this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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Nope. They’re all shit.
Partially because ink/toner scam.
Partially because fuck you, I bought the damn thing. If I am ok with stripy printouts until I squeeze the last molecule of toner from your hellcartridge, imma do it and you can’t stop me.
Ex. I bought a $30 printer off eBay. Burned thru the toner quickly. Bought cartridge.
Turns out that this printer counts pages - and only pages - and hangs itself at an arbitrary number of the same.
Twenty pages of the cartridge were lettter sized.
Ten were A4.
The remaining pages? A fucking 5.
IOW, I printed thirty total pages of US letter. And the remainder were half-letter.
Printer doesn’t care, a page is a page.
Admittedly, printers have to sol e a fairly difficult MechEng problem - grab one and only one sheet, pull it just right, and don’t wrinkle it.
That doesn’t give the mfg the right to extort us. I literally should have 2x the A5 pages I’ve remaining bc by def each one is half of (roughly) a full page.
I’ve gone from printing general templates for my day to day, to developing things that feel native to me to draw - but I’m also a fountain pen hobbyist and truly care about paper quality, etc.
TL;dr - I just want some damn lines to color between, as I organize and journal my life. Printer manufacturers have abs ruined that. There are zero good ones.
Srsly I’d rather spend the time to carefully develop a template for day to day use and trace it (max 1 hr, tracing it then takes zero time to speak to) than deal with printers.
But that’s just me, an IT guy who values organizing in an analog world.
Oh, also, a 40ish IT guy who remembers LaserJets that were nearly bulletproof and still weren’t worth screwing with.
Interestingly, here in Asia some inkjet printers are sold with huge (like 500ml per color) external ink tanks that take very cheap 3rd party ink. They're not terribly expensive. I see all the print shops and some businesses using them, they seem to work OK. I don't have one personally, but recently I've been tempted to get one.
If I do, I'll post about it somewhere. It sounds like it's nearly worth physically flying all the way over here, buying one, and carrying it back. If you're a small business owner and print a lot or something.