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.
