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.
I use my HP printer infrequently enough that every time I booted up my inkjet, I had to put it through a printer head cleaning cycle. I’d be surprised if I got more than 20 sheets of paper for each cartridge do to the wasted ink, and the dang thing malfunctioned frequently even after cleaning (streaks, blots, complaining about missing colors when printing b/w, etc).
After switching to a Brother mono laser, I haven’t had to do any maintenance in 3 years and it’s still on the original toner cart which it came with.
This is the way.
Print at work.
If you can’t, print at an office supply store.
Seriously, how much do you need to print?
I love my mono laser printer. It’s an older Canon I got from a retired lawyer, so it has probably printed a million pages already for all I know. Haven’t had to futz with it since I popped in a new toner cartridge that was ~$40. If I need to print color, I go to the local copy store, but that’s rare anyways. Been recommending the same for all my friends and family.
IMHO, inkjet printers as a whole are a scam. That is, unless you buy a really high end one for professional photo printing.
From 15 years of experience in IT, and with home printing:
Many inkjet printer manufacturers will refuse to print if you insert non-oem cartridges. Just because one model will allow you to dismiss a warning doesn’t mean they all will. I’ve seen people waste a lot of money doing this.
The ink injections are also tricky. What I’ve seen is that the ink ends up leaking all over the inside of your printer, or worse, the printer will refuse to print it because it knows it’s been tampered with.
Also, unless you have a specific use case for an inkjet (design work, photo prints, etc), just get a cheap laser. Or if you don’t print that much, just throw your documents on a flash drive and go to your local office supply store. Or library.
As for re-manufactured cartridges, especially for laser: stay away. I’ve seen them time and time and time and time again burst in the printer and spill toner all over the place. This kills the machine. So the $50 you might save on a cartridge will end up costing you hundreds or thousands in the long run.
The whole damned industry is predatory, built for lock-in, and designed to fuck you over. It really sucks. But there’s no reliable way around it.
