Basically the business model is that if they can sell you a cheap printer at a loss, you won’t consider a less cheap model from a company that isn’t as shitty. Then they can lock you into years of buying their ink, which is overpriced deliberately.
Last I checked, if you need an inkjet printer, get a Brother or an Epson. All the rest will rip you off in various ways.
Even better, get a laser printer if you can afford it (or don’t mind forgoing colour with a b&w model). For these, the above two brands, plus Ricoh, Xerox & Canon have a pretty good reputation last I looked into it
I am onboard with the Canon lasers. I got a color mfp/scanner. Off brand toner is less than half the price, and even the Canon toner is less than other brands.
The amount of ink that comes with an inkjet printer is tiny. So a new printer comes with 10mL of ink, and the refills are 35mL or more. You quite literally get what you pay for.
The other reason is that inkjet printers need to be used on a regular basis, or the ink can dry out. But manufacturers have handled this by having the printer drip out tiny bits of ink all the time, so it’s literally using the ink even when you aren’t using it.
For the vast majority of people, a cheap laser printer is the far better option. Unless you want to produce art prints, but at that point you’re looking at spending a ton of money anyways.
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Yep. Can anyone explain why this is?
Basically the business model is that if they can sell you a cheap printer at a loss, you won’t consider a less cheap model from a company that isn’t as shitty. Then they can lock you into years of buying their ink, which is overpriced deliberately.
Last I checked, if you need an inkjet printer, get a Brother or an Epson. All the rest will rip you off in various ways.
Even better, get a laser printer if you can afford it (or don’t mind forgoing colour with a b&w model). For these, the above two brands, plus Ricoh, Xerox & Canon have a pretty good reputation last I looked into it
Never ever buy HP anything
Also, seriously consider if a library might be a better choice than owning a printer for your use case
A caveat to the HP thing, they split off their enterprise hardware division years ago, and it’s actually a decent company.
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I am onboard with the Canon lasers. I got a color mfp/scanner. Off brand toner is less than half the price, and even the Canon toner is less than other brands.
The amount of ink that comes with an inkjet printer is tiny. So a new printer comes with 10mL of ink, and the refills are 35mL or more. You quite literally get what you pay for.
The other reason is that inkjet printers need to be used on a regular basis, or the ink can dry out. But manufacturers have handled this by having the printer drip out tiny bits of ink all the time, so it’s literally using the ink even when you aren’t using it.
For the vast majority of people, a cheap laser printer is the far better option. Unless you want to produce art prints, but at that point you’re looking at spending a ton of money anyways.