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

  • Synthead@lemmy.mlEnglish
    33·
    1 year ago

    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?

    • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      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.