I guess the expensive inks environment at Epson will become much more sustainable. So their environment delivering new printers because the old ones clogged. Never understood why they never delivered head cleaning cartridges....

After all, the drum in my (non-epson) laser printer lasts at least five years (that's the last time I changed it) while the kids never get to the end of their (epson) inkjet because it clogs, dries up, and generally makes itself disagreeable...

Can we have a green icon please? --->

inkjet because it clogs, dries up, and...

The only inkjets I have ever worked with which didn't clog themselves up on a regular basis were those HPs where the printing head was built-in to the cartridge such that every time you changed the cartridge you got a new print head, but then you could never tell whether streaky prints were due to clogged jets or running out of ink and they still needed dismantling in order to clean the head-cleaning sponge, which eventually filled up with so much congealed ink that you got brown ink smears all over the paper. Oh, and every time you changed a cartridge you needed to re-align the heads, which wasted both paper and ink.

I also owned a Xerox Phaser (solid ink) printer. It was a fantastic machine in many ways, and the ultimate evolution of inkjet technology, but even it - which went through a comprehensive cleaning cycle every time it came out of standby, and had as one of its consumables a roll of special cleaning fabric - suffered the occasional blocked jet which mostly could be cleaned by repeated runs of one of the cleaning cycles (and waste a lot of ink in the process) but had as part of its firmware a "jet re-mapping" procedure so that permanently clogged jets could be substituted for by adjacent ones. Replacing the print head was an extreme expense, and after 12 years in use that kind of spare part was difficult to find. I didn't replace it because it wasn't working (I think it only had one, maybe two permanently-blocked jets after all that time) - I replaced it because it needed a new drum as well as a new set of ink, and I bought a Lexmark colour laser printer, twice the speed, with "starter" toner cartridges claimed to do the same number of pages as a standard set of ink for the Phaser for somewhere around 2/3rds the price of maintaining the Phaser. It uses less electricity too.

Then again, I was looking for a laser to recommend to a friend the other day and noticed that very, very few of the "affordable" models come with paper trays which can hold a full ream (500+ sheets of 80gsm) of paper. I even found one model where the optional 500-sheet tray cost more on its own than buying the printer + starter toner + 250 sheet tray!

Perhaps the problem is that in a domestic situation printers get such intermittent use that inkjets are bound to clog up. Perhaps in an office they're better? Back in the day when we had a photographic shop on our high street, their massive poster printing machine was essentially an inkjet and seemed to be working fine whenever I was in the shop. Then again, at the prices they charged for a poster print, perhaps they could afford to replace print heads fairly often.

Whatever happened to dye-sublimation printers? I still have a Canon Selphy 6" x 4" photo printer and have often wondered (cost aside) what one of those would be like to use as an everyday A4 machine.

As a final thought, and not wanting to be too cynical about profit from sales of ink, is this just a "not invented here" thing? Am I right to remember that Epson manufactures its own inkjets, but that Epson lasers are badge-manufactured by someone else? More in my line of work, Epson has never (to my knowledge) produced a DLP-based projector; all their projectors use LCD technology. LCDs have traditionally had lifetimes of well under 10,000 hours because the filters and the LCD shutters themselves degrade in the light from the discharge lamps. I have had DLP projectors from Panasonic which have lasted well over 30,000 hours - the originals of those replaced LCD units where the "optical block" was only specified for 4,500h. However, with lamps moving to Laser and LED-based units which are cooler and produce less UV, perhaps it's time to revisit LCD projectors, which can produce "nicer" images than (single-chip) DLP under some conditions.

M.

Perhaps the problem is that in a domestic situation printers get such intermittent use that inkjets are bound to clog up. Perhaps in an office they're better?

We wouldn't know. Nobody in their right mind would run an inkjet in an office, or for anything but very occasional light use.

A standard yield Epson 288 cartridge costs £17.16 and holds 3.2ml worth of ink, printing 175 pages with a cost of 9.8p per page in ink.

A Ricoh MPC 3003 cartridge costs £41.95 and does 29,500 pages and so costs 0.1p per page in toner.

While the startup costs of buying a photocopier are higher, by the time you'd printed the equivalent of one photocopier cartridge on an inkjet it'd have cost you so much on ink that it'd have been cheaper to buy a brand new photocopier. And you'd have saved 169 3ml single use plastic cartridges (and probably a couple of crappy dead inkjet printers) from going to landfill so it'd be better for the environment.

What about the huge piles of ink cartridges?

What about the huge piles of discarded inkjet printers?

This ^ ! People I know buy a new inkjet printer almost every year, as the old one always breaks down somehow (about the only thing you can rely upon on those printers).

And the ink cartridges on a brand I won't name have become so tiny they'll soon require tweezers to handle them. Of course they have lots of expensive throwaway electronics on them, "for your convenience" of course. "In the name of the environment", sure, pull the other one. It's just the money is in selling lots of crappy vastly overpriced ink cartridges, and and you can't permit laser printers allowing people to avoid buying them.

... you can re-cycle used cartridges.

However you will struggle to find a re-cycler.

We have one, a few miles away, that I have yet to visit.

Meanwhile, a pile of used cartridges rots away in the cupboard under the printer.

Ah well....

1. we're SO GREEN, LOOK!

2. sustainability of our bottom line is going - BONUS!

...inkjets have a "greater potential"

Cynical old me thinks, "That's true".

Not for the reasons stated by Epson but as others here have said, it's a ploy to pad their bottom line.

Inkjets are fine for colour work but I have yet to see an inkjet produce the quality of a laser printer for text and when you are sending letters to people quality counts.

As Marshall McLuhan said "The media is the message" and if you print out something that looks bad then you have managed to shoot yourself in the foot.

The other advantage of laser printers is that the print is waterproof. I have a laser printer just for the purpose of printing documentation and notices that are likely to become damp.

I'm sure that the solid ink phase printers that someone mentioned above are waterproof, by ink jet prints definitely run, even when laminated.

Without thinking first I tried to laminate a printout from a Phaser solid ink printer. It re-melted the ink and smeared the colours all over the inside of the laminate pouch. Obvious - after the event.

Yes, it was incredibly expensive in ink (huge wax crayons) and other consumables.

Especially good for postage labels. Inkjet in the rain is not a good look.....

"if you print out something that looks bad then you have managed to shoot yourself in the foot."

On the other hand given the general lack of grammar and in some cases coherent meaning in a lot of advertising stuff I get nowadays it might be better if it's not quite so clear: I had one the other day from a window company that I genuinely can't make sense of.

I have had 2 inkjet printers that cost more in never-used cartridges that clog after a few months than the entire printer. WFH with occasional printing needs, inkjet is the worst

That.

I had so many ink cartridges clog, or the "cleaning" cycle mostly empty the bloody thing, or the darndest thing just dry out that I am pretty sure the resource use of my laser printer is quite a bit slimmer. Yeah, it is only black I can print, but that covers almost all of my needs. Photos I print at the drug store, or through some website based service. I don't print a ton of stuff anyway.

... before that, my inkjet printers lasted about 2 years.

So I guess my laser printer is more sustainable than any inkjet printer.

Yep, the laser printer I mentioned above is a Brother - HL2150N - which is not only happily working, but Brother still provide Linux printer drivers for it (and even without the printers, it still works albeit at a lower resolution).

I should have grabbed a decommissioned laser printer from my last job, but I was also moving houses after my last job, and the missus wasn't keen on more junk to move. InkJet Never Again!

I bought a HP LaserJet 1200 in January 2002 (£235.45). It's still going strong, with just one replacement toner cartridge. I turn it off when not in use. The energy I use is miniscule compared to that needed to manufacture a new printer.

I don't use it very often, but I've just printed out 97 caving rigging guides from the [1]CNCC web site. It worked perfectly. No nozzles to clog. No [2]yellow tracking dots .

[1] https://cncc.org.uk/caving/topos/

[2] https://www.eff.org/issues/printers

From my personal experience :

I've bought Epson inkjet printers. About every two years when I was still using inkjet. Heads clogging, ink drying, etc, as has been said above, I've wasted God knows how much ink on so-called "cleaning" procedures.

Inkjets may be fine, but only at the condition that you are printing many pages every day. If you are printing a dozen pages a month, you're up shit creek without a paddle.

I bought a Samsung laser printer in 2010. It's still working fine, even when I only print a page a month.

Inkjets are green my ass.

see https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/26/which_printer_ink_costs_survey/

"Epson's Heat-Free inkjet technology consumes less electricity by using mechanical energy to fire ink onto the page." So we use a piezo instead ... powered by magic perhaps?

I'm probably one of the few who have a fully working older Epson inkjet (I'm currently hugging a tree for luck) but always use a laser for some jobs - archival 3 or 4 point onto archival card for instance because a) inkjet just can't do it well enough and b) inkjet costs a fortune to run ...

Do they no longer have a soaker in the bottom of the printer to fill with expensive ink (that the user pays for) which, when deemed "full", bricks the printer (which the user pays for) else the head blocks and bricks the printer (which the user pays for)? And of course there's the issue of brand new cartridges that fail to operate because they are beyond an arbitrary date set by Epson (that the user has paid for). A completely non maintainable/repairable system with built-in obsolescence of both device and consumables, what could be better?

Using a bit less electricity does not necessarily make something greener but greenwashing can improve profits ....

For volume printing, soy based inkjet technology (what we used to call Risograph) is the only sustainable solution compared to printing with the same volume of plastic (laser toner).

For individuals who don't need to print much - which is quite a few people these days - or for those who can't refill their cartridges - also most people - the lack of maintenance or inks drying out with a cheap laser printer blows the impact of the ink vs the toner out of the water. I'm in the same boat as commentards above, my old Samsung printer is going to [1]stop working with Windows before it runs out of ink on my usage patterns. The horrific amounts I used to spend on inkjet printing in the 90s and 00s to get something splodgy out at the end is a distant memory.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/25/microsoft_windows_22h2_printer/

My Epson inkjet printer worked for one year and a half, then refused to print. I had to buy several cartridges in between.

I bought then a Samsung laser, 5 years ago, and it is still working like a charm.

If I have the choice, I'll never ever buy or advice to buy an inkjet printer.

For now, when somebody asks me for a personal printer, I tell about a Brother laser printer.

== Bring us Dabbsy back! ==

We've just swapped out all our lasers, a mix of Xerox Phaser colours and Brother monos for Epson inkjets

We even swapped out the two big Toshiba bulk printers that do all the fancy foldy, staply, punchy things to booklets for a pair big Epson injets.

Genrally I'm finding the Epson Workforce Pro in my office to be quieter and quicker than the elderly Xerox Phaser colour printer it replaced.

The colours aren't as vivid though, but I'm not printing photos, so it's not an issue.

The thing I found most interesting is the big bag of black ink is supposed to last 50,000 pages, and works out at a shade over 2p a page if we buy the genuine Epson part, so I imagine that cost will plumet once we find a compatible supply.

On that note, I printed over 1,000 pages on Wednesday (we email the school reports home, but teachers are old school, so like a printed report on their desk for parents' evening) and it barely made a dent in the ink level bar, so I'm assuming the 50,000 page figure may be close to true.

I've had this printer for 3 weeks now, so I can't attest to its reliablilty or longevity, but I'm happy with it at the moment.

My tiny Samsung laser printer has a habit of telling me it can't continue because it needs more toner. Bollocks! Give it a shake or thump and the life is doubled. Printing technology is inherently dishonest. I'm sure even the butcher substitutes pig's blood for ox. But good news, you can get away with not actual goose feathers for quills. Works fine on goat, sheep, even hamster parchments.

I guess one of the beauties of the new Epson printers that use a bag of ink, they can't lie about being out of ink, you can tell when the bag is empty.

The same is ture of the HP Pagewide printers, you can tell when those cartridges are empty because they weigh almost nothing when out of ink.

Would that be A5 or even smaller?

Should read:

According to the company, inkjets have a "greater potential" than laser printers to make "meaningful advances" when it comes to the profit

...green washing at its highest. Inkjet runs out quickly and as others they make it difficult to use other inks. Not forgetting the inks are expensive.