Last time my printer ran out of ink, I bought a new printer at Walmart cheaper than two cartridges (Black and Color) would have cost me.
Yes Cartridges are a rip off. There is no excuse for charging what they do for ink.
Just get a CISS. Ink cartridges are for suckers.
Laser printing has been good for me. The printer costs $99, and a 3000-page cartridge costs $75.
Enbrel, a widely-prescribed drug used for treating several autoimmune diseases, costs $10 per milligram. That's $10,000 per gram, or $4.5 million per pound.
By comparison, the printers of today are quite nice. I recall wrestling with an Okidata Microline123 many, many years ago. That’s when I learned to hate printers.
A friend of mine says the conspiracy is really in razor blades. Like printers, they literally give away the razors and then stick it to you on the blades. He spends something like $40 for a package of blades at Costco.
HP is Evil!
Years ago, I had a Cannon inkjet. It worked fine, until I needed to replace the cartridges. Then, the printhead would stall or the machine would send an error regarding the ink cartridge. The machine became junk.
Next, I bought a Lennox inkjet. It had a short warranty (60 days, IIRC). Over the two months I had it, I printed about 20 sheets. Then, the printhead jammed. Of course, it was out of warranty. I never could get it work. It was a piece of JUNK.
Next, I bought a desktop Minolta PagePro b/w laser. Great little printer. I seldom print more than a few pages a month. Every time I would turn it on to print some thing — no problem, great printing results. That is — until Windows7 64-bit. No driver. Someone had created a quick-fix driver for the 32-bit, but nothing for the 64-bit. I sent the printer to a relative who had also inherited my older XP laptop when I finally bought a new Win7 laptop. That Minolta was still using the original cartridge after about 5 years of my owning it.
Next, about 4 years ago, I ran across a Xerox color laser. It, too, works fine and is still on the original cartridges. When I upgraded from XP to Win7 with a new laptop and later a new desktop, I discovered the Xerox had built-in wireless. The laptop recognized it and set it up with no problem. I have it wire-connected to the desktop computer.
The beauty with laser printers is that their printing heads don’t clog like inkjets.
Laser printers are very cheap. The Xerox color I got on cyberMonday for $150. I have occasionally seen color lasers for under $100.
Stop printing.
Print to an Adobe .pdf file.
I find myself increasing going paperless and only rarely print anything, but I could see some still might need hard copies. Printers could be on the extinction list much like fax machines.
My HP Photosmart wireless printer is a piece of crap. Cartridges are relatively cheap but they don’t last long. Besides poor performance, HP’s bloatware software and frequent crashes from network connectivity, my biggest objection is that the printer will not accept refilled cartridges - apparently the cartridges have a chip in them that tells the printer they are empty even if it has ink in it. If I had known this upfront I would not have bought it. No more HP products for me.