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I used to use a color laser but when my last one died I got one of the cheap ones described in this article. back in 2016 we ran out of toner cartridges and my kid needed to print, so he just bought a whole new printer for less than a replacement cartridge, including one hour delivery.

We are still on the small starter cartridge that came with the printer almost 7 years ago. It's a wonder anyone makes small printers any more.

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You never run out of toner in a cartridge. Just give it a shake for another lease on life. It’s like Zeno’s paradox. You just have to shake it increasingly often.

In theory. In practice, when you need to shake it more often than once per page, it becomes unusable. In physical universe, once you need to shake it more than once per scanline (perhaphs 1/600inch), you start losing resolution (classical version of Heisenberg uncertainty principle).

The laser printer Planck limit is rather large, and not constant.

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