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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?
My dad has a side business, and he uses a dot matrix printer for the invoices. He's been using the same printer for over 25 years, and I believe he's on his second printer ribbon. The printing isn't very dark, but it's perfectly readable.
I've got an old B/W laser that works on toner that's close to twenty years old.
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. The patents have all expired, printing technology has gone basically nowhere in 20 years, and old LaserJet consumables are basically commodities by now. The HOME market for printers like this might be small, but small & medium-sized businesses (especially those who print a LOT) and schools would LOVE printers that cost a few hundred bucks, but had almost zero consumables cost.
Worst-case, they'd have to get ISO to codify the consumables for the print engine & give a non-Trademarked name to PCL or PostScript, so they could advertise their standard-compliance without risking a lawsuit for Trademark-infringement.
They could probably even start by giving the printer a "dumb" framebuffer, then do all the rendering/rasterization logic & printserver in a RasPi. So you'd buy the USB-interfaced dumb-framebuffer printer, and pair it with your own Pi-based printserver running GhostScript.