Consumer, commonly found inkjets are absolutely crammed with.. I was going to say "dark patterns", but it's an euphemism when your product is being rendered unusable due to a fixed number in its firmware, so maybe.. criminal? They've been doing this for more than a decade and an half, and the rationale behind the ink pads does not hold up, at least in my experience.. being an incredibly easy replacement if they ever were a problem, you still have to get it officially serviced to have the page count reset, at an hefty price from what I recall. You also cannot use the scanner if it has one when the counter hits the limit. Luckily, there exist programs that give you ownership of the machine back, one of which I recall being named antipampers, that you can find un-demoed online too, and it sure came in handy all the times I had to resort to it for myself and others. Don't buy these printers.
Really happy with my HP LaserJet Pro M15W Printer so far... Bought it only about 2 years ago but I print almost daily and didn't even have to replace the toner.
Head cleaning is a legit necessity with inkjets, and avoiding clogging is probably why it doesn't power off fully.
Of course that doesn't negate all the other scams, like the cost of ink or the refusal to work with third party ink, print b&w without a color cartridge, scan without ink, etc etc... New low-cost HP printers come with a vendor-locked ink-as-a-service scheme (no I am not making this up) you can't opt out from.
I bought a b&w duplex laser printer and use it with non-genuine toners. If you enjoy reading from paper its a good investment imho.
I have had the cheaper Brothers for a while- I upgraded mine to a wi-fi model after the first one broke 10 years in. Pretty happy with it, sure the first one broke after being moved around many times, but I got an enormous value out of it.
The Brother $100 black and white laser is quite civilized. And printers have come so far since the old days. I plug that motherfucker in and I can print to it from my phone, immediately!
I also own a couple of Brother black and white laser printers. They are quite durable and cheap to operate. Way way way better than any inkjet.
The only complaint I have is that after a large number of pages the printer will insist that the toner cartridge needs to be replaced and will just stop printing, even if the printer output darkness is still acceptable. Quite annoying if you need to print urgently! Fortunately I found a youtube video with a work-around you can enter into the UI on the printer.
At least with the Brother printers I've owned (and some of which I still do), they actually shine a light through a small bit of clear plastic in the toner cartridge. Taking that cartridge out, giving it a good shake (outside, no need for adding potentially cancer-inducing toner dust in your room), and putting it back in will make the printer work again.
> Odd that you had to throw 'hard-earned' in there like it adds anything (unless it does but I can't tell)
If money fell from the sky in abundance and could be exchanged for new printers there would be no problems with these shenanigans. Assuming that money is scarce and money spent on a printer means something else will have to remain on the back burner does change things.
Point is, isn't all money 'hard earned' for us who don't inherit it (sadly the greatest majority of the population), I mean that's the point of money in capitalism, about allocation of scarce resources, so why even mention it.
To emphasize and focus the reader's attention on a particular property of money the writer would like to highlight. Money has many properties, and emphasizing the relevant one helps the writer to communicate their meaning more clearly. It also helps to express the writer's frustration at the printer manufacturer's behavior. In that way, it serves much the same purpose as the irrelevant adverb "sadly" you added to your parenthetical aside.
Submitted title was "Epson Didn't Kill Itself". Please don't rewrite titles like that! It's against the site guidelines, which say "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
If you’re OK with smaller prints then I’d recommend a small dye-sublimation printer like a Canon Selphy.
The quality is not as good as the very best inkjets but it’s good enough if you’re not exhibiting your photos.
The reliability though is amazing. I have an old Selphy printer from the 90s that still works perfectly from certain cameras. There’s nothing to dry out or spill.
It just works.
I have replaced it but only because the USB implementation seems too old to be recognised by many modern devices.
The Selphy I replaced it with I expect to run and run.
For everything else I use a Brother colour laser.
Canon, Epson or HP inkjets are a fool’s purchase. I’ve been that fool before, never again.
I had the opposite experience. My Canon ES1 Selphy died after not much use. Paper stopped feeding, sounded like grinding plastic gears.
Tried the recommended things to fix but couldn't fix. I liked the quality of the prints even if they were a bit pricey per print.
Upright design of ES1 didn't help, since the paper must do a 90 degree turn like it's performing a stunt! Just to reach the output tray. All in a creaking plastic box. I respect Canon cameras but not my old Selphy ES1. Sorry!
Got an Epson photo eco-tank and it's good. No stress about running out of ink. Nozzles haven't clogged and I like the quality, it is well made printer the Epson ecotank, at least the model I have.
Previous Epson printers - hated the cost of ink and clogged nozzles.
I wonder how much paper I need to go through to get myself an Epson end of life message! I doubt I will print/waste that much paper. Funny how some are concerned about the e-waste implications of printing a truck load of A4.
No need to apologise, it's useful to hear about another anecdata point (vs my own. :D )
I've only used the CP range of Selphy printers. These are flat, horizontal designs where the paper travels out one side and back again. They sound much simpler mechanically than a vertical machine.
I think I pay about £0.20 to £0.40 a photo (paper + ink) where as my local supermarket prints for about £0.07 each, so there are cheaper options but I'd bet still cheaper than buying and running a high end Epson inkjet.
I buy bulk paper+ink packs and print pretty rarely. Since it never goes off (I've used 20 year old stock before) it just sits in the box until the family comes round.
I'm glad you're getting good service from your inkjet but I'd never buy another one.
What I really hated about my Epson and Canon inkjets is the driver software. It's overly big and very rent seeky. It tries desperately to sell you stuff like ink, paper or photo storage, none of which is competitive price wise. On the Mac I needed third party software to remove it completely.
The experience soured me on both brands, (old Selphy printers excluded).
Recently bought an older Laserjet off CL. HL-4040CN.
The autofeed tray was broken, but the manual feed tray still worked.
A steal at $100 and cheaper, easier and more reliable even in the short run than trying to unclog the 2 inkjets my wife and I both brought to the marriage.
What do you mean 'a thing'? They're hugely popular in offices and increasingly in residential environments as people (very) slowly pick up on the offensive economics of feeding a bubblejet.
I picked up a Brother (L3510CDW) colour laser + scanner a few years ago. It was slightly more expensive than a bubblejet, but consumables and maintenance will mean TCO is way lower. Brother seem to have some of the better support for GNU/Linux & CUPS these days - this thing Just Worked (over the network, too) on Debian with I think one package from the standard repos.
Also, the printer from your childhood was limited to black and whatever colour paper you fed into it, not black and white.
I meant ‘are they being produced anymore’, ‘would you still recommend them’, etc.
>> Also, the printer from your childhood was limited to black and whatever colour paper you fed into it, not black and white.
I wouldn’t have known - it’s not exactly like I was the person purchasing the toner, and I was simply told by my Dad that it printed in black and white only.
At that age, I was just grateful to be able to print my Winnie-the-Pooh fan fiction. :P
Laser printers have been the most versatile B&W printing tech more or less since they were invented, and the best-looking for most of their existence.
For photo prints, you are far better off just paying per page for commercial products, though color lasers are pretty good for simple things like colored charts. A really good color printer costs a lot; it's far cheaper to rent the use of one when you need it.
I used an HP LaserJet 4+, upgraded to 4M+ by adding a PostScript board, and adding memory to get it into the 30-something MB range. That was 12 ppm printing speed. I replaced it with a much-lighter Brother HL-2140 (22 ppm) when I had owned it for about 10 years, during which I replaced the toner once. The Brother is now almost 10 years old, still working just fine, though I have replaced the toner twice.
I could replace it, but why? It still does what I bought it to do.
Fair enough. I'd looked at your profile and assumed you'd have come across plenty of laser printers at large orgs like LEGO & Universal Music. I guess the swathe of energetic replies to your first question have now convinced you, in any case.
It's a bit of a trope, people calling monochrome printers black & white -- they don't print the white areas, of course. Some light-yellow paper would have been appropriate for the fanfic. : )
IMO if you print only occasionally at home, laser printers are the way to go. No more frantically realizing that all my print heads are gummed up 2 days before taxes are due.
Laser printers are really bad in terms of energy use if you don't turn them off (the toner is kept warm at all times) and interior air pollution, two problems inkjet printers avoid entirely.
Yes, don't expect photo quality from them, but if you want some documents, or tickets or what ever in paper form they are perfect. And you don't need to care about drying up ink.
They're the best thing. They print at screaming high speed, with none of the problems of inkjets. Every inkjet printer I've ever owned has ultimately made me want to throw it in a wood chipper. I got a Brother HL-L2300D a couple years ago and have been thoroughly impressed, no wood chipper impulses so far.
I've had zero cases where I needed to print color. If I want to print photos I just order them at Shutterfly and pick them up in less than an hour at the Walgreens around the corner.
Yes. They can be purchased new with color or B&W. Old HPs from 20+ years ago are still running fine as well. Modern color lasers have the same problem as inkjets with tracking dots printed on every page so there is utility in keeping a B&W laser around.
I just bought a new Kyocera ECOSYS P2235dw laser printer. Still black and white, but I haven't had a paperjam yet, unlike my HP5600, which has a ceremonial paper jam every time it wakes from a deep sleep, or my old HP 1606n, which occasionally just couldn't print a particular PS or PDF. Didn't need Windows to get the Kyocera on my network, and they provided a .ppd that works with CUPS. Hasn't automatically upgraded itself over the network either.
Don't underestimate impact dot-matrix printers as well. They still have the lowest cost per page if you don't mind the rather sub-par quality and are printing a lot.
Former printer tech here - waste ink pads are common in inkjets, and definitely not an issue exclusive to Epson. After all, the ink that it sucks through priming on start up/shut down/idle has to go somewhere.
It's not that straightforward to modify the machine to make the parts user replaceable. I know in Canon inkjets, at least, this was my least favourite job - the entire printer has to be disassembled from the top-down (including a number of springs and the decoder strip) to get to the pads. Most of the cost is in labour, not the parts.
Looking at the video linked in the article showing Epson waste ink pad replacement, it actually looks like a pretty simple process with a couple of screws. Much easier than Canon's procedure of disassembling the whole unit from the top down.
But if you add in even just 20 minutes of (messy) labour in the Epson scenario, that's where the cost becomes more than replacing the unit.
It's unfortunate, but at least they don't do what HP does with their inkjets... if we're accusing anyone of malice when it comes to inkjets, it should definitely be HP.
Waste ink pads are a necessary evil for inkjet printers. Cheap home printers don't get use replaceable ink pads for cost reasons. The Epson Workforce line that uses high capacity ink pouches does (they're called "maintenance boxes"). I don't get the outrage in the article, as filling the ink pad even in consumer printers takes tens of thousands of pages, even hundreds of thousands for sprinter used multiple times a day that doesn't need to flush ink.
The outrage is that these machines are designed to fail. If it's a wear part, make it user replaceable. Programming the printer to just stop working is horrible.
Replaceable wear parts cost extra money, and consume extra resources (which cost is a great proxy for). Many consumer products will never be used enough to make user-replace-ability cost effective or an effective use of resources. If you want to find evidence of this, look at all the computer and other consumer grade that is thrown away with no failed wear items (thrown out due to changes in preferences, obsolescence, or poor maintenance).
>look at all the computer and other consumer grade that is thrown away with no failed wear items
One of my hobbies is rescuing these devices from E-Waste, so I'm acutely aware of them. The huge difference is that these devices are usually pretty out-of-date.
Sure, that first generation iPad that went into an otterbox on day one is just fine, mechanically. But can a normal person use it to do much of anything useful? The youtube app doesn't work. Safari won't load any webpages. The app store loads, but most apps (even compatible ones!) won't install.
Not even just things being "too slow", they can't speak modern protocols.
Printers haven't changed that much. When's the last time there was a change to PostScript that made old printers not just obsolete, but unusable?
I agree that these devices are usually able to accomplish useful tasks, but they're still being thrown away in massive numbers. If you find a way to re-allocate or otherwise re-use these devices, more user-serviceability will be worthwhile, but that's a big 'if'.
There's enough E-Waste being generated without these sorts of anti-user moves.
Those old devices you're talking about were thrown out because they are old. Not because they were designed to fail. I pull PowerBooks from this era out of the trash literally every week. They're basically useless to anyone but collectors. They still work! But they're not very useful for modern tasks, for most people. Sure, giganerds like me can get use out of them. But good luck finding software to run on them...
Everything is designed to fail, the only questions are when and how. These printers are designed to stop working before the absorbent pad is full/used up. My guess is that most of these printers are thrown away long before the 'soft-failure' is triggered.
I reject your notion that everything is designed to fail. I regularly use machines that are older than you are. They certainly were not designed to fail.
The waste pad on every professional grade inkjet printer I've ever seen is a snap-fit part that costs under $25.
But no, defend this practice of throwing away a printer because a sponge is saturated.
I work in an electronics OEM, and I can tell you that all our products have a variety of age-related failure modes. We design them to last a long time, but not forever. LEDs age, as do capacitors, transistors, and batteries. Electro-mechanical systems are even worse!
So you're not designing them to fail, your designing them to last at least X years/uses (but it can last more in theory).
In this case, the printers are literally designed to fail. Once you get to an arbitrary number of uses, you can no longer use them, independently of the device state.
Assuming a replaceable waste pad is around $25. What fraction of a $50 printer is that?
Canon TS302 Wireless Inkjet Printer https://a.co/d/3SjlJbB (not Epson, but cheap inkjet; there were a handful of Epsons under $100).
I solved this problem for our house in the sensible way: with a color HP3600N laser and a B&W multi-function HP (I think a 252), but there’s clearly a cost to make a part user-serviceable that doesn’t strictly have to be and if you’re trying to sell a printer in the $50-90 range, $5 of parts matters.
In this case it amounts to a replaceable sponge. Inkjets already have elaborate mechanisms to support replacement of cartridges. There is no cost justification for omitting something so simple other than driving future demand with forced obsolescence.
I think a fine compromise would be simply disclosing the expected lifetime of the wear parts when you purchase the printer. Epson could say "the lifetime of the ink pads is around 100,000 pages" (or whatever).
The outrage is not that Epson doesn't make it easy to replace the part.
The outrage is that Epson printers (might?) have a secret page counter and the printers kill themselves after a certain number of pages whether or not the ink pads still work. Even if the user replaces the ink pads, the printer will still refuse to work because the counter is used up.
This sort of behavior is unethical, user hostile, and should be criminal.
There is likely no way to detect how full the ink pad is though. A counter does make perfect sense but it should be legally required to allow the user to replace the pad and reset the counter. Most service alerts are based on usage counters.
But all of this is very specific and complex so there isn’t enough demand for laws to mandate such things.
there's room for the law to mandate disclosure of any built-in expiry mechanism - e.g., # of pages printed before printer stops working.
I think the problem is with the fact that this is just not disclosed properly, before a purchase decision is made, as it's not apparent that such a expiry mechanism can exist!
Even if it was disclosed I don’t think it would help users all that much. There is already too much info to take in. The problem is that a printer is just not worth that much so buyers would rather just get whatever seems good and if it breaks in a few years they get a new one. People don’t have time to audit part lifetimes and compare the market when buying a $200 printer.
> Even if it was disclosed I don’t think it would help users all that much. There is already too much info to take in.
But it definitely wouldn't harm them, so even if the expected benefit is small it's still net positive. Whether it is worth their time to evaluate the market should be the customer's decision to make.
Tens of thousands isn't a large enough number to be reassuring. I use an Ecotank 4500, and because of the nature of my work buy paper five reams at a time. So far I have 13k sheets on the clock. If the printer fails at 20-30k, I'm going to be seriously annoyed. Fortunately it seems that aftermarket waste ink collectors exist, though there is always a concern that Epson might shut these down with legal or technical measures. However this doesn't address a major concern: I bought this printer for availability. Cheaper running costs are important, of course, but what really matters to me is that it should not suddenly refuse to work. Yes, I have another printer on a different site, but I don't want to have to trog over there late at night because some damn fool has (a) not designed for maintenance; (b) put in a misleading error message; and (c) not designed in a warning of the lines of "this printer will cease to function after approximately 5000 more sheets.
Why does the scanner need to stop working then? It is independent and requires no use of ink. There is no confusion why this is the way it is to anyone here thinking critically for 2 seconds.
Isn't this a design flaw, and such printers can be returned in (atleast most) EU countries? If there is a flaw, that existed when you bought the device, that prevents you doing the thing you bought the device for, you can return the device to the seller to get them to either fix it or to get a refund.
If every time some manufacturer decided to do stupid stuff like this, 80% of their customers returned the devices to get refunds, they would maybe actually stop with the shitty behaviour.
But what fraction of people are actually going to take their device in to get a fix or a refund? In the EU your right to a refund for a malfunctioning product only lasts 2 years, so only the fraction of users who notice a problem before that time limit would even have the opportunity to bring it in. Then there is a decent chunk of the population that doesn't want to go through the effort of turning it in (which also incentivizes overly burdensome return workflows). Then there might be some people who notice the problem and would be willing to go through the effort of returning it, but mistakenly believe that the problem was their fault instead of a defect (incentivizing arcane error codes and unintuitive maintenance procedures). The real refund percentage could easily be low enough that the increase in sales from bad design practices is still worth it. And of course that's assuming the company selling it is a single rational entity - if the product development head gets rewarded based on short term sales and won't suffer the consequences of returns months or years down the road, then even a high refund rate won't necessarily stop bad behavior.
It's interesting how a market has also formed around offering services (often pay-per-use!) to reset the counter. I'm ambivalent about that; on the one hand, they did do some RE work to figure out how to reset the counter, but on the other hand, it seems just as predatory --- and I'm honestly surprised that there doesn't seem to be many who have sniffed the communications necessary to do the reset and published it freely yet. Here is one of the few projects I found; note the very short list of supported models:
You don't need a crowdsourced, open-source, open-hardware printer. Just buy a decent laser printer off-the-shelf with proprietary hardware and firmware. You can buy 3rd party cartridges (or even just toner to refill your existing carts) for dirt cheap on Ebay.
This is nonsense, cost of the printer is a very valid reason if you don't print very often. And what if you already bought the printer? Your solution involves trashing all existing printers, not very economical or ecological.
Laser printers can be bought for $100 now. Cost is not a valid reason.
Your solution involves getting an army of unpaid volunteers to take on a pet project that you think is important. That's not even realistic. If you think it's so important, I look forward to seeing your github page about it.
I think the overlap between people with the skills to do this and who care about printing is close to zero.
I suspect this is also why printer software/firmware is so terrible to begin with. The best, or even just decent developers are not working on printers.
You can buy something like that; they're just a few orders of magnitude more expensive than the majority of people would be willing to pay for a printer.
I'm referring to industrial machines using bulk ink (by the barrel), which come with full service literature and have parts availability. Unfortunately, besides the price, they are also relatively low resolution and designed for volume instead of print quality.
This would be a huge deal for more rare/advanced types of printing such as Piezography
Oddly it seems like a simpler problem than 3d printers? You could literally even expose a sheet of photo paper pretty well with a formlabs printer if the paper was UV sensitive.
You're assuming there's a huge army of volunteers available to tackle these problems. Most likely, any open-source developers irritated by this crap simply don't buy Epson printers, knowing this about them, or better yet just don't buy inkjet printers. You can get laser printers rather cheaply these days, even with color, and avoid all the problems inherent in inkjets.
On the other hand, there seems to be no shortage of 3D printing projects; yet I find myself using a 2D printer far more often than I have ever had a need for a 3D one.
I would imagine it’s because it’s easy to buy a printer that works from someone other than Epson, Canon or HP.
When I got fed up of poor quality multi-megabyte driver downloads and cartridges that dry put after a month of inactivity I bought a Brother laser printer.
It prints from Windows, Linux and macOS without a driver download and it never dries out.
3D printers are much simpler than 2D printers, in terms of manufacturing the parts. Aside from the extruder area, the parts are simple mechanical off the shelf (or at least simple to manufacture) parts plus some machined or 3D printed interface parts. Most of the complex parts are not unique to a 3D printer and thus they are mass produced and cheap.
Many of the important parts in a laser or inkjet printer Have traits like tiny, precise, fluid-tight, even high voltage. And they are only made for printers, they aren’t commodity parts you can just buy. Just getting the parts to make one printer would probably cost 2 orders of magnitude more than buying a printer.
I’m also surprised why there isn’t any disruption in this space. If planned obsolescence in printers is so obvious and problematic, it would seem to me that creating a printer that doesn’t follow the dark patterns would just sell like hot cakes?
Epson actually has a line doing this, the Epson EcoTank series. They're excellent. The fact that Epson is playing both games clearly means that many consumers are not taking the long-term view here.
In college I bought an HP LaserJet 5. It was old then, well past EOL, but was fully functional and previous owners had added a network card, so Icould add it to my appartment’s network and we all shared it. It printed thousands of pages with no trouble at all.
Recently after starting to WFH I realized how much I like reading contracts or longer docs on actual paper, and how much the kids ask to print work out. I’ve never had an inkjet last more than a year. I found a Canon C743 online second hand, and it’s printed flawlessly and quickly for several years now. It was $175 down from $450, not much more than a high end ink jet. I scan a lot more than I print too, so the AIO is great.
Lasers have quick print times, even better in volume, much more serviceable, don’t dry out, ink lasts ages, etc. the biggest issue with inkjets is that you need to use them often or they dry out, and the cartridges don’t hold much either. To infrequent printers they’re effectively single-use.
Inkjets typically sell themselves on photo quality, but photos are far more economically printed at better quality and consistency at a CVS or Walgreens. Typically our local stores do same day printing of basic photos for very very little, far less than inkjet ink.
Lasers have quick print times, even better in volume, much more serviceable, don’t dry out, ink lasts ages, etc. → all these problems have been solved by the Epson Ecotank series as far as I'm concerned. Laser printers are terrible in terms of interior air pollution and idle current.
I only did laser too, for years, until I checked out the new high capacity ink jet printers. It’s pretty much just an ink jet that you pay full price for (over $300), and it has huge buckets each of CMYK. When they run out, you buy new ones in bottles the size of a small mustard container for under 20 bucks.
Now I get color on every page, and those wonderful, ink jet blacks I’ve been missing. And per page, it’s cheaper! Those laser cartridges are really expensive.
Sure, it’s slow per page, but I only print a page or two at a time.
Oh, and you refill the ink, not replace the cartridge. So if the printer company ever decides to charge $100 for a refill, sourcing it somewhere else should be trivial.
at this point I don't think there is a single inkjet printer manufacturer that is not highly abusive to the consumer.
buy a brother black and white laser printer and just don't print stuff in color (or better yet, try really hard to find a reason not to print things at all).
I would be super happy to have a water heater that shut itself down before it got worn out and leaked water all over my floor. A reset utility that kept it running for a few weeks more till I arranged for service or replacement would be even better. And sure, I am against paternalism and unprotected water heaters / inkjets should be available for those either knowledgeable or stupid enough to want them. But a default consumer product should shut down before it's at risk of doing something horrible, like spilling inks that are designed to be permanent over an expensive carpet.
They aren't comparable to a water heater rupture. It's like comparing a heart attack to a tiny splinter. My anecdata tells me this isn't a big issue (ink spillage). I've taken old printers apart and yes I got ink on my fingers from the soaked pads but I wasn't in anyway thinking OMG - this thing is about to blow!
Presumably you were not taking printers apart on top of your grandparents' heirloom dresser than you didn't wish to get stained. I would rather my gadgets disable themselves than spoil my furniture or give me splinters, when these are foreseeable possibilities.
When waste ink absorbers are full, a fault condition is spilling ink out the bottom of the printer... mainly when (some) non-genuine inks are used. I've seen it happen a few times.
I did the same by buying a Brother B/W laser printer. I think it may be the only reliable printer I've ever owned. The rest (both expensive and cheap) were junk.
HP did the same with their CD writers in the late 1990's. They would only write a certain number of CDs and then would fail. Reflashing the ROM counter would fix the issue.
I think the better Epson printers have a ‘maintenance box’ which absorbs excess ink and can be replaced.
In general borderless printing causes a lot of hassles. A borderless print looks like a traditional photo print in that the printing extends to the edges of the paper but actually the problem is that the printer doesn’t control the position of the paper exactly so it prints an image that extends off the edges of the paper so some traces of ink have to get absorbed.
One consequence is that something on the edge of a borderless print can be cut off so if something is important to the composition you have to leave some extra space.
I hear stories of people who use off-brand inks who have terrible messes with those ink pads used for borderless printing. As resentful as you might get about printer manufacturers, off-brand ink is not consistent with getting good results.
> One consequence is that something on the edge of a borderless print can be cut off so if something is important to the composition you have to leave some extra space.
In the printing industry it's nothing new, it's called bleed.
It's kind of sad how greedy corporations destroys how I enjoy and want to use technology (TV, telephone calls, printers, web search...).
I used to have a printers, but they all turned out to be unreliable and frustrating to use, so I just stopped buying them. Luckily my work and local library has a printer, so I can print documents the couple of times a year I really need one.
Honestly, with the lack of documents that really need printouts these days, I just go to local UPS and spend a few dollars a year on what I do need to print out, instead of spending however much money on a printer that mostly collects dust.
Sincerely I thought this was common knowledge. Had an Epson several years ago that stopped working all of a sudden, and while I was searching the internet trying to figure out what happened, many people complained not only about that specific model but about all Epsons in general for their shameless planned obsolescence.
I feel like the analogy to a car requiring potentially expensive work/replacement parts isn’t reasonable, as you only have to replace those parts when they actually die, not at some random fixed point (as much as dealer-workshops may try to convince you otherwise)
It seems pretty analogous to an air filter or oil filter to me. You do eventually have to replace these. It's a consumable part that is required for the product to function. The differences seem to be that a) the lifetime of the ink pad is not told to you and b) you can't replace the consumable yourself.
Drafting “right to repair” legislation strikes me as tricky, but this feels like a perfect example of what it should be pushing.
Consumables like this should be standardized; if they aren’t, they should be manufactured for a guaranteed minimum period of time by their manufacturer. Maintenance should be something I can do myself, or I can take it to an independent servicer or a dealer.
I’m not saying cars don’t have consumables, I’m saying a car doesn’t brick itself when it decides that you’ve driven sufficient miles to need to replace the relevant filters. That you can replace your filters yourself is a secondary (though related) issue.
Doesn't belt wear produce noticeable symptoms prior to actual failure? I recall timing belt issues at least being noticeable prior to them failing - the only sudden failure I am aware of was when the engine dropped out of the bottom of my parents car when I was a kid - and honestly you could have argued that that car was itself evidence that everything in it needed to be replaced.
The Epson ink tank printers do take reasonably priced replacement ink pad units.[1] But they're hard to get, and replacing them with the OEM part will not reset the counter which stops the device. Only an "authorized service center", or some third party programs from sketchy sources, does that.
I have one of those, but I print so little that I usually have to do the cleaning procedure before printing.
I have an old Epson printer and have been using it with a continuous ink system. It has some big 3rd party tanks of ink that get connected with flexible tubes.
It works pretty well and clogs once in a while. At first I thought it was impossible to fix a clog besides self-cleaning on the printer. There's a solvent called "CoYlBod Printhead Cleaning Kit Printer Flush Kit" which you warm and inject into the heads. In the case of my printer, there's a blotter on the bottom that absorbs spilled ink and lets it dry. It won't leak outside the printer. You can put some paper towels inside the printer under the heads to absorb solvent and ink.
At this point, I think I'd be more satisfied with doing all my printing and scanning at a print shop if I don't have an employer that has a printer and scanner available for me. More peace of mind, less anger.
Even the professional Epson SureColor 800 ($1200+) have that problem. When you have to buy five of them to keep up with your businesses' workflow (one of my clients), it starts to cost money one cannot spend.
Just curious, I have an SC800 (the model has been discontinued). I've used the printer (fairly lightly) and not run into issues (yet anyway). Not real clear what limits to number of prints or other EOL criteria you've observed. Interesting that up to now haven't heard/read about such problems.
It's not that straightforward. When people will start buying more of them, they'll fall for the same tricks too. Here's a recent example. You must fight for consumer rights instead of jumping ship to the least worst.
I've heard that they have become less user-friendly in later iterations, but I'm using a 10-year-ish old Brother (PDF user manual is dated 2009, so the design is at least that old), and all I've done in that time is feed it paper and change the toner once. They were (and may still be) well-built and inexpensive, and they're reasonably fast (mine is 22 ppm, vs my previous 1994-design LaserJet 4+ that was far heavier and did 12 ppm). Somewhat ironically, the old 12 ppm print speed would be just fine for anything I needed to do these days - I don't do big prints - but the Brother has a very-low-power mode that the HP didn't, so it costs very little to keep it on and ready to accept AirPrint jobs.
If all it takes to be a corporate shill is "it's inexpensive, it's reliable, and it's easy to use and maintain, based on over 10 years of personal use", then they owe me a few hundred bucks in commissions.
