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Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

I agree, laser printers these days are an interesting option to consider (one advantage he didn't mention is the speed of printing, which makes life significantly easier when you often have to print large stacks of documents)

However, what I don't like is his treatment of colour printers. He somehow concludes that the only use-case for consumers to print in colour would be photos and then goes on that printing photos at home produces crappy results, so you shouldn't do it anyway. Therefore, consumers do not need to print in colour. QED.

I'm always wary of "tell me one reason you're gonna use it for" type arguments, where the asker then goes on to treat the answer as an exhaustive list of use-cases. Only because I cannot think of a use-case in that very moment does not mean a use-case doesn't exist.

For colours, additional use-cases would be colour-coded diagrams or documents that for various reasons, you just want to look pretty.

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>I'm always wary of "tell me one reason you're gonna use it for" type arguments, where the asker then goes on to treat the answer as an exhaustive list of use-cases.

Sounds like an "On the spot fallacy" - https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/On_the_spot_fallacy

In the original article author's defense, I think his argument does scale out properly to large portion of the population, who have no need to print anything more than documents. On the off chance (once a year?) something needs to be printed in high quality paper with colour, I'd jog down to the local Kinkos/Staples instead.

If you print colour-coded diagrams regularly, then the cost-benefit analysis falls apart, but I would argue that you might be a smaller part of the general population than you expect.

I maintain a single Brother household MFC, had it for nearly a decade, changed the toner twice, drum never. We print notes, documents, and legal contracts for work, etc... even the occasional diagram that gets put in the print queue doesn't _need_ to be in colour. It'd certainly be nice, but it's not a dealbreaker either.

I print color documents all of the time on my home (Dell C1710nw) laser printer. The necessity of color is heavily dependent upon which type of documents are being printed. Life isn't monochromatic for me.

Now at work there are only rare occasions that I print anything at all, preferring electronic copies of everything. When I do print, most everything is monochrome.

I'd argue "these days", this advice isn't as true anymore as it was some years ago. Office inkjets now beat many laser printers on printing costs again, you can buy inkjet printers you refill with an ink bottle, ...

> you can buy inkjet printers you refill with an ink bottle

In my experience, this is messy and not worth the trouble.

I wasn't quite clear: I'm not talking about refilling used cartridges, but printers that have tanks and are designed for that. Those aren't that messy in my experience.

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