Is a 1992 hp laser printer and still works perfectly other than having to prop the paper tray up with some books since the connector pieces are broken.Oh and a side cover piece went missing - but doesn’t affect function. No scanner though.
@Kidsandliz The Japanese made print engines in the American made printers were like the old diesel mercedes. They just keep running. We had to give up our LaserJet 6P finally because the shelf it was on broke (we overloaded it) and it smashed onto a tile floor. Still mostly worked… but too expensive to repair…
I have a boring old b/w hp laserjet. Microsoft keeps putting out new OS’s that “aren’t compatible” with it, but at least three times now I’ve found a way to keep it truckin’.
… got cut up for parts when @miraclewhispers left for college (she didn’t want it… she hated it and was the only person able to make it print).
I now use a printer at work, tho I probably print less than 15-20 pages a year, if that. Pretty much everything that I used to need to print is now handled without paper (taxes, NYCFC parking at Yankee Stadium and coupons for BJ’s Warehouse Club).
Yankee Stadium Parking’s Five Facilities
YSP 1: 153rd Street Garage, 71 East 153rd Street, Bronx, NY - $35 Self Park
YSP 2: 161st Street Garage, 20 East 161st Street, Bronx, NY - $40 Self Park
YSP 3: Gerard Avenue Lot, 1011 Gerard Avenue, Bronx, NY - $35 Self Park, $175 Bus
YSP 4: River Avenue Garage, 950 River Avenue, Bronx, NY - $40 Self Park
YSP 5: Ruppert Plaza Garage, 1 Macombs Dam Park, Bronx NY - $40 Self Park
The River Avenue Garage is $425 ($25 a match) for the season package this year.
I pay ~$140 per match for two seats, the parking, gas and tolls; food and drink is usually ~$50 for two. My seats are covered, so rain and sun are not issues.
FWIW, If I used public transportation, my 60-70 minute round trip travel time would be ~2.5 hours (saving $16) or ~4.5 hours (saving $34).
@hchavers We still have one of those at work; one customer still needs to do multi-part carbonless forms, and you gotta have impact for that. Okidata for the everlasting win.
BTW if you have a ribbon cartridge, you may be able to pry it open (top is often a friction fit or not too heavily glued). Mask around it and lightly spray WD-40 on the ribbon (you’ll see the top edge). Put the ribbon cartridge back together and let it sit for a few days before using.
I had a rare dot matrix printer that nobody carried ribbons for. The WD40 trick worked twice on each ribbon I had.
… is a Brother HL-2380-DW. I print documents almost daily. I spend about $6/year on toner replacement. Please don’t buy an inkjet printer. Get your color prints at a print shop if you need them, or get a color laser printer if you’re not printing photos.
@ruouttaurmind I’ve seen some laser printer photos and they’re getting pretty good, but not nearly as good as a good inkjet. I’m thinking of upgrading to a color laser printer in the near future though.
@jibbyjam1 I bought an Epson with the EcoTank. While overall printer cost was higher, the amount of ink it holds for dirt cheap more than makes up for the ability to print color whenever I want. When not printing color I normally use my Brother laser.
Have a new HP ink jet that uses the Instant Ink. I love it. I dont buy ink. HP sends it to me, no charge, and includes a prepaid return envelope to send back the empty cartridges for recycling. I pay $0.05 per page. All day, every day. HP got this right on printer ink-as-a-service. No more looking to buy ink at 10pm on Sunday night. Not going back to Epson.
Instant Ink is the shizzle.
And if you’re a really low volume printer they even have a free service at like 15 pages a month. You can up/down your level each month and it’s the bees knees.
@awk What @Collin1000 said. The lowee plans ($5/$10$/15 per month) give you a “pre-purchased” block of pages at your per page price. If you go over, you buy $1 worth of pages at whatever your per page price is. If you go under, you rollover the pages you’ve already paid for. So you literally pay $X per page and spend zero time or money on anything else. If you have a bump in printing, you can go up a level, and then switch back after, even in the current month if you did a lot of printing that month.
The team that developed and ran this project at HP did a great job top to bottom.
I have a fancy Xerox Phaser and it’s huge, but it prints two-sided and I’ve only bought new toner twice in 10 years. Which is good because that stuff is mind-numbingly expensive.
/image mind-numbingly expensive
I’ve had 3 or 4 inkjet printers over the years, but I have never emptied an ink cartridge. The print heads and cartridges always dry up and no amount of “Clean the Heads” or alcohol swabs ever gets them working again. Then it’s always cheaper to buy a new printer than to replace the ink cartridges.
I bought a Pixma last time you sold it because my printer was broken. Then someone linked a similar one for twenty bucks that included ink. So now I have two crap printers and one is still in the box in my closet. And the ink lights are flashing. I guess I need to go buy ink. Fuck.
Is an HP all in one that takes up a ton of space but is essential about once a month and more than six years old. I only have a black ink cartridge in it which is at least a year old with a (new in box) spare bought at a yard sale. The scanner is hardly used because I have a portable one which is much easier to use for most things.
My boss bought this for me (on sale for $60) to create slideshows from photos of our work.
I still have my old HP printer with a few spare ink cartridges in the closet.
I have an Epson Workforce WF-3620.
/image Epson Workforce WF-3620
It’s a decent AIO printer, wireless, cloud-capable. Best part is I modded it with CISS and it costs like nothing operate. I have the room for it, so not a big deal, but it’s been a beast and runs forever. The only real downside (as with most inkjets) is the nozzles occasionally get clogged. When it’s really bad, I can shoot a little windex into the heads and it clears it up.
I have / had this printer. It’s sitting in the closet, waiting for its date with destiny (at the local electronics recycling yard).
I love/loved this printer. It was a real workhorse and the quality was great.
But after it sat about a month the printhead clogged and no amount of Windex, alcohol, or other YouTube fixes were going to resurrect it. I got maybe 90% of the dots working, but no more.
Because I loved the printer (and it fit perfectly under the seat of my RV/mobile office) I thought, “Well, I’ll just replace the print head.” Wrong! The price of the print head is about what I paid for the printer.
This has been a great experience for me, because, now, it’s a small Brother color laser. At about the price Epson wanted for the printhead alone!
And for six months I haven’t spent a cent on consumables, and the quality is terrific.
I’ll never buy another inkjet as long as I live.
Disclaimer: I’m old; that may not be a very long time.
@simssj You and me both. I bought a small Dell (made by Brother) all in one b/w laser several years ago and I just replaced the cartridge for the first time last month for $18. I will never inkjet again.
@simssj I have a Workforce WP-4530 and I had the same experience. It worked great for about a year, but now the black ink is clogged and the printer is pretty much useless. I have to make a document all color in order for anything to print. It’s pretty much just a scanner at this point.
I’ve got some kind of mildly fancy-looking small / home office Canon all-in-one that I got as a gift several years ago. In all the time since, I have never placed toner in it or printed anything at home.
we used to have one, but it finally croaked after a house fire. his name was prince. we want to replace it but not with inkjet. i have a few projects i want to complete and after that we’d probably use it once a year to print car/dmv related stuff.
I have 2 hp 6p laserjets that I bought from goodwill 10 years ago and the one I use is still going. I bought the other one for a spare. they were $15 each
Brother HL-2280DW B&W laser for most things
Epson XP-810 color inkjet for when I need color or batches of 2 sided stuff printed/copied/scanned, or CD/DVD labels printed directly on the disc (YES I still make DVDs of video now and then…)
Love them both for different reasons, kind of like my kids!
Printers are such garbage! Seriously, the technology has not appreciably advanced in over 20 years. In fact it has regressed a little because printer manufacturers intentionally design in flaws to make them waste ink and be expensive to stock the ink for. The printers themselves have become loss leader technology where they sell the printer at a slight loss in order to get you to pay 10 to 100x as much as you should for ink. It is a horrible racket and I would love to see someone disrupt that dinosaur of an industry.
Laser printers are in general less guilty of these sins than ink printers, but they are catching up with the shady garbage with giant “toner cartridges” that include a lot of the parts that don’t need to be replaced every time you fill the toner.
I have 2 printers, one ancient workhorse of a laser black and white, and one laser color. They are both quite capable but expensive to maintain. Still cheaper than ink printers to maintain though.
@infornography Thats mostly consumer printers. In the commercial space, especially the higher up you go, the more the efficiency matters to the customers, and so to the manufacturers.
@duodec Yeah, which is why I bought big bulky laser printers. The state of the industry is still rage inducing. You either pay several hundreds to thousands for the ink or the printer.
There is no good reason you couldn’t buy an adequate printer for around one to three hundred dollars and have the ink be of negligible cost. The ink itself IS cheaper than dirt, but the proprietary cartridges are absurdly overpriced. Yeah, they include some of the electronic components that fail more frequently but disentangling that would not be hard. Just make it so that the printer notifies you when it needs a new head which can cost up to around $30 and still make a tidy profit.
I just can’t help but feel there is a prime opportunity here for someone to disrupt this industry and provide a reasonably priced ink printer that is cheap to maintain.
Brother Inkvestment and Epson Ecotank are good for low consumable costs, but alas, the typical consumer still tends to focus on the printer’s price and not the ink’s.
@narfcake Thanks for that info. I had not seen the Inkvestment as it has been several years since I bought my most recent printer. Should I find myself or someone I know in the market for a printer again soon, I will point them toward those.
@infornography Buy once, cry once. Of course one may overdo it; I nearly bought a brand new DEC LPS20 printer on clearance ($500, ~20ppm, postscript, networked, delivered as tall carton on a pallet, total overkill); then onsale.com had a spectacular deal on HP LaserJet 6P/6MP’s and we avoided a huge lot of trouble (and some fun, I’ll admit).
Funny story. I haven’t had a printer for years. Until my husband got me a Canon dye-sub Selphy for my birthday on Friday. I subsequently made him a Father’s Day gift using it to print some images I made of our son. He generally prints whatever we need at his office or I go to the library, which is enough of a hassle that I was actually tempted to buy this. I already have a Canon scanner, though, and now I’ve heard of HP instant ink, I might just do that. I want to print some clothes patterns, but I feel bad asking my husband to do that at work, and it’s a pain in the butt to do it at the library with my toddler son in tow.
We have three. One is a b&w bother laser printer, what we use the most. One is an epson all in one with a built in CIS that we got to replace the huge copy machine we had.
And my baby. An old Epson R1900 color stylus, wide format for the time. I modified it for a CIS so ink price isn’t a problem. I use it to print paper for my crafting hobby. I had to add a thing for the excess ink to dump outside of it, not in the bottom and software to reset the count (when it hits a certain number of prints, it won’t work, it thinks the waste pad is full).
Is an Epson inkjet used a few times a year and always needs ink since it won’t print if it is out on any one cartridge. And since it is used rarely the heads always need to be cleaned using up lots of ink.
Where’s the option for “I don’t own one”? Haven’t owned one in years. I either print at work or stop by the local library. (Neither of which is needed very often.)
I inherited it! It’s older than I am, and still kicking ass. I have invested in an (almost as old) print server to make it network accessible (digging up the drivers to use it natively was a constant struggle) and since then it works rather well again. The main shortfall is that it is black and white only and prints at the blistering fast speed of 4 pages a minute.
Have an old Kodak I wish they were still made because they are great photo printers and would love a new one. Also Staples stopped selling the ink in my local store.
Although it had the usual inkjet limitations, I loved the old DECwriter 520ic color printer. It predated photo-quality for images but still did a creditable job. It had multiple emulations, could do sixel printing for the big VMS workstations, 4MB cache card, optional font cartridges, , extended paper trays, optional tractor for continuous feed paper, the works. And best of all…
Made in Italy. It was like the Lamborghini of inkjet printers. The big 4x4 Rambo Lambo
Until all the cartridges dried up and I couldn’t get any more…
Which one? I have several for different purposes.
sucks an entire ass
Is a 1992 hp laser printer and still works perfectly other than having to prop the paper tray up with some books since the connector pieces are broken.Oh and a side cover piece went missing - but doesn’t affect function. No scanner though.
@Kidsandliz The Japanese made print engines in the American made printers were like the old diesel mercedes. They just keep running. We had to give up our LaserJet 6P finally because the shelf it was on broke (we overloaded it) and it smashed onto a tile floor. Still mostly worked… but too expensive to repair…
I have a boring old b/w hp laserjet. Microsoft keeps putting out new OS’s that “aren’t compatible” with it, but at least three times now I’ve found a way to keep it truckin’.
… got cut up for parts when @miraclewhispers left for college (she didn’t want it… she hated it and was the only person able to make it print).
I now use a printer at work, tho I probably print less than 15-20 pages a year, if that. Pretty much everything that I used to need to print is now handled without paper (taxes, NYCFC parking at Yankee Stadium and coupons for BJ’s Warehouse Club).
@baqui63
Wow. And here I thought $10 was high.
@therealjrn Well, it is NYC…
The River Avenue Garage is $425 ($25 a match) for the season package this year.
I pay ~$140 per match for two seats, the parking, gas and tolls; food and drink is usually ~$50 for two. My seats are covered, so rain and sun are not issues.
FWIW, If I used public transportation, my 60-70 minute round trip travel time would be ~2.5 hours (saving $16) or ~4.5 hours (saving $34).
@baqui63
I am pretty sure the ribbon has dried up since I used my printer the last time.
@hchavers The miniature gnomes that draw the pages are all dead now. Nothing left but hundreds of tiny little dried-out fountain pens.
@hchavers Ribbon?
/image dot matrix printer!
@narfcake
@PlacidPenguin
@narfcake
Was watching FHFIF yesterday (Sunday), and started thinking about somebody who is more egotistical than Dot was with that song.
@PlacidPenguin
/image Blooregard Q. Kazoo
@narfcake
@hchavers We still have one of those at work; one customer still needs to do multi-part carbonless forms, and you gotta have impact for that. Okidata for the everlasting win.
BTW if you have a ribbon cartridge, you may be able to pry it open (top is often a friction fit or not too heavily glued). Mask around it and lightly spray WD-40 on the ribbon (you’ll see the top edge). Put the ribbon cartridge back together and let it sit for a few days before using.
I had a rare dot matrix printer that nobody carried ribbons for. The WD40 trick worked twice on each ribbon I had.
… is a Brother HL-2380-DW. I print documents almost daily. I spend about $6/year on toner replacement. Please don’t buy an inkjet printer. Get your color prints at a print shop if you need them, or get a color laser printer if you’re not printing photos.
@jibbyjam1 My Xerox does a pretty fair job of printing photos.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@ruouttaurmind I’ve seen some laser printer photos and they’re getting pretty good, but not nearly as good as a good inkjet. I’m thinking of upgrading to a color laser printer in the near future though.
@jibbyjam1 I bought an Epson with the EcoTank. While overall printer cost was higher, the amount of ink it holds for dirt cheap more than makes up for the ability to print color whenever I want. When not printing color I normally use my Brother laser.
Have a new HP ink jet that uses the Instant Ink. I love it. I dont buy ink. HP sends it to me, no charge, and includes a prepaid return envelope to send back the empty cartridges for recycling. I pay $0.05 per page. All day, every day. HP got this right on printer ink-as-a-service. No more looking to buy ink at 10pm on Sunday night. Not going back to Epson.
Instant Ink is the shizzle.
And if you’re a really low volume printer they even have a free service at like 15 pages a month. You can up/down your level each month and it’s the bees knees.
@mike808 Is that for full color pages? That’s pretty good.
@awk @mike808 Any kind of pages. I have Instant Ink as well. You pay per page, and that’s it. Color? Black and white text? Same price.
@awk What @Collin1000 said. The lowee plans ($5/$10$/15 per month) give you a “pre-purchased” block of pages at your per page price. If you go over, you buy $1 worth of pages at whatever your per page price is. If you go under, you rollover the pages you’ve already paid for. So you literally pay $X per page and spend zero time or money on anything else. If you have a bump in printing, you can go up a level, and then switch back after, even in the current month if you did a lot of printing that month.
The team that developed and ran this project at HP did a great job top to bottom.
@mike808 damn. You may have just sold me a printer.
I have a fancy Xerox Phaser and it’s huge, but it prints two-sided and I’ve only bought new toner twice in 10 years. Which is good because that stuff is mind-numbingly expensive.
/image mind-numbingly expensive
Was destroyed, ala Office Space.
Twice.
@afullbeard It came back after the first time?
My printer is a brat.
This one, but from Walmart.
I’ve had 3 or 4 inkjet printers over the years, but I have never emptied an ink cartridge. The print heads and cartridges always dry up and no amount of “Clean the Heads” or alcohol swabs ever gets them working again. Then it’s always cheaper to buy a new printer than to replace the ink cartridges.
(Laser FTW)
hp laserjet that i use almost exclusively for printing shipping labels. both “essential” and “takes up a lot of space.”
this poll would probably have benefited from being a series of checkboxes.
Was a gift in the meh exchange.
Is used only when I need to print a return shipping label or rebate form.
I bought a Pixma last time you sold it because my printer was broken. Then someone linked a similar one for twenty bucks that included ink. So now I have two crap printers and one is still in the box in my closet. And the ink lights are flashing. I guess I need to go buy ink. Fuck.
Is an HP all in one that takes up a ton of space but is essential about once a month and more than six years old. I only have a black ink cartridge in it which is at least a year old with a (new in box) spare bought at a yard sale. The scanner is hardly used because I have a portable one which is much easier to use for most things.
My boss bought this for me (on sale for $60) to create slideshows from photos of our work.
I still have my old HP printer with a few spare ink cartridges in the closet.
I have an Epson Workforce WF-3620.
/image Epson Workforce WF-3620
It’s a decent AIO printer, wireless, cloud-capable. Best part is I modded it with CISS and it costs like nothing operate. I have the room for it, so not a big deal, but it’s been a beast and runs forever. The only real downside (as with most inkjets) is the nozzles occasionally get clogged. When it’s really bad, I can shoot a little windex into the heads and it clears it up.
I have / had this printer. It’s sitting in the closet, waiting for its date with destiny (at the local electronics recycling yard).
I love/loved this printer. It was a real workhorse and the quality was great.
But after it sat about a month the printhead clogged and no amount of Windex, alcohol, or other YouTube fixes were going to resurrect it. I got maybe 90% of the dots working, but no more.
Because I loved the printer (and it fit perfectly under the seat of my RV/mobile office) I thought, “Well, I’ll just replace the print head.” Wrong! The price of the print head is about what I paid for the printer.
This has been a great experience for me, because, now, it’s a small Brother color laser. At about the price Epson wanted for the printhead alone!
And for six months I haven’t spent a cent on consumables, and the quality is terrific.
I’ll never buy another inkjet as long as I live.
Disclaimer: I’m old; that may not be a very long time.
@simssj starred for that last comment (FWIW I’m old too!)
@simssj You and me both. I bought a small Dell (made by Brother) all in one b/w laser several years ago and I just replaced the cartridge for the first time last month for $18. I will never inkjet again.
@simssj I have a Workforce WP-4530 and I had the same experience. It worked great for about a year, but now the black ink is clogged and the printer is pretty much useless. I have to make a document all color in order for anything to print. It’s pretty much just a scanner at this point.
I’ve got some kind of mildly fancy-looking small / home office Canon all-in-one that I got as a gift several years ago. In all the time since, I have never placed toner in it or printed anything at home.
nonexistent.
we used to have one, but it finally croaked after a house fire. his name was prince. we want to replace it but not with inkjet. i have a few projects i want to complete and after that we’d probably use it once a year to print car/dmv related stuff.
I have 2 hp 6p laserjets that I bought from goodwill 10 years ago and the one I use is still going. I bought the other one for a spare. they were $15 each
@cranky1950 Those were work horses, which you probably know. I still see them in people’s offices on consulting gigs.
Brother HL-2280DW B&W laser for most things
Epson XP-810 color inkjet for when I need color or batches of 2 sided stuff printed/copied/scanned, or CD/DVD labels printed directly on the disc (YES I still make DVDs of video now and then…)
Love them both for different reasons, kind of like my kids!
Printers are such garbage! Seriously, the technology has not appreciably advanced in over 20 years. In fact it has regressed a little because printer manufacturers intentionally design in flaws to make them waste ink and be expensive to stock the ink for. The printers themselves have become loss leader technology where they sell the printer at a slight loss in order to get you to pay 10 to 100x as much as you should for ink. It is a horrible racket and I would love to see someone disrupt that dinosaur of an industry.
Laser printers are in general less guilty of these sins than ink printers, but they are catching up with the shady garbage with giant “toner cartridges” that include a lot of the parts that don’t need to be replaced every time you fill the toner.
I have 2 printers, one ancient workhorse of a laser black and white, and one laser color. They are both quite capable but expensive to maintain. Still cheaper than ink printers to maintain though.
@infornography Thats mostly consumer printers. In the commercial space, especially the higher up you go, the more the efficiency matters to the customers, and so to the manufacturers.
They will last a lot longer too.
@duodec Yeah, which is why I bought big bulky laser printers. The state of the industry is still rage inducing. You either pay several hundreds to thousands for the ink or the printer.
There is no good reason you couldn’t buy an adequate printer for around one to three hundred dollars and have the ink be of negligible cost. The ink itself IS cheaper than dirt, but the proprietary cartridges are absurdly overpriced. Yeah, they include some of the electronic components that fail more frequently but disentangling that would not be hard. Just make it so that the printer notifies you when it needs a new head which can cost up to around $30 and still make a tidy profit.
I just can’t help but feel there is a prime opportunity here for someone to disrupt this industry and provide a reasonably priced ink printer that is cheap to maintain.
@infornography Kodak tried that a decade ago …
http://adage.com/article/print-edition/kodak-develops-model-expensive-printer-cheap-ink/115525/
… and where are they now?
Brother Inkvestment and Epson Ecotank are good for low consumable costs, but alas, the typical consumer still tends to focus on the printer’s price and not the ink’s.
@narfcake Thanks for that info. I had not seen the Inkvestment as it has been several years since I bought my most recent printer. Should I find myself or someone I know in the market for a printer again soon, I will point them toward those.
@infornography Buy once, cry once. Of course one may overdo it; I nearly bought a brand new DEC LPS20 printer on clearance ($500, ~20ppm, postscript, networked, delivered as tall carton on a pallet, total overkill); then onsale.com had a spectacular deal on HP LaserJet 6P/6MP’s and we avoided a huge lot of trouble (and some fun, I’ll admit).
Funny story. I haven’t had a printer for years. Until my husband got me a Canon dye-sub Selphy for my birthday on Friday. I subsequently made him a Father’s Day gift using it to print some images I made of our son. He generally prints whatever we need at his office or I go to the library, which is enough of a hassle that I was actually tempted to buy this. I already have a Canon scanner, though, and now I’ve heard of HP instant ink, I might just do that. I want to print some clothes patterns, but I feel bad asking my husband to do that at work, and it’s a pain in the butt to do it at the library with my toddler son in tow.
We have three. One is a b&w bother laser printer, what we use the most. One is an epson all in one with a built in CIS that we got to replace the huge copy machine we had.
And my baby. An old Epson R1900 color stylus, wide format for the time. I modified it for a CIS so ink price isn’t a problem. I use it to print paper for my crafting hobby. I had to add a thing for the excess ink to dump outside of it, not in the bottom and software to reset the count (when it hits a certain number of prints, it won’t work, it thinks the waste pad is full).
@lisaviolet so pretty! Wow
@moonhat Thank you.
This looks like a great printer…
FOR ME TO POOP ON!
Is an Epson inkjet used a few times a year and always needs ink since it won’t print if it is out on any one cartridge. And since it is used rarely the heads always need to be cleaned using up lots of ink.
My last printer broke down 4 years ago and I never replaced it. Now I have more room to stack up unpaid bills.
Where’s the option for “I don’t own one”? Haven’t owned one in years. I either print at work or stop by the local library. (Neither of which is needed very often.)
@billchase2 Make sure you pay for the paper/toner/electricity you’re using at work!
I inherited it! It’s older than I am, and still kicking ass. I have invested in an (almost as old) print server to make it network accessible (digging up the drivers to use it natively was a constant struggle) and since then it works rather well again. The main shortfall is that it is black and white only and prints at the blistering fast speed of 4 pages a minute.
@candreasen I’m guessing a HP Laserjet 4L or 5L?
“Doesn’t take up much space and isn’t absolutely essential but is pretty nice to have when I need one.”
Have an old Kodak I wish they were still made because they are great photo printers and would love a new one. Also Staples stopped selling the ink in my local store.
Although it had the usual inkjet limitations, I loved the old DECwriter 520ic color printer. It predated photo-quality for images but still did a creditable job. It had multiple emulations, could do sixel printing for the big VMS workstations, 4MB cache card, optional font cartridges, , extended paper trays, optional tractor for continuous feed paper, the works. And best of all…
Made in Italy. It was like the Lamborghini of inkjet printers. The big 4x4 Rambo Lambo
Until all the cartridges dried up and I couldn’t get any more…
/giphy old printer
