Note: I’ve no idea why the uploader decided to rotate the image, when I’ve tried rotating the original image in a way that’d fix it only to see that it didn’t matter
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10 cents a page to use your own printer? Glad I picked laser.
Not only that, but you would have to print all 50 pages/month to get that “value”.
I haven’t printed 50 pages over many months, but I still have a laser for those times it’s useful. Pretty soon they’ll be able to downgrade your colour to black only, at only a slight surcharge over the regular black ink plan. I noticed they say you can print 50 pages but do they give the paper too? Heh.
Don’t worry, for an extra $5/mo you an get 50 pages of paper that automatically disintegrates after one month
Your own hardware as a “service.”
Fun fact: If you cancel your HP Instant Ink subscription, they lock you out of using the cartridges already installed in your printer.
I also gave up on inkjet bullshit and went laser. I use a Canon ImageClass at both work and at home; A single set of toner cartridges easily lasts me for years of home use. Color laser options are also no longer rare or expensive.
The sad part is that inkjets aren’t inherently bad. They’re just a different way to print. They can make some fantastic, deep, high-resolution colors. It just so happens that this type of printing is being ran in such an anti-consumer way that it’s borderline unbelievable.
Ink is cheap. It’s INK. I can go to the art store and find thousands of different types of ink. It’s just water with coloring in it. It’s not special. However, HP sells their ink at a cost that is about 4x the cost of gold by weight. I can understand it being a little more expensive than just ink in a tube, but this is insane.
We should have inkjet printers that have caps on the top of the cartridges to let you add your own ink. No DRM. Buy common ink at the grocery store, and it’ll work with most vendors. Open the lid, add your ink. Dried up? Wash it under the sink. Really dried up? Buy an empty cartridge for $6.
Our society has advanced enough to where this is a solved problem. We have figured out INK of all things. We know what ink is, and we know how to put it on a sheet of paper. Civilization hasn’t been stumped on how to put ink on paper for decades, and it’s not like we’re in a position where only vendors like HP can save us. It’s 100% greed, all of it, and it’s so shameless that it reads like something out of Snow Crash or something.
Imagine if you bought a ketchup bottle from the grocery store, and refilled it with more ketchup when it was almost empty. Then, the ketchup bottle phoned home and figured out that you missed a ketchup subscription payment, so it refused to squirt ketchup. Ain’t it silly when I compare HP’s model to ketchup, yet both circumstances are literally dispensing a liquid?
Now you made me want a printer that can do all the fancy fountain pen inks like Emeraude de Chivor.
And I want a printer that can accept sandwiches and uses ketchup instead of ink
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Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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So, the best printer I’ve ever owned in my life was a Canon Pixma iP5000. And yes, it was an inkjet. It had it all for the time: It made excellent photo prints, did double sided printing, could do borderless even on a full 8.5x11 sheet of paper, and its ink cartridges were literally just boxes full of ink. It had a separate print head below the tanks which was removable for cleaning (!) with no tools (!!) and the ink cartridges did not have any DRM chips or other bullshit in them. I refilled the original in cartridges it came with for years before I finally just wore the durn thing out, and I could not find the parts I needed to fix it.
Then began my odyssey of trying to find something to replace it. No one made a comparable inkjet printer by then. Anything you get nowadays is either missing duplex functionality, borderless, or both, and/or has head-on-cartridge printing, and they all have DRM chips built into the cartridges to prevent you from refilling. I thought the Epson Ecotank line was the answer, but it turns out those are all have trash build quality and while the no-cartridges idea is sound in theory, the way they’re designed means that the things inevitably cack themselves in short order and they’re basically impossible for a consumer to take apart to clean or service. The Ecotank takes the idea of commercial printers with external remote ink reservoirs, but messes it up by building the reservoirs into the printer body in a “consumer friendly” way that leaves the reservoirs not sealed (so the solvent can evaporate out of the ink, and dust can get in) and not removable (so they can’t be cleaned), nor can the print head be accessed in the event that it needs to be unclogged.
I went through three of them under warranty and once my warranty was expired that was it. I had to throw the damn thing away, and then I just bought my current color laser printer. The hell with it.
Your own hardware as a “service.”
TBH, if they could provide a high-quality piece of hardware that would just work for years on end and automatically reorder ink (at no additional charge, up to some reasonable limit) when it needed it for a low fixed price, maybe 50 or 60 bucks a year, I might be interested. If they added large-format print-on-demand service with quick delivery (same day in cities, 1 or 2 day elsewhere) I’d probably pay a bit more. That way I could print regular documents up to, say 11x17, at home, and have big stuff like poster-sized delivered quickly and seamlessly with the same printing system.
I just want to be able to print stuff without futzing around with a persnickety machine, and needing to replace the infernal thing every couple of years.
No shit, the cartridges are part of the subscription. If you don’t want that, you can just buy your own cartridges outside of the subscription service
I’ve nothing by good experience with Brother laser printers.
likewise, brother
Brother, it is good to know that we’re on the same page.
Brother is 90% awesome, 10% infuriating. My Brother laser would blow my 15 Amp circuit. I had to move it to the basement for a 20 Amp outlet. It’s been going for 12 years since on its third toner cartridge (and I probably will never get through my current 2 pack), though the Wi-Fi printing capability won’t work with any router I’ve bought after 2015. Duplex printing, Linux, smartphone, any computer I hook up to it, no worries.
A printer that is blowing a circuit sounds like there’s something wrong and it’s a fire hazard.
I have bought two laser printers in fifteen years. I got a Canon to replace the slow Brother MFC. I’ve lasted years on the toners I bought after the starter toners ran out. Toners never dry out and they don’t have the same print quality issues that ink jets have.
Anyone using an ink jet printer for anything other than printing photos onto photo paper is wasting tons and tons of money.
Beyond parody. Now ink is a subscription service as well? Soon a back to school supply subscription service will be created.
I’m all for shitting on mandatory subscription services but this is optional. You have a choice. Why are you shitting on choice?
I actually have the cheapest sub for this because I did the math and it’s cheaper than buying cartridges. I use the printer enough to justify it’s existence but that’s about it. If they price goes up and the math doesn’t work anymore I’ll cancel it.
Regarding your image rotation: When you rotate an image, it’s often not done as an actual movement of data, but as an added EXIF tag. “Take this image and display it at this angle.”
EXIF tags can store a lot of malicious shit like the GPS location of your photo, so lemmy aggressively strips them out. Better take your photos the right way from the start and/or use a robust photo manipulation software that will actually rearrange the data instead of adding a tag.
I hope Lemmy doesn’t strip all EXIF tags… There’s important things in there about colour, copyright, etc that should be kept.
I’ve encountered the same issue as OP where Lemmy was incorrectly rotating an image, and I couldn’t figure out how to fix it. It worked perfectly fine on other sites that strip personal EXIF data like Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc; it was just Lemmy that was unhappy.
I’ve found that taking s screenshot of the pic solves the issue, for me at least
Lemmy is much more aggressive about it than the other sites you mentioned. Dunno what to tell you since you’re hoping otherwise, but that’s what’s going on.
I hope Lemmy doesn’t strip all EXIF tags
So far as I know it does. Otherwise why strip the rotation data?
Funfact, printer ink costs 20-50€ per Liter for the manufacturer and is often solled for over 5000€ a liter!
This is not mildly infuriating. This is intensely rage inducing.
Shit like this is why I refuse to have a printer in my house. Between the exorbitant prices for fucking INK, the suspense of “will it actually work?” each time I print something, and the printer itself usually sounding like two geriatric robots fucking, I don’t need that kind of negativity in my life.
This is why I moved to a brother laser printer years ago. No drm on their toner it’s a dry medium for printing. Everything is enclosed with in the printer so nothing gets covered in dust when sitting for too long. Oh and the best part is I get two xl toner that print 3k pages each for 20. Literally the first time I had to replace the toner the printer already paid for itself just in the savings.
She may be basic as fuck but for pushing 10 years of service. I wouldn’t trade her for anything else.
I would love to buy laser printer, but sometimes we still need to print at home with colors.
They do make colour laser printers - but in the past 5 years, I’ve needed to print in colour maybe 3 times, and I just took it to the copy shop where it’d be better quality than I can do at home anyway.
Almost all the printing I do is either stuff to sign like contracts or boarding passes / tickets, and those are moving digital more and more.
I would consider printing in shops, but we are in countryside and driving almost an hour to nearest city is just not worthy.
Brother makes fantastic color laser printers too. I’ve had mine for 11 years, replaced the toner carts on it twice. They are NOT cheap - $200ish for cymk - but you’ll get years of prints from them. It’s not a photoprinter, but the resolution on it is great. Handles the whole family’s print work, easy to access, no driver bullshit, just works out of the box.
I would rather pay a little bit more for toner if it works. I am serously thinking about color laser printer when my printer stops wokring. I was looking at some brother color laser printer for around 250€ which is not a lof if this stuff works. Photo quality isn’t important for me, so I thinks this could work for us.
EDIT: Also, what about scanner? Does those laser printers have an scanner option?
Mine did not, not sure what’s out there 13 years later. TBH, I have a flatbed scanner I used when my dad died (scanning photos) then when my wife’s grandmother died (again) and then when my mom died (again scanning photos). Basically, it stays unplugged until unfortunate phone calls come in the middle of the night. If I need to ‘scan’ a doc my phone does a fine job.
Some brother printers have a fax and and scanner built in. It’s a feeder though, not a flatbed. Could matter if you’re trying to scan photos instead of documents.
I think the feeder is not a problem. We mostly scan documents. I will look into those brother printers when the one we currently use stops working
I had a Brother laser printer for a long ass time. I asked for it for a gift for either Christmas or my birthday as a teen because I’m a dweeb. It had an awesome feature called something like “continue print” or “print continue” or something that would force the printer to attempt to print even if your toner was low.
I think nowadays I’ve heard even Brother’s newer models don’t have this feature and will force you to replace the toner when it’s low instead of just going until it physically can’t anymore.
But after many years, the print head started printing funky and blotchy even with fresh toner and even after attempting to clean and fiddle with the corona wire. I’m sure someone that knew more than me could have figured it out eventually.
I was graduating from grad school at the time and just ended up chucking it in the bin when I moved, but it pained me a bit to do so considering how much of a tank it was. After I graduated I rarely need to print anything and usually just run to a print shop instead.
I wholeheartedly recommend Brother laser printers from the time, but I can’t say whether or not modern ones are as good or not.
Buy a brother. They cost more but they are no bullshit printers - I’ll never buy any other brand
Yep. The xerox one I got has done pretty well too. No drivers to download, for any device or OS in my home network. Shit just works.
Look into epson ecotank printers
You fill up ink tanks on the printer from bottles of ink
I still got and older HP one that takes cheap refills. Screw you HP. I don’t know what I’d do if that thing breaks. Luckily it only ever gets used like 2 or 3 times each year.
HP isn’t the only company that makes printers.
Fun fact: it’s really only HP that pulls this shit. Buy a printer from literally any other company and you’ll be fine.
Get a basic Brother B/W láser printer.
With $15 you can buy a 1,000 page generic toner, and a 500 pack of paper.
I’ve printed a few hundred pages with the starter toner they said would only last 30 pages, and just disabled the warning
That’s fancy, mine is rather new (2y) and just prints even if the cartridge is empty, doesn’t complain at all.
Like I said in one of the previous comments, I would love to buy laser printer, but sometimes we still need to print at home with colors.
Pray tell what exactly do you have to print in colory, and how often. Most of color printing can be offloaded to a print shop.
My mother is teacher and she needs to often print at home (when she is not at the school anymore). Print shop would be the best option, but we are in country side and driving almost an hour to nearest city is just not worth.
We are mostly discussing color printers for personal use tho, for work (doesn’t matter if at home or at the office) it obviously doesn’t matter as it’s required to do your job properly.
Mildly Infuriating: HP printers and your image being sideways.
we can drop the “mildly” for the printers part
Mildly infuriating: this post’s lack of image rotation
Also mildly infuriating: When the OP had made a note of it but someone still obtusely charges in with a reply like yours.
Don’t be so acute.
Mildly infuriating: this post’s lack of image rotation
Get an Epson ecotank
This…I invested in an Ecotank ET-15000 and it’s been amazing. Much cheaper models available, but the upfront cost is worth the hit if you do a lot of printing. The family hasn’t even managed to put a dent in the original tank supply. A full load is rated at something like 9000 pages.
Yeah the ink lasts for ages as long as your not doing power print head cleanings frequently
All of you who say you never print anything must not have kids. We have to print stuff for my daughter’s school fairly regularly. Even now that assignments are generally turned in on her Chromebook.
Nah, we’re not saying we never print anything. School & work are the main reasons you’ll need a printer. However, the thing is nobody needs to print consistently. Even on a whole family of seven I’ve lived in, I doubt we printed more than 5 or 10 papers per month, and that was maximum. Not to mention we live in a place where it takes 30-45 minutes to go to a school (and libraries? They don’t exist lmao) and print shops are expensive.
The fact of the matter is the usefulness of a printer is is mainly due to being able to keep it around to print on demand for essentially free (how many times have you used up all the ink in the cartridge, really?) Nobody can ever predict whenever they need to print, it just happens. The second you attach it to an overpriced subscription service where the public will absolutely not use all of their “monthly papers” is when they all leave your brand like birds in the winter, and especially if they live somewhere more fortunate than we do, just go to your local school or library.
Oh I’m not justifying the subscription bullshit. There are just multiple people in this thread who are suggesting there’s no reason to own a printer.
What grades does this start? I’ve got to prepare for it. Is it an ad hoc requirement, or is it known partially in advance can I run some test papers as work every once in a while to cover printing needs?
How are parents without printers doing it? Local library?
We’ve been printing stuff since first grade, although admittedly she didn’t get a Chromebook until fifth grade and printing has been less.
That said, I’m sure they have accommodations for parents who don’t have printers. It’s probably the school themselves or the teacher (more likely since it’s probably on their dime) wanting to save ink.
Also, it isn’t 100% necessary for this reason, but it’s really helpful to have a printer when doing posterboard projects for things like labels.
Appreciate your insights.
Meanwhile at home we’re using Canon tank printer for which starter inks should be enough for about 3 years, and retail ones are dirt cheap, like $10 each for like 100ml average
What kind of demented toddler would even buy a printer attached to a subscription service? Printing is the definition of a thing that you do so sporadically and randomly it’s almost questionable to even get one. If you have some kind of cheap printing shop, school, or library super close by to you, then it’s not even a competition. The whole reason people buy printers and ink cartridges is so they can print something on demand at any time for essentially free (besides the odd time you might need another cartridge, which is even rarer to happen).
If someone buys a freaking “printer subscription month”, I guarantee, they’ll print one, MAYBE two papers, and not use the rest of it. Then repeat the cycle every time you need to print. $15 well spent, huh?
It’s not quite that bad (yet…) - it has reasonably clearly labelled subscription and non-subscription cartridges. So when you cancel the subscription, you just throw the non-subscription cartridge back in.
If you’re printing quite a lot, but not enough to justify a laser printer, then they can work out okay. The vast majority of people would indeed be wasting money though.
A basic brother is like $20 more than the inkjets at this point, hard to justify anything else.
For a second or two I thought that you didn’t even get any actual ink. I had seen a post about multi-function printers refusing to scan if you’re out of ink, and I thought perhaps you could buy a card with an unlock code for such situations (hence “instant ink”). That’s not too unbelievable these days though, is it?
Don’t give them ideas. They could send you a default cartridge to top it up, then only allow you to print when your have an active subscription.
Why I print everything at work.
