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Comment by nerpderp82 | Hacker News Reader

I have never used one, but I think it is interesting that Epson does sell a line of printers that have easily refillable ink reservoirs.

https://epson.com/ecotank-ink-tank-printers

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Inkjets have to be used regularly or they will suffer from clogs and in the case of Epson you're SOL if a head clean doesn't work. You can leave a laser idle for years and it will print fine.

I think eco tanks (and some other modern inkjets) will purge the heads regularly if left on, so it should be fine if left on standby constantly.

Mine doesn't, some nozzles clogged every time I wanted to print (infrequently, sometimes months). Now I'm printing a test page every week to prevent that (maybe should add a cron job).

A contributing factor could be that the best-before date on the bottles is in the past. Though I have no idea how that date would matter for filling up, and no idea how to observe it after the ink is in the printer and the bottles disposed of.

I have a Brother laser printer which is used for almost everything, and a Canon inkjet for the occasional color print.

I’m pretty sure my Canon inkjet uses more ink when idle than when I occasionally use it to actually print something. Quite sad.

I do wonder where it all physically goes tho. After years of seeing my cheapo cartridges just “evaporate” whatever reservoir the printer has for cleaning the heads and purging ink must be well and fully saturated at this point?!

huge sponges and felt blocks. not kidding.

Yes and the printer has an internal counter keeping track of how much it has dumped into the sponge. After a long time it will stop and require disassembly of the printer and a reset procedure to rectify this.

I have a HP Smart tank I can refill with a bottle of cheap ink. Anyways, I don't print often, and it doesn't clog. But I have it always plugged into outlet - I _think_ that it manages print heads so they don't dry. I have this thought before Ink Tank printers. Printer specialist should chime in as I generally don't like dealing with printers.

For a lot of people a laserprinter is probably better than an inkjet, especially given that a lot of people don't print much these days. And you can get even color lasers for a pretty good price these days. I've had a B&W laser at home forever. About a year ago, I just got rid of my inkjet rather than spending a bunch of money to get new ink. It was a large format photo printer and was sometimes nice to have but not worth it.

I've found that Walmart is perfectly acceptable (and cheap) for printing normal photographs (pickup in an hour!) and if I want to go larger they offer that too.

Of course you can order things printed online and shipped, but a black-and-white laser covers most of my needs there.

Yeah, I don't need many photos printed and, when I do, there are lots of options that don't involve $100+ in ink cartridges. I did sometimes print color maps too but B&W is usually fine at the end of the day, I can print a map, or (usually) on a phone/tablet works.

They sound cool but apparently have a sponge that holds the ink between the tank and the jet and eventually that becomes saturated and it's basically game over for the printer because it doesn't sound like the sponge is user serviceable https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25047231

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