct and neutralize it should your 5G-enabled automobile be found to have an expired subscription to Motorhead Monthly.

The Retail Price (Diesel and Petrol) Display Order, 1997 that obliges garages to show the price per litre of fuel should be extended to printer ink.

Printing the pice per litre would use too much ink....

We bought an Epsom EcoTank printer before lock down. Myself and my wife both working from home as well as two kids home schooling all printing pretty much every day, and we are still not through the ink which was supplied with it for colour, and we've only used half of one new bottle (plus supplied ink) of the black.

Oh, and the bottles only cost £10 each, or £30 for all four colours. It's never acted up significantly, certainly never blocked up, the only thing it's needed occasionally is a print head alignment.

Of course YMMV.

They’re Epson. They’ll pull shenanigans. It’s what they do. When my current Epson dies, it’ll be replaced by a colour laser.