Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Do You Print Too Little?
shanen writes: How many of you don't print much these days? What is the best solution to only printing a few pages every once in a while? Here are some dimensions of the problem...
Inexpensive printers: The cost of new printers is quite low, but how long can the printer sit there without printing before it dies? Lexmark and HP used to offer an expensive solution with integrated ink cartridges that also included new print heads, but... Should I just buy a cheap Canon or Epson and plan to throw it away in a couple of years, probably after printing less than a 100 pages?
Printing services: They're mostly focused on photos, but there are companies where you can take your data for printing. My main concerns here are actually with the costs and the tweaks. Each print is expensive because you are covering their overhead way beyond the cost of the printing itself. Also, most of the time my first print or three isn't exactly what I want. It rarely comes out perfectly on paper the first time.
Social printing: For example, are any of you sharing one printer with your neighbors via Wi-Fi? Do you just sneak a bit of personal printing onto a printer at your office? Do you travel across town to borrow your brother-in-law's printer?
Inexpensive printers: The cost of new printers is quite low, but how long can the printer sit there without printing before it dies? Lexmark and HP used to offer an expensive solution with integrated ink cartridges that also included new print heads, but... Should I just buy a cheap Canon or Epson and plan to throw it away in a couple of years, probably after printing less than a 100 pages?
Printing services: They're mostly focused on photos, but there are companies where you can take your data for printing. My main concerns here are actually with the costs and the tweaks. Each print is expensive because you are covering their overhead way beyond the cost of the printing itself. Also, most of the time my first print or three isn't exactly what I want. It rarely comes out perfectly on paper the first time.
Social printing: For example, are any of you sharing one printer with your neighbors via Wi-Fi? Do you just sneak a bit of personal printing onto a printer at your office? Do you travel across town to borrow your brother-in-law's printer?
Exactly this. I manage a business that has a whole fleet of HP LaserJet 2100 printers manufactured between 1998 and 1999. There is still 100% fully supported drivers by HP For Windows 10 in both 32bit and 64bit environments. All of the printers were upgraded with the optional JetDirect network card ($10 or less on eBay usually), so they just connect to the network and just WORK. The toner cartridge and print head are one in the same, so replacing toner is basically replacing the majority of the components within the printer.
If you're spending $200 on a printer every couple of years, and only printing 100 or so pages during its lifetime, that's $2/page. Kinkos is probably looking like a cheaper alternative.
I'm surprised nobody in China (or even the US, since we're STILL pretty competitive for low-volume manufacturing) has started cranking out laser printers with copies of the 1990s-era LaserJet print engine.
Yeah... those things never actually die, as far as I can tell. I used to work for a school that had some HP LJ 6MPs in the lab. By the time I got there, they'd already done 17 squillion pages, but were perfectly fine - just slow. The slowness led to them getting replaced (in about 2004), at which time I offered to buy one to take home. They said "just take it." I still have it, and it works perfectly, with the same toner cartridge that was in there when it was retired from the lab at school. It will still be printing come doomsday.
Only problems I've ever had with it are that it only has a parallel port, which is getting really damn inconvenient to deal with, and it's short on memory, which leads to the occasional inability to print something.