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robbyt

If you don't print much, your inkjet printer will probably not work when you actually need it.

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This was me until a few months ago. If you don't print frequently you have two options:

1. Buy an inkjet and pray that it prints every time you need to use it.

2. Spend a little more for a lazer and never worry again.

Inkjets only make sense if you print a lot of photographs, which is a vanishingly tiny portion of the market.

3. Use the public library

I don't know exactly what premium I'm paying per-page to print stuff at the FedEx Office location a couple of blocks away on the rare occasions when I really need something on paper, but whenever I see a discussion like this about the endless compromises and annoyances in home printer ownership I feel like I'm really getting a bargain by comparison

Not such an attractive option this year.

Don’t print much != never print anything. I print approximately 20 pages a month. I have been paying $1 every two months for it. Now I’ll be paying on average $3 every two months. I hate HP for doing this but this is not enough of an impetus for me to move now. I paid $30 for the printer. I prefer inkjet because I print photos and recipes. I’ll be moving to an EPSON tank when I decide I’m done with HP. But for now it’s actually a great service for me. (It’s just my preference)

Depending on what you're printing photos for, you may find it more convenient/a better fit to use a laser for text based things (including recipes), and getting photos printed at a print center (better color fidelity, lots of high quality paper options, etc). That's what I do, but, again, it's rare I print photos (and when I do it's generally for display or similar, so stuff that an at home consumer printer is just subpar for).

Living in a dry climate, rarely printing usually meant by the time I needed to print again my ink cartridges had dried up (or at least enough to not dispense ink anymore). Not sure if this is still true today.

I've been using cheap laser printers for many years and will never go back to inkjets! But my needs are very simple, not trying to print photos.

Recently excavated my early 2008 inkjet printer from the basement. Works fine. Even the color cartridges still work.

Modern inkjet printers use ink at almost the same rate whether you are printing or not, with innovations like daily self-cleaning routines that just spray ink into a receptacle inside the machine.

Our Brother printer (inkjet circa 2014) doesn't use ink when we're not printing because we unplug it when we're not using it, as we do with all of our corded electronics. If it's been more than 2 months since we've printed a page, it only takes two minutes for the printer to run the "ink > clean" cycle, and then it prints just fine. We've had the same black cartridge for three years, no problems, and we're still using the color cartridges that came with the printer when we got it secondhand.

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