If you have a Samsung laserprinter with number pad and empty toner / imaging unit try menu # 1904 menu and reset the counter, then happily print thousands of pages more
This is outrageous. Only a small percentage of owners know this kind of tricks. Imagine the environmental damage created by thousands of users throwing away perfectly usable cartridges. I always feel bad about throwing away laser printer cartridges, they have so many components that are working just fine, there should be a way to just refill the toner and reuse it.
You can buy kits online to refill your toner carts. It's cheap and fairly easy to do.
You just gotta make sure you get the right kit for your printer, as most have a chip in them that acts as a page counter. You typically have to replace the chip when you refill.
Some models like mine require you to melt a hole into the cartridge, there's no external access to the toner tank. Make sure to do your research and don't buy the cheapest kit you find. The quality of the toner does matter and will greatly affect print quality.
If you think that’s bad, consider that some printers are literally cheaper to buy than the ink replacements. Since new printers come with cartridges it can be cheaper to just buy a whole new printer whenever you run out of ink
Beware that some printers come with cartridges that are the same size as refills but contain less ink/toner (or are at least programmed to tell the printer they have less)
I think the entire situation is best summarised as ... "Beware of printers"
They basically all (but I will leave room for the possibility of a non-evil printer vendor) suck in a myriad of different ways from poor quality, to all the various dark/anti-patterns in both the original sale and the subsequent consumable sales.
I actually want a printer, but know this and have put off buying one for about a year now because I can’t be bothered to spend hours working which is the least shitty.
I have a brother laser, it doesn't have a counter and will run past the point where there is no ink, so I can replace the toner when I'm ready to.
If it is low and the page is faint that's fine for my home printing. I don't need HP to tell me to replace the cartridge. Caveat to that is that it is "only" black and white but then I've never needed to print colour.
They also support Linux so all the computers in the house work fine with it.
If you're not set on a laser printer have a look at the epson ecotank range. You can literally just fill up the tank in the printer with ink and there are 3rd party inks available for a fraction for the price of 1st party refills. We have one that we have "converted" to a sublimation printer simply by filling it's tanks with sublimation ink. It's capable of some impressive results https://imgur.com/a/QTyDPu8
And I've talked to more recent purchasers who are also happy; this is important because I had an Epson Workforce inkjet and it was great, but they really went down hill about 5 years ago.
Same for me. I’ve wanted to get a printer for quite a while but don’t want to spend the time researching which one won’t try to rip me off, lie to me and defraud me. So I haven’t bought one.
Is Brother any better? So far happy with my Laser Brother, way happier than the nightmares I've had with inkjet printers. But I have to admit we changed the tonner after less than 2000 pages. I assumed the cartrige had small capacity and didn't arise my suspicions. Should I worry?
No. They just run X pages and assume the cartridge is empty.
You can reset it with some faintly annoying incantations, and I'd suggest doing so until you notice actual print quality issues. Especially on black.
The logic is... reasonably sound from a print quality perspective. "We know the cartridge can print XXXX pages of reasonable coverage without any fading/dropouts/etc. If the user replaces it at that point, they will never have any print issues." If your goal is "flawless printing," it's a reasonable enough path. It's just not particularly cost effective for the end user. It is, however, cheaper and more profitable than actual toner level sensor/mixing device/etc.
But, yes, there's a hidden menu to reset the toner counter on Brother, and in my experience, there's at least another 50% of rated capacity pages lurking in the cartridges unless you print very toner-heavy pages.
Yes, and if you're trying to save every penny, that's reasonable. Brother doesn't prevent you from doing this, you just have to look up the toner counter reset process, which is trivially found online.
It's exceedingly unreasonable for something like a small office printer to have people constantly reprinting things because the toner is almost, but not entirely out, so please remove the cartridge, shake it gently, etc. Remember, the paper you're spending on partial prints and the toner you're applying isn't free either, and people's time isn't, either. Neither is the carpet cleaning of the toner spot in front of the printer from people trying to stretch it.
I'll reset the counter on mine, give it a shake, and run it until I see any impact on printing, but as soon as I notice any streaking, I just replace the cartridge. It's not worth the hassle to fight for 100 pages of toner to me at this point in my life.
The incantations are printed out and taped to the side of my Brother printer. I can live with light prints for a while. Until I got a recent tablet device, a lot of my prints were sheet music that was used once.
Compared to others, I have had good experiences with Brother. The reset procedure is well known enough, for any model I have worked with, that compatible third party toners include a picture with the reset directions on the Amazon listing.
I know that Brother includes a starter cartridge that usually includes less than even a standard size replacement. They have high yield cartridges and I have only ever seen the bigger size in third party replacements.
The model I have is the 2270dw which was purchased years and years ago. The bigger replacements are rated at 2600 pages and standard are 1200. The drum unit can do up to 12000 and I don't think we've replaced that yet. I did reset it a couple times to get past the toner warning, it continued printing well into faded pages without issue. All it took was holding a button on the front while turning it on and then pressing the same button a specific number of times after initializing. The third party replacements are priced reasonably well in my opinion.
I had a Brother inkjet printer that would give low ink warnings when the cartridges obviously had more left. I found if you used a black marker to mark the translucent side of the cartridge it would stop complaining and let you print hundreds more pages. It also wasted tons of ink on frequent "head cleaning". One day it finally stopped printing one of the colors despite no mechanical problems. So I got a Canon and have been happy ever since.
I have Brother HL-L2300D. I can print around 2500 pages from non-genuine toner.
Annoying is sleep mode that cannot be changed. Printer won't turn on when I send print task to it. I have to turn on printer manually every time before print.
A full refill for my HP 8725 seems to be £158! The previous identical cartridges cost £85, and that was an insult. This is getting beyond ridiculous.
It's not like printer tech has improved much in recent years. I suspect a lot of what they're charging me for is R&D into how to prevent customers from using 3rd-party cartridges and a big profit hike to congratulate themselves for doing so successfully.
Do you think that applies to the Neverstop models? They have an internal toner tank that refills with syringes, so this kind of nonsense isn't really possible.
Is this recent from LaserJets, or involves HP software off-printer?
My HP LaserJet Pro 400 series m401n will keep printing even as the print quality fades, presumably due to actually low toner.
(This is running with CUPS and open source PCL drivers on the client, talking TCP to network passthrough to printer's USB, no HP-written software used off-printer.)
more modern printers have smarter chips that are harder to reuse and the printers can even permanently brick themselves if it thinks you're using non-proprietary cartridges
Generally some folks will re-use the proprietary cartridge, but manually refill them. In the mid 2000s I used to do this with inkjet cartridges - you could remove some of the labels/wrapper on the cartridge to expose a port that was accessible via syringe, and refill the reservoirs with cheap ink.
Or how about the environmental damage of implementing a chip onto every cartridge that is at least 10x expensive as the ink and plastic materials and who's sole purpose is to enforce that you're only using proprietary cartridges for your printer
I bought a Samsung printer a few years ago. A couple of months later, I discovered that Samsung's printer arm had been acquired by Hewlett-Packard - the company I least wanted to buy a printer from.
My printer has no number pad. It has a horrible menu system you navigate with arrow-keys. The cartridge it came with was tiny - it lasted for less than a ream. But the replacement I bought is still going strong (I don't print more than a couple of pages a week, which is why I didn't want an ink-jet).
My laser Samsung from 2013 has a just small display and simple function buttons. But I never got an original cartridge - the replacement I can get online are far cheaper and cost me about 8.50 EUR without the delivery cost.
The printer works but paper feeder rollers seem to struggle now. I'm afraid that once it gets broken beyond any repair I'll have to get new which will chain me to official supplies.
ghacks.net [1] has published a news about Epson ending the laser printers production while focusing more on inkjet segment from now on, which as they claim are more eco than laser ones. One of the users in the comments says HP already region-locks their cartridges
Haha, yes, I should have made that more clear - I only meant lubricate if there are any bearings or rolling surfaces, definitely not on the parts that are meant to grip! I had an old printer where one end of the steel roller was in a simple plastic bearing and it was squeaking, a drop of oil fixed it. But I'm not an expert, maybe that wasn't a great idea.
Identical story here. The toner the printer came with lasted a few months. I refilled it in a local shop (the guy explained me that they had to replace the chip that counts the pages so refilling was expensive, but in fact it was a fraction of a new one). Still printing with that same toner after (I think) 6 years.
Just make sure you never do a firmware upgrade unless it's absolutely required, and, if possible, disable DNS lookups for FW upgrade with something like pihole.
My first and last Epson (inkjet) ended its life on my balcony after I took to it with a cricket bat, Office Space style. Never again. Leaks, overpriced cartridges, crappy software.
Had a Brother laser since then (HL-3170CDW) no complaints, just works, toner lasts forever.
The eco-tank epson models have been pretty good so far, except for a duplex feed that doesn't work well - and that is not economical to repair, given the printers not expensive. That's a separate concern - I'd prefer more expensive, but modular and repairable machines.
But I second Brother lasers - I have two for over 10 years, and they soldier on like on day 1.
Brother lasers also have a funky reset procedure (depends on model, but searchable on internet). It’s outrageous. You can get another 500 to 1000 pages out of it.
I've done this for a few office Brother laser MFCs. In my experience while you can get a couple hundred more pages out, pages may start being speckled and the cartridge will dust toner into the printer, even if there's still plenty of toner in the cartridge.
From what I can tell this is due to a rubber blade that cleans the toner cartridge's "drum" wearing out, which can sometimes (but not very easily) be replaceable. My guess is that while there's some encouragement of new cartridges going on, the print count is also at a lower number to prevent issues like it from cropping up.
I've also heard that as the cartridge goes through toner, some printers will increase voltage on the drums proportionally, which can be thrown off by resetting the toner level.
From a toner remanufacturing document:
"When the printer senses a new toner cartridge, the bias voltage is set to a high voltage. As the cartridge is used, the bias voltage is reduced gradually down. This process is necessary because according to Brother, a new toner cartridge has a tendency to print light. As the cartridge is used, the density increases. To keep the density level even throughout its life, the density bias voltage is reduced accordingly. Each time a new cartridge is installed, the bias voltage is reset to the high voltage point, and the cartridge page count is reset to zero." [1]
My brother laser printers have a setting on the web interface for what to do when the "replace toner" warning comes up: either continue printing or stop. They'll happily keep printing if configured to "continue".
For some of these it may be a quality issue. With less material to deposit in the cartridge it may not apply evenly. Lots of times this could be fine but it might not always be the case.
That's possible and understandable for high volume printers. But for personal/desk printers they should have an option like. Cartridges are running low on toner, would you like to enable degraded printing? Rather than having labyrinthine steps to overcome out of toner error (which are not in the manual mind you). My experience is that full color printouts do not suffer. When they do run out, it's noticeable and comes nearly at once --rather than slowly degrading.
My Brother laser printer has been reporting low toner for months (years?) now. Does it get to a point where it says toner is out and stops printing? For now, I just keep printing, and it's working just fine.
Canon also has a program like this, although they dont have that brilliant consumables separation of toner from drum that seems to be a brother-only hallmark at the sub $1,000 pricepoint. so you have to replace a perfectly usable drum with each toner change, like HP and all the rest.
I use mine less than once a month on average and I'm in my 40s :P
I use it for shipping labels, notices to put up, government forms as they are not very digital here. Sometimes a hardcopy of something I'm organizing and want to scribble on.
Also tickets and boarding passes as backup for the electronic version.
I'm still on the toner that came with the printer (which is half empty to begin with!) years after buying it. I use laser because it doesn't run when it gets wet and because there is no ink to dry out with low usage.
I have a printer in my home office only because of work.
For work we use QuickBooks Enterprise and it’s oriented to paper checks.
More interesting, some tasks are _faster_ when you use a paper print. I’m thinking of processing payrolls. You should verify before authorizing the processor to complete the run. I prefer to not waste paper and routinely verify the PDF on screen. But if things go sideways and I’m under pressure, a hard copy is the way to go.
Finally, I do my own vehicle maintenance, and a hard copy of the service manual page is good to have on hand.
I could go to Staples for the service manual pages, but for work that’s just a waste of time.
“Record keeping” mainly - official returns, paid for professional work product (lawyers, etc) - stuff that you’re obliged to keep, or would cost money to get a new copy of.
Unlike ink jets most laser printers will let you disable the low toner “lock outs” although by default it may refuse to print.
Then you just wait for the streaks to appear to know when you’re out. You can shake it to extend the life once that occurs. I’ve printed hundreds of pages after the printer said I was out of toner.
There’s probably some small quality loss but for text you don’t really notice if it’s not streaking.
My laser doesn't _refuse_ to print, it makes you click through a warning on the printer itself for each print job. Like you said, that can be easily disabled (it's a menu item -- no secret procedure). I've found the toners to easily print double the nominal capacity.
Manufacturers want to provide a product that produces reliable high quality prints. That's why the toner low warning comes up very early, so that there's no chance that your important documents look unprofessional due to low toner levels.
As a consumer, naturally, you can almost always ignore the warning and use the toner until you can't even read granny's apple pie recipe anymore.
I spent some time maintaining a fleet of printers, among other things. Toner cartridges streak when they are near empty, and can be restored by shaking them, for a time. Shaking them more and more as they near the end. I can understand why you’d want a cartridge to report “empty” before it starts streaking.
I don’t really care about a bit of wasted toner, though. What I really want are more durable mechanical parts (gears, etc) and a ready supply of replacement parts like fusers.
I also wonder how the printer counts its toner “empty”. If it’s just a page count, surely it wouldn’t be accurate. I know that you can measure page coverage, but I wonder if they actually do it.
I’m also sure that they have no incentive to make the “empty” threshold more accurate.
This is being a bit too generous. If that were the case, they could provide a warning about print quality instead of just saying that the toner is low. But then people wouldn't be as compelled to needlessly buy more overpriced printer supplies.
That's not necessarily toner left in the cartridge. It could be developer. Laser printers have 2 separate forms of powder inside of them. One being toner, and the other being developer.
The developer has fine metal particulates inside that "charge" the toner, enabling the toner to be pulled off of the drum, and onto the page.
Larger copiers have the Developer, and toner separate. However, the cartridge pictured is the full process unit.
Developer is, in all modern machines, a roller. It lasts almost forever - far longer than any home user will use their machine at least.
When it does run out, I don't think it's due to wear or the metal particles being 'used up' in any way, but instead because a layer of dirt has stuck to the surface of the roller, so it is no longer any good at transferring toner.
Developer loses its charge over time. You have to replace it.
Every laser copier/printer still uses developer. If you can show me a model of laser printer that does not, I'm all ears.
There is also a transfer roller in each copier, maybe that's what you're talking about?
I could be mistaken, but as recently as 2020, every commercial copier I worked on, still uses developer. I have never worked on, or heard of a laser copier without developer.
"Mono-component" toner is toner that is magnetic in its own rite, so it doesn't need separate developer (iron powder) to make it magnetic. I believe the original mono-component toners had magnetite in them, but I believe now there's non-magnetic mono-component toner too.
Magnetic printers, with magnetic toner, have been built [1] but never really caught on.
It was one of those dead ends from the early years of trying to build a faster printer.
Somehow I managed to encounter, early in my career, the first CRT phototypesetter prototype (Harris-Intertype), the first electrostatic liquid printer prototype (Clevite-Brush), the Data Interface Magnetic Printer, the Teletype Inktronic (swept a beam of ink dots with deflection plates, like a CRT), and a Corning Glass display that used photochromic glass (write with UV, view in green, erase with IR).
None were successful products, although for a decade or so, electrostatic liquid printers from Versatek [2] were a thing. They used "dark juice", toner particles in a liquid suspension. A row of electrodes charged the paper, which passed over a liquid surface where the paper picked up toner particles. Then a heating station fused the toner and evaporated the liquid. Required special paper. Print quality was mediocre, but the devices were quiet and fast.
In classic xerography, yes, the toner is moved around electrostatically. But it also needs to have magnetic properties (either intrinsically or by means of developer) to form a magnetic “brush” which is presented to the drum. Think of iron filings mixed with toner on a piece of paper and a magnet on the other side. The right static charge will be able to pull the toner out while leaving the iron filings behind.
Also it's not flat across the top so it's probably more like 10-12% than 15%. They measured the highest edge when there's a pretty significant slope compared to the full toner cartridge.
Yeah. My HP toner cartridge has been "empty" for about a year and is still printing fine! It has done more pages since it was empty than before it was empty.
We have about five HP 4200 printers in our office and I use genuine 38X toners which I think are rated at 12,000 pages.
When we get a Toner Low message it'll then do about 500 pages before it reports Toner Out, after that print will rapidly fade. We can probably scrape 1-200 pages on Toner Out, but it's not good enough quality to send out.
Basically their Low and Out warnings seem pretty accurate in my experience.
It's not different from what a well-known company does with their devices by installing low-grade batteries with leaking capacity. Intentionally, planned obsolescence.
All rechargeable batteries lose capacity over time, with every cycle. If you think you're sitting a scoop that you can prove then you should let the world know.
Somewhat related, I recently bought a Brita water filter jug which has a little led on the lid which glows red when the disposable filter cartridge has “expired” and needs replacing.
Before I even started to use the thing I knew what to expect. Sure enough it starts to glow red after a ridiculously short period of time of using a brand new filter cartridge.
I’ve been ignoring it for a few weeks now and checking for any difference in taste of the filtered water but haven’t detected anything yet. I’d recently been wondering about how to verify the filter’s effectiveness somehow as I’m sure this indicator is less than useless and essentially setup to “lie” for profit.
There should be laws against this sort of thing. Any indicator that tells you when a consumable needs to be replaced should have to meet some level of accuracy in order to be legal.
> Any indicator that tells you when a consumable needs
I'm not a fan of the blinking reminders either, but it's not a monitor it's just a flashing version of the "remind me in the months" wheel or whatever.
The problem they face is a hard one. There are really two timelines you care about, one is how long it stays effective, the second is how long it is safe.
The first one especially is highly affected by both usage patterns and the water quality you are starting with. With an inline system I'd sort of hope to have reasonable monitoring, but Brita filters are fundamentally passive devices, to do this "properly" your going to 10x-100x your costs, maybe worse.
A less cynical (than pure profit motive) take on the timing would be that the lifteimes are all based on some sort of average case for usage and (bad?) test case for hardness and water quality. I suspect they have to be careful in what they say about how best to adjust this without opening themselves up to liability, so they don't.
Instead of a timer you could have a counter. The Brita filter looks to last 40 gallons. My Brita pitcher holds 10 cups. 10 cups equals 0.625 gallons. Which means my filter lasts for ~64 fills of the pitcher.
So using a counter until 64 would tell me to refill. All you need is a plus sign and some way to reset.
Now that I've done the math I might start writing this on a pad next to my refrigerator because I never have any idea when to switch the filter. Paper is preferable to electronics in my life.
At one point Brita distributed a spring-driven mechanical ratchet counter that would sit on top of the filter cartridge; it had some sort of diaphragm arrangement that would sense the water level and "tick" once per refill cycle and tell you when it was time to swap in a new filter.
I wonder why they go rid of it. Was this shipped with every filter or was it a think you reset and put on again? Do you recall if it could tell the difference between a partial fill and full fill?
What you really want is to measure the volume through the filter, but I can't think of a way to do that cheaply and mechanical only.
It was reusable. You would turn it back to the start to reset it when you'd pull it off the top of the old filter and stick it on top of the new one.
I don't recall whether it came with the pitcher or as a bonus item included in a filter-multipack. It just counted one "tick" on a ratchet per fill/empty cycle, no attempt to measure volume or fractional fills.
That definitely works better than a timer, but still has to be adjusted for the water quality in your house.
But it also assumes you go fill-to-empty. In my limited experience they are often refilled from partially empty, whenever convenient. If you are doing this on paper, maybe you should count output instead of input? More work though.
So Brita filters are just activated Carbon that improve the taste and filter some of the worst pollutants but nothing else.
One way to test is using a TDS meter to see if over time the amount of dissolved solids increase. This is not a bulletproof test but it may give some indication of when the filter is saturated. Again, the Brite/PUR filters do not do much to begin with.
This video shows how the Brita filters perform compared to others. THey use a TDS meter. I do want to also point out that TDS is not the only metric for how good water is filtered but thats another conversation.
We use Brita at home. Fwiw, it seems to be pretty successful at filtering chlorine - I did a little before/after experiment with a chlorine test kit purchased off Amazon.
Yes Chlorine can affect taste so it is one of the things it does filter although I have had friends tell me that it does not do a good enough job and they still taste it. I guess it depends on the person.
I also recommend Zerowater although it seems like their filters empty out faster than expected(as per their chart explaining how long the filter would last per initial TDS reading). Wish there was an ecosystem of third party filters like Brita has to help put downward pressure on the price. I also hate the fact that they don't really have a recycling program anymore. These filters are huge and I feel guilty just tossing them.
Regulation regarding the truthfulness/accuracy of indicators probably wouldn't hurt.
But, the better solution is effective Right To Repair laws that coerce a minimum level of standards and open design.
For example, if Brita were required to publish the parameters of that part, you would be able to more easily make an informed decision regarding replacing that part (either by repairing it, cleaning it, refurbishing it, or replacing it with one from another maker) without the tedious guesswork and reverse engineering.
Good luck with that! Even the EU hasn’t broached that subject.
Most of those folks make their money on consumables anyway, so then the manufacturers would Jack up the price on the main product and blame the legislators.
I'm OK with sleazy companies pricing themselves out of the market if that's what it takes to prevent rent-seeking "ecosystems" imposing vendor-lock-in by making their "too cheap to be true" loss-leader products require esoteric consumables.
Plenty of states have active Right to Repair legislation happening right now. It's definitely on some people's priority list and good legislators make time for important issues.
Those filters (usually coconut shell carbon) can start having bacterial biofilm grow on them over time, and generally get saturated with gunk, that’s why you’re meant to change them frequently. I guess when they do depends on a lot of factors and the recommendation is an average length - ideally would have some better sensors on when to change them but gets more costly
And (defensibly, somewhat) they’ll of course set the indicator to be for the worst case possible, even if not probable, so they 1) get more money, and 2) won’t lose money in lawsuits from someone saying ‘It still said it was fine!’ who gets sick, even if there were other really obvious signs something was wrong.
So for a filter, either 24/7 use or one time use then letting it sit (whichever is worse).
And yet water filters for use when camping last WAY longer and don't cost that much more. A simple Katydid BeFree lasts 1000L. I'm betting the Brita indicator came on WAY before that.
Can't say I've experienced the same thing, ours lasts pretty long and with our water you can start to taste the filter needing to be replaced shortly before the light goes red.
iirc Brita advertises the tracker monitors how long the pitcher is being tilted for, so there's some verbiage about avoiding doing certain things with it etc in the installation guide/manual.
Just FYI, those brita jug indicators are based on a counter that increments every time the lid pops open from a pour, after a certain threshold the light changes color.
It depends on the model. Mine has the light on the dispenser (at the bottom) and the lid (at the top) has nothing connecting it to the light. I know there's nothing connecting them because it came unassembled and I put it together. I believe it is simply a timer on my model.
Brita® pitchers and dispensers have three different styles of filter indicators—Pitchers WITH Max Fill Line, Pitchers WITHOUT Max Fill Line, and sticker filter indicators.
Pitchers WITH Max Fill Line
The filter indicator lets you know when it’s time to replace your filter. It activates when the lid is opened for 5–8 seconds (based on size of reservoir) and measures water use by counting the number of times the reservoir is filled.*
Pitchers WITHOUT Max Fill Line
The filter change indicator lets you know when it’s time to replace your filter. It is activated each time you pour, and measures water use based on 8 fl. oz. pour
Fair enough. I guess I just don't understand how that would possibly work for the model I've got. The lid is at the top, and the electronics are at the bottom, and outside of the water. There is a clear container of water separating the lid and the electronics. The lid is a thin piece of plastic, there's really nothing to it. I'm still convinced it's just a timer for this model, or at best it measures the water coming out of the spigot:
For the pitcher equivalent they document that the indicator is simply a count of the number of pours, where they assume each one is exactly 8 oz, and that the filter lasts for exactly 40 gallons. (i.e. turns red after exactly 640 pours).
For that one, they don't actually document how it works. They do seems to indicate they that they are trying to approximate water used though, since they say it turns red "once you reach 40 gallon[s]". It might be a count of activations of the spigot handle or based on timing how long the spigot handle has been open since last reset (e.g. they previously calculated the flow per second, and use that to count up seconds that up until they reach 40 gallons).
My refrigerator recommends changing the filter every 6 months. Last filter change, I wrote the date on it with a Sharpie. Sure as shit, 6 months later, the light goes off to remind me to change the cartridge.
I'd say the unfiltered water quality still might matter in your case. I had to swap to the "stronger" orange marked Maxtra cartridges for harder water because the standard ones weren't actually helping. And I can tell the difference because our kettle gets less limescale now - that's also still the marker for me when filter is about to wear off. For our family one cartridge lasts for about a month now.
I'm using these jugs for 10 years already and the quality of these dropped significantly. The older Elemaris line (with "probes") had more durable plastic while the newer Style (with silicone lid handle) already broke twice during washing. At leas the rounded sensor is more waterproof than the "probe" - that one I had to replace twice and luckily the local distributor send these for free.
You can use a TDSmeter to see how many particulates are in the water. Brita (as do many charcoal based filter) adds some particulates though. If your water naturally has a lot of stuff in it though, Brita will reduce it overall
Have had good luck with ZeroWater which comes with a TDS meter on the pitcher. Unlike Brita indicators which are time-based, this allows you to just measure the solids have actually been removed (if it's too high, it's time to replace it)
Zerowater is great but man their expensive filters do not seem to come near the advertised amount. The expense and lack of good third party alternatives for their filters just adds salt to the wound(since it didn't get filtered out HA!).
What is the appeal of these compared to just getting a 10 inch under the counter filter set? I have a double filter set, with two different multistage filters. The water is extremely well filtered and it's relatively cheap to change the filters a couple times a year as per manufacturer recommendations. It took me 35 minutes to install, but it's been running fine for years.
The modern answer to printer manufacturers' woes is of course to simply offer consumers a monthly subscription that unlocks the ability to use the ink that they've paid for. I mean, yes, you've already paid for the ink, but have you paid to use it? I think not. The store you bought the printer from will take a 30% cut too, to compensate them for the ongoing effort they expend in having sold you the printer.
The premium subscription could include indemnity insurance in the event that the onboard-AI detects and auto-reports you for printing any copyrighted material.
Bought an Epson "Ecotank" a few years ago, best printer I've ever had. Only had to refill the ink tanks a couple of times, and the refill ink is super affordable. Paid a much higher up-front cost for the printer but damn... I print out TONS of photos now, and don't have to worry about the ink cartridge depleting at a fast rate.
As a counterbalance, I bought that same one at Costco and hated it; I am much happier after switching to a Brother laser printer.
During the pandemic it was especially helpful for the kids' school work. I went through 3 or 4 ink cartridges (literally thousands of pages of printing), but the 3rd party cartridges worked fine and not expensive at all.
I still have one of those. I don't print enough to keep it from clogging, and often have to run two or three cleaning cycles after not using it for a few weeks. I had to refill black ink once, for a few dollars.
Many printers are sold at a loss because the cartridges are where the money is made. I've heard of people buying brand new printers when their ink ran out because it was cheaper than new ink
I would like to see cartridges designed ecologically - refillable perhaps, or at least designed to flow as much out as possible - and allowing you to override the "toner low" warning and keep printing even if it's almost dry.
Most are refillable if you follow an unofficial online guide.
Beware that toner dust is really nasty stuff and gets everywhere, so however careful you are you'll still have clouds of toner dust escape and stick to every surface of your house inside and out...
Top tip:. Never clean toner dust with warm water. It will stick and become permanent.
There isn't yet enough research on health hazards of toner to really give a good answer here... Black toner for example is mostly polyester plastic and carbon dust. Neither of those are particularly toxic, although they are in a much finer powder than you'd normally encounter them.
Basically I'd still steer clear of them, but exposing yourself to them isn't a certain death sentence like say organic mercury.
I would say akin to smoking a cigarette. One time won't hurt you in a measurable way but if your job is refilling toners or dealing with broken laser printers you need some protection.
Be warned that mixing different formulations of toner could cause the toner to not stick tot he drum properly and start to pool up in your printer requiring expensive maintenance.
Lets put aside the fact that you wouldn't know the correct values for whatever garbage generic toner the refill company gave you. How are you going to deal with the fact that the printer already has particles of the old toner in the system and now you are introducing contamination with a set of different particles from the new cartridge/refill?
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.
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.
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?!
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.
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 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.
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
Make no mistake, they can be refilled. By the manufacturer.
Most times a company will lease several multi-function printers from a manufacturer like Ricoh. These lease agreements come with a certain quantity of toner replacements included or discounted. Most also include service agreements, because they don't want you servicing a unit you do not own yourself.
When you have one of these agreements, you are supposed to send the empty toner back to the manufacturer. I have no doubt at all that they refill these and sell them as brand new units. Honestly, it would be an absurd waste if they didn't.
So think of it as a "Blue Rhino propane tank" which are notoriously not filled to capacity from the factory either. They don't give a crap how much product is in the container to begin with or when you return it. They only care that you return it as that increases their profit margins.
I remember when I was at school about 15 years ago there were printers that used wax(?) blocks, that were just put into it, not sure how it worked exactly.
Advantages: waterproof print; very clean; easy to change ink blocks; maintenance was mainly just emptying a tray containing small amounts of waste wax (biodegradable)
Disadvantages: when offline, the printer still used power to keep the wax in a liquid state, otherwise a cold start could take a while; colors were occasionally not as vibrant as regular laser printers
We had a tektronix with blocks - and that one had to be kept off except for very specific times, because if left on it would stay warm and over a week or two drain all the wax out of it into the waste tank.
Tektronix did a range of printers that used wax. They used rolls of wax sheet. They produced fantastic output, but the rolls of wax were really expensive. And if you put a coffee mug down on a printout, they got stuck together.
I think they were meant for one-off proofs of image-heavy marketing material. The colours were intense and vibrant, in a way that no colour laser or ink-jet ever is. Also, the wax stood a bit proud of the paper, giving an embossed look. But they weren't very permanent - if you folded the printout you'd damage the image; you could even scratch the wax off with a fingernail.
Epson has a line of printers that has refillable tanks rather than cartridges. The bottles that the ink comes in are designed so that they do not spill out when held upside down. They must be inserted into the tank to dispense.
You can refill them. They typically have a plastic plug on one side, and some companies will refill them for you, or you can buy a refill "kit".
However, the internals of the cartridge will break down over time. Typically it's the "blade" that evens out the powdered toner that wears out, leaving too much toner stuck to the page and results in those gray-page prints and streaks/lines.
If you buy refilled cartridges, the blade seems to be the most common failure point long before you run out of toner.
This is the opposite of how their designed. The chips on cartridges exist solely to make sure you're only buying proprietary cartridges and they cost about 20x the prices of the rest of the materials. The ink is dirt cheap and Costco actually had a service where they'd refill them for you (not sure if they still do since they got sued by some of these companies not too long ago). The plastic might even be more expensive than the ink
They used to be in some applications (like really big photocopiers). But toner is messy nasty stuff to deal with. Maybe refillable at a shop could work though.
I've been refilling the toner cartridges for my low-end Brother printer with generic toner off Amazon for years. It's not that bad and costs a fraction of the price of even a generic replacement cartridge. The toner comes in a bottle and you slowly pour it into the cartridge, perhaps with the assistance of a small funnel if necessary. I wear gloves and do it outside or in the garage. It only gets messy if you try to do it inside or have the dropsies. Obviously don't breathe it in.
Toner cartridges are generally recyclable / refurbished. You don’t throw them away, you take spent ones back to the place of purchase when you buy a new one.
I can't stand forced product refills from the OEM. I refilled my Sodastream maybe a half dozen times before buying a 5lb tank, an adapter hose off Ebay. It paid for itself in 2 refills of the 5lb tank at a nearby homebrew store.
It's a very old business model. Often cited in introductory businesss classes as the "Kodak model" (give away the camera, sell the film) or the "Gillette model" (give away the handle, sell the blades).
Generically you use the initial equipment purchase as a loss leader and then profit by marking up the required supplies.
Also, the difference between a full cartridge and an empty cartridge is minimal; about 20% of the toner reservoir is filled in a new cartridge, dropping to 15% when the printer says the cartridge is empty.
Many laser cartridges are legacy designs from before they started cheating on the amount of toner. That "extra" space was used to provide 10,000+ sheet capacity standard cartridges.
I'll always remember when our fairly expensive prosumer all-in-one-printer suddenly wouldn't let me scan pages because there was "no more ink" in the printer right before an important task. A straight up scam.
I'm surprised no one has disrupted the sad state of affairs in the printer industry yet even though it's slowly dying.
Long time ago, in around 2006, a computer shop guy wanted to charge me 3 times more for color scans jpegs than black & white scans, because "color ink" is expensive!! I was like, its a paper to pdf, you are not using any ink at all, but he was like no, how will your pdf get colors from?
Unfortunately, with ink-jet an out-of-ink can actually do damage, not merely produce a bad print. They have no incentive to make a reliable ink measuring system, though.
At the lower end of the market the printers are sold below-cost and the profit is in the ink. Above that, there's laser printers, which are far less prone to this.
Are we looking for someone to sell an ink-based printer that will cost more up front than its competitors, and then willingly forego the revenue that comes from market ink prices?
but also to say that typically when my toner cartridges start to say "empty" or get a few streaks, all i have to do is pull it out, give it a few firm taps all around (think tapping a nail into drywall) and then give it a few horizontal shakes to redistribute the material across the drum. I get 100s of more pages this way doing it multiple times.
Never, ever, ever buy a printer that takes cartridges. They’re discounted to at or below cost where they make the money back on cartridges.
They use ink to clean the heads. They say empty when they’re not. The cartridges that come with the printer aren’t full. There is a constant firmware update war to defeat third party cartridges for obvious reasons.
Buy a tank printer that you fill with ink bottles.
Well - buy the printer and once it runs out of ink toss it and buy another printer :)
I did that with an HP inkjet - got me out of trouble until it ran out, then I replaced with a Brother laser that was half of what the ink refills for the HP would have been. Toner for the Brother is like 20 bucks and lasts for a couple of years given my level of usage.
Years ago I used to do this when I rarely but occasionally needed a printer. Less than $100 for a printer that'd last me 2-3 years then just buy a new one. I fully support this strategy if your usage is really, really low.
Sounds like you're talking about ink printers, TFA is about laser printers.
Laser printers are far more cost-effective than ink printers, and there are even color laser printers with very decent color quality for everything except photos. (Ink printers are better for photos but even I think those look terrible compared to professionally-developed photos.)
Agreed. I've had the same HP color laser printer for over a decade and it's still working well. I've only had to replace the toner cartridges once or twice. Before that, I went through at least 3 inkjet printers that all failed because the ink dried out.
BTW, a cool modern hack is converting a document to high-res image files and then submitting the images to the Walmart photo printing service or similar. The document will look incredible.
I spent three hours refilling each of the CMYK cartridges in my HP color laser the other night.
First you use a copper ring to melt a little hole in exactly the right spot, then scalpel open the bag inside, carefully pour and shake the toner from the bottle, all the while huffing clouds of pink and yellow and blue dust and then you find it’s got everywhere. Then you’ve got to use bathroom sealant around a plug in the hole. Then the plug is sticking out too far and you’ve got fade on one side of the page, so repeat the plugging step a few times.
The refill kit was £65. A new set of carts was £200. I’m still deciding if it was worth it.
My Brother laser printer counts toner consumption (i.e. page count) with a keyed gear on the toner cartridge, different cartridge capacities have different shaped gears, resetting the gear orientation resets the counter.
The last printer I bought (HP LaserJet Pro m254dw) seems to do it right.
My black cartridge is at 0% and has been for a while. The supply status printout says something to the effect of "Just because it says 0% doesn't mean it's empty, keep printing until the quality is unacceptable." I ordered a new cartridge about a year ago, but haven't installed it yet because I'm not seeing any quality problems. I don't print much though, so it'll likely sit there for another year (or more).
The revolution has already occurred in some places. If I need a print job there's a printer within five minutes walk from me, I actually have a couple of places I could walk to. It's less than 10 yen for black and white, 50 to 80 yen for color.
I've put over 10000 of pages through my $150 laser printer at a consumables cost of about $0.02 per page, resulting in an amortized cost (including the printer) of $0.035 per page.
Have craft-related hobbies? All the damn time. Patterns, instructions, et c. Despite having a shitload of iPads and extra laptops and such around. Paper's far nicer in many cases, and sometimes cannot be replaced by a screen of any kind.
> Despite having a shitload of iPads and extra laptops and such around.
My SO likes to bake decorated cakes. When decorating she prints out the design, so she can put the cut-out paper pieces on the cake to finalize sizing and composition of the decoration. Be it text, a symbol or something more elaborate.
Just so much easier than trying to imagine what that thing on the tablet would look like draped over the side of the cake.
Right, there are tons of cases in various crafts, including things like cake decorating, where you need to destroy or deform a template or guide or placeholder, or at least for which it'd be very convenient, if not strictly necessary, to do so. You obviously can't and/or don't want to do that with a screen.
"Daddy, can you print me something" daily here as well, most time wasted on finding the bloody print-and-cut cartoon best in the world character of the week.
A while back I taught my oldest how to turn the printer on (and get the paper coming out, so I don't have to walk and get it myself) and she also wanted to "learn" how to print, so I explained the 2 mouse clicks needed for that. There is just something special about a kid that has unlocked a new magic ability and excitingly walking out of the room to return gleefully with a piece of paper in their hands. So far she printed recipes for cookies (which she somehow learned how to search for), drawings for her little sister and pictures of cats.
I know a guy who does printer support for biiiig (1 ton, length of the room, $100k+ easily) printers.
He takes stacks of paper. Running a 500 page ream through is a test. If it is something like streaking, which requires hunting down and cleaning up toner leaks and accumulations, he can run many many tests...
It is dying but very slowly, still very profitable and pretty big business. hp's 4th quarter printing business was 4.5 billion with a 20% profit margin.
I print standard library docs all the time to read.
That includes building Table of contents/indexes.
I print out pages of source code to do physical cross ref of when I get in some really gnarly code to help me physically reckon through the abstraction spaghetti.
I print invoices, letters, diagrams, books, pamphlets.
I mean, just because you don't do documents or have anything you want on paper, doesn't mean everyone else doesn't.
That's crazy. You know the text is just as real if you read it from the screen?
I've never owned a printer, they're Satan's own gift to the consumer electronics market.
Paper is also annoying to deal with. I've had an e-reader for 10 years but the odd older book isn't available. You'd think based on comments online that a real book is some magical wonderful thing, but they're an ass to use, heavy, large to store. Their only virtue is that they look nice on a shelf. But the other thing that looks nice is something other than a shelf.
> You know the text is just as real if you read it from the screen?
It's not about the text being "real", it's about the UI of printed pages versus screens. You can use the space around you, and leverage spatial reasoning, better with paper. You'd need multiple really big, digital-pen-input-ready, high-res screens, plus some very nice specialized software, to come close to the same experience with computers—and still only kinda, for some situations but not others. Or you can just print a few sheets of paper at pennies per sheet and have a couple pens and highlighters around.
Physical paper is just another UI, and remains better for some things than screens are. Screens do have some advantages—you can't full-text-search the sheets of paper you have splayed over your desk or pinned up on the whiteboard or tackboard, of course, though given how good & fast OCR is getting, we might be able to do exactly that when AR eventually takes off. You can't have animations on a piece of paper. You can't back your paper up in the cloud. But you can also have ten pages visible all at once, with paper, and recall "I think that one part was somewhere to the top-left...". You can fold it. You can doodle on it. You can stuff it between relevant pages in a book. You can bundle related pages together with consistent ordering in a UI I that's quite nice for many purposes (AKA a binder). Put all those together and there are plenty of times printed pages beat screens (though, to emphasize again just to make this entirely clear, not always).
> Paper is also annoying to deal with. I've had an e-reader for 10 years but the odd older book isn't available. You'd think based on comments online that a real book is some magical wonderful thing, but they're an ass to use, heavy, large to store. Their only virtue is that they look nice on a shelf. But the other thing that looks nice is something other than a shelf.
From my perspective e-readers have exactly two killer features: space/weight savings (this one is, to be fair, a huge advantage, and is the only reason I have one), and not needing separate "large print" editions for readers with poor eyesight. The UI of paper books is, in practically every other way, better. Two pages visible at a time is great. Being able to easily hold open a couple different parts of the book at once is great. Full-text search is occasionally nice but a good index is, overall, better (to be fair, being an ebook doesn't rule out having a good index, but I find them far more awkward to use than in physical books). Commentary and notes and annotations and anything that leverages the fixed, physical space of the page, including things like thoughtful typesetting (especially noticeable with poetry) are all better in a real book. Endless customization is obviously nice in a lot of ways, but the flexibility of ebooks harm some use cases—it's no coincidence that a lot of non-fiction struggles with representation in e-book form, without resorting to fixed-size PDF.
IMO ebooks aren't a book replacement, they're a totally new format, and creating content that best suits them won't be identical to creating content that best suits books, and books that are simply format-shifted to ebooks are bound (ha, ha) to suffer in some ways for it. The most apt comparison I can think of is the transition from scrolls to bound volumes. It's not hard to think of ways that scrolls would have been superior to codices, and while ultimately the latter may have been overall-better and certainly did win out, they weren't universally and in all ways better. Ultimately, the space-savings thing may win the day for ebooks (again, it is a huge advantage) and print books may largely vanish, but it won't be because ebooks are strictly superior formats for reading.
I understand your points, but, for all except "including things like thoughtful typesetting (especially noticeable with poetry)," I don't find them very compelling. For fiction an e-reader has been a great improvement, easier to handle, never lose your place, able to jump around the book and then back again, search, and probably most importantly ergonomics - larger text when I'm tired etc.
For non-fiction I do find it hard to understand how paper is better for you than on a monitor. Open 2 pages at once, yep, side by side is no problem, plus as many other pages as you like open at once with windows or tabs. Full text search AND the index, with clickable links to the places you want to go.
Jotting down notes in the margin - yes, I can see that would be an issue. But if its important I think I'd want to keep it separate anyway. I have one of those e-paper notepad things with a digital pen which I use for note taking or drawing freehand diagrams or music notation (and its nice because it has the templates so I don't have to go and search for the sheet music paper). The only feature I miss from real pens and paper is colour.
> For non-fiction I do find it hard to understand how paper is better for you than on a monitor. Open 2 pages at once, yep, side by side is no problem, plus as many other pages as you like open at once with windows or tabs. Full text search AND the index, with clickable links to the places you want to go.
Not stuck to a monitor, for one thing. If you are at a desk, you can have like three open at once, two pages each, no problem, on a desk that's not even very big, plus a notebook out, all at once, no swiping between "desktops" or whatever. (admittedly, the huge-screen version of the iPad Pro can solve the "stuck to a desk/laptop" problem for reading textbooks/papers/etc.—it's pretty great at that, actually—but that's $1,000+ dollars and that only lets you have one open at once)
I do think ebooks are a pretty good—and probably, overall, strictly superior—replacement for casual-reading fiction, but I think the which-is-superior question gets murkier past that. Books can have lots of UI/presentation features and ebooks aren't great at matching all of them, especially when you're reading them on a portable device. Though, again, being able to have 10,000 books in your coat pocket is a pretty serious advantage even if everything else is a little to a lot worse.
Had a friend who was brilliant with a ink printer and cutter who made multiple armies of printed, cut, folded miniatures. He was ridiculously good with precision. And patience...
Ask yourself before buying anything: cost per year times its lifetime. Kilowatt hours, disposal costs, quality degradation (battery, software slowdown), etc.
There is a benefit to the convenience of printing something at home instead of going to Staples to get it printed. That is a subjective cost that cannot easily be measured.
The 15%/20% figure is wild. I've owned a Kyocera Mita laser printer from 2004ish to 2022 - and I had to change the toner cartridige like 2-3 times. Either this weird filling was not the case for my model, or I could have saved another 60€ in 18 years :D
And while this sounds like a useless purchase, I printed many thousand pages, but apparently for laser printer that's still not a lot.
Are we at all surprised when the incentive is for them to make you buy ink as frequently as possible? There are even subscription services now for ink - all for that sweet Recurring Revenue investors love. They've made their systems hard to service yourself or use third-party components/cartridges so no player is going to make a "value" option anytime soon.
I bought a Canon ImageClass MF210 for $99 many years ago and it works flawlessly (as long as you don't need to print color). It never forces me to change the toner (I'm merely forced to swap it out when the print starts getting to faint). It also happily accepts cheap, knock off toner replacement cartridges without any sort of modification.
I ordered a replacement toner cartridge for our HP laser printer in 2019 when it reported it was low. We print a few pages a day on average and the new one is still in the box... I haven't even had to take it out and shake it.
I don't own a printer for this very reason. As of late though I've had to question if this is viable anymore - UPS price gouged me for 2 A4 sheets of black/white paper prints for $6.40.
The horror stories are a bit overblown. I've had good luck with a regular old inkjet printer. Been using a Brother inkjet for years. It was $50 brand new (!!!), prints beautiful photos (use glossy paper), has a built-in scanner and photocopier, and even prints double sided. The last time I bought generic ink it cost me $22 for 3 full sets of cartridges. Aside from having a wonky UI it works flawlessly.
We print out worksheets for the kids almost daily so we need a printer. I bought the cheapest HP laserjet that had an internal paper tray and it's been fine. I'm pretty sure I bought it in 2018 and we're still on the starter toner despite it having the low toner warning light on since 2019.
I got few prints from UPS, black & white long ago. Now I use staples, color one side letter prints are 70 cents or something, black white around 14 cents. Assuming your files are as pdf, on a fat32 usb.
The whole stranded toner/ink issue is why subscription is becoming popular in this space, nobody wants to feal cheated and per-page pricing is pretty straightforward.
I think we should slap all these companies with class action lawsuits till they start behaving. This is outrageous behavior. How can these executives sleep at night?
