Home inkjet printers are only ideal for a niche usecase where you print lots of photos regularly (to the point where you need your own printer over a photo printing service). Their only advantage over laser printers is higher image quality.
If you don't print frequently, the ink nozzles clog up (and you inevitably use a bunch of ink trying to fix them). For infrequent document printing, a laser printer will Just Print whether it's been sitting unused for an hour or a month. If you occasionally need some photos printed, using one of the myriad services will be better than replacing the inevitably gunked up ink cartridges.
If you print a lot of documents, the laser printer easily outstrips the speed of an inkjet. You'll also run up huge ink fees since the cost per page of ink tends to be higher than toner.
Therefore, the only reason you should get an inkjet printer is if you often need high quality colour prints (photos).
1) Surprisingly, the running costs, with generic ink, are the same as a laser.
2) The text quality is fine. The image quality is better than a laser. Photos are great.
3) It can do larger formats (up to 13x19), copies, duplex, etc. The cost is literally a fraction of a similar laser. A large format laser is $$$. This one is $250 right now.
4) The speed is similar to a basic laser, but slower than a nice laser. It's rated at 12PPM color and 25PPM mono. It's slower, but it's fast enough.
I used to share your opinion, but ink has come a long ways. Something like this is super-versatile, since it does literally everything for $250.
I had an Epson inkjet and I only used it maybe once a month, and I had to change the ink cartridges every other time I used it, despite attempts at maintenance. I've now a laser printer for a couple years and am now only just running low on toner. Don't buy inkjet.
I print no more than a few times per year, but those times I do print it'd be really annoying not to be able to print. Inkjet simply doesn't work for that kind of use case, you have to be printing somewhat regularly for it to make any sense. Highly irregular printing patterns like this are better served by laser, because the toner doesn't go bad just because you haven't printed this month.
He says you should always buy their special guaranteed virus free ink, but in my opinion it's much easier and safer to avoid the printers completely. You never know when you buy ink online if it's genuine - you could "catch a virus" at any time. It's almost certainly nonsense, but you can't be too careful.
This is true if you're in a dry/mostly-dry climate. In Southeast Asia, a humid tropical climate, they have problems with toner clumping instead of ink drying, and I've noticed that inkjets (invariably with CIS/bulk ink systems installed) are far more popular than lasers.
I can confirm; in 11 years I haven't had a single issue with ink drying out, with very sporadic use of our printer.
I have also noticed lots of government offices that print a bunch of stuff all put an inkjet on almost every (rather than shared laser printers I'd been expecting to see), and I wondered why. Your explanation may be the key to that too.
You’re posting on an article about other things inkjet is used for and then you say the only thing you need a home inkjet printer for is for photos?
????
Photos is the last thing I’d buy an inkjet printer for. I’d be using a home inkjet to make circuit boards, temporary shirts, screen printing masks, transparencies, stickers, etc.
"Agilent developed a way to print strands of DNA from the four nucleic acid bases—cytosine (C), guanine (G), adenine (A), and thymine (T)."
"Inkjet systems are particularly suited for printing drugs in the form of thin films, such as transdermal patches to be applied to the skin and buccal films to be held in the cheek, where drugs can pass directly to the bloodstream without first going through the digestive system."
These applications are from dedicated machines, not available at BestBuy. Though I would like to see a supplier selling conductive inks for circuit board prototyping, and just maybe a home system could be filled with DNA or medicines??
The article also gave an interesting overview of the micro-dosing technology using for example piezo-electrics.
I think the "occasional printing will clog up nozzles" affects some printer models more than the others.
As a single data point, I used a Canon i9990 for many years. It had a very irregular use -- I would print a few 13x19 photos or a tiled panorama, or an occasional school picture of kids for the relatives. Then it would sit unused for days to months until the next job. And even with this supposedly abusive cycle it ran like new until it completely died one day.
I personally had worse luck with image printing services. Maybe the machines are off, maybe the fellow who runs it does not care, but more often than not there is something subtly wrong: either the color is off, or there is a smudge at the edge or some minor artifact. My 2c.
> Their only advantage over laser printers is higher image quality.
There is also the significantly lower price. Although,if you print a lot, you'll eventually make up the price difference in toner. If, like me, you only need to print rarely, it's probably better just to print at a library or FedEx or UPS store when needed. But there is probably somewhere in the middle where a decent inkjet is more economical, especially if you can get one that works with third party ink cartridges.
As others have noted, some printers (for instance Epson EcoTank) have printing costs that are pretty much on par with laser printers and almost no clogging issues. People usually don't take into account energy costs when buying laser printers (toner is typically kept warm from instant, no-preheating printing) and, crucially, laser printers are terrible for indoor air quality. I therefore reached the opposite conclusion as you…
> If you don't print frequently, the ink nozzles clog up...
This was true before, but my 10 year old Deskjet 4515 doesn't do that, even if you don't print for a couple of months.
Being an InkAdvantage(TM) printer, cartridges are not expensive either, and while its color inks are dye based (not pigmented), the colors hold up very well even when they are not stored properly (frame the photo up and leave it there).
B&W laser printers are nice, and they're cheap on the long run, but color laser printers polish the paper a lot (4 drums + baking), and reading long papers on that shiny copy is not very comfortable. Pens' handling on that paper also changes after that much heat and processing. Inkjets and B&W lasers doesn't have that problem.
I use my B&W laser for more disposable documents, but for code and papers which contains graphics, I prefer my Inkjet very much.
Lastly, people think that ink is just colored water. It's not. Same is true for toner. They're complex technologies. Yes, cartridges sent for some markup, but ink and toner quality varies. Esp. if you want archival prints.
Unless you print a ton, cost is definitely an issue. I was excited when I got a free color laser that was fairly new, but it was over $200 just to replace the black; my inkjet and a dozen replacements is still cheaper than refilling the all the laser cartridges
I bought my Brother color laser printer 12 years ago in a fit of HP inkjet induced rage.
It just runs and runs and runs.
I've bought a couple more for around the office and recommend them every time the subject of printers comes up.
If you don't want GBs of bullshit malware pretending at being drivers, you're sick of the color ink shenanigans, and you want a printer that wakes up and prints every single time, get a Brother Laser printer. They're amazing.
And the sad part now is that HP Color LaserJets are hampered by such godawful software and design that I wish I had bought a Brother color laser printer. I will never make that mistake again.
I have a beautiful HP Color LaserJet MFP 4301dfw that constantly loses connection to the WiFi access point and requires a reboot and/or logging into the incredibly shitty HP Smart software. I really wish HP had enterprise-grade or at least prosumer software instead of this fucking awful consumer shit. A $599 printer should have a solid software stack, and HP even markets it to small office consumers.
The machine has a beautifully designed exterior and solid internals that are plagued with an absolute shit software stack. Bill Hewlett and David Packard are probably rolling over in their grave at how fucking far their laser printer division has fallen.
Indeed about the founders. I'm sorry to hear you were fleeced. I highly recommend taking that monster out back and recreating our favorite scene from Office Space.
HP was once a great company that innovated and made incredible technology.
It was taken over by financial types in the late nineties. They sold off the test equipment core business and leaned into cost cutting. They excised any vestiges of integrity or quality wherever it could be found.
With regard to software, I've long since accepted that HP, Brother, Canon et al can't write drivers to save their lives - and shouldn't have to - in a world where AirPrint, Chrome OS Printing, Windows IPP, or Direct IP printing exist.
It's long past time for printing to be treated as an OS service, where 3rd parties write the smallest possible shim to plug into available devices.
I don’t know if both authors being affiliated with HP Labs is a coincidence or a sign of a conflict of interest… But the article kinda reads like a desperate last-ditch promo for the inkjets.
I haven’t had an inkjet for 30 years - only black and white lasers. Starting with HL LaserJet 5L in 2000, then Samsung and now Brother (yay for their nice platform independence so they work on Linux).
My Prusa 3D is also arguably spewing a material into a surface so I guess yeah, maybe I should count it as an inkjet as well, though ;-)
Seems like the point of this article missed a lot of people entirely, since they are so fixated on consumer inkjet printers. That's a very specific case of inkjet printing, but inkjet technology is way more than that.
For example continuous inkjet printers are used to label packages of many items you buy every day. There's also research about inkjet printing wearable electronics etc. None of which has a lot to do with HP.
A lot of the comments here read like a hobbyist programmer saying “C++ is dead, I haven’t written any C++ in my projects for years and since I’ve switched to Rust, I’ve never looked back”.
Yes, I stand by this analogy because inkjet is that important. The market is doing great and technology is improving at an impressive rate.
To build on your example of continuous IJ presses: more and more applications have lately been switching to drop-on-demand, as those printheads continue to get better (especially piezo IJ) and cheaper (especially thermal IJ).
Since there’s no “jet” in your 3D printer from an engineering perspective, arguably you shouldn’t. That would be extrusion (and Prusa correctly refers to it as such).
Basically if it's a liquid you can inkjet it. (basically each nozzle has a chamber with a tube leading into it and a hole in the top. A resistor heater boils the drop and it spits out the hole).
I always wondered if anyone ever tried to make a fuel injector out of one. (the finer the mist you can make your gasoline, the better it combusts).
Source: I looked at thousands of these things under a microscope at a company that makes lots of them. 0/10 would not recommend.
For engine injector need high pressure. In automobile direct injector used 20 layers of piezoelectric plates to achieve this, and sure, high voltage applied.
I'm pretty sure I've come across piezos on inkjet printers too. Can't remember the make, but resistive heating is only one way to get the ink to go splat.
I wonder if you could make a really good fuel injected motor utilizing these for RC/Drone engines.
An RC/drone I think that would be neat would be a 'diesel electric' (not diesel) - but a motor utilizing this for injecting into a generator for a gas-electric helicopter. Like a Chinook where the interior is the gas-electric generator, but the overall design modeled after the Chinook given that its the Heavy Lifter of Helos with a payload lift capacity of ~20 tons.?
--
In the late 1990s I worked at a company who manufactured a lot of the physical media for various software/games/OS (Intuit/Everquest/SunOS for example)
We manufatered the CDs, copy, manuals, boxes, etc - boxed and shipped it...
All the CDs were printed using Brother inkjets.
My buddy was a fairly famous DJ in the rave scene in the 90s - so in my off hours we would make and print his CDs...
dj morgan...
I designed and printed these logos onto CDs in the 90s
(I actually designed the Decepticon Logo in circuitry when I worked at Intel - but we lost the artwork, and that was the cover - the CD was printed with the logo as drawn in circuit traces and was pretty bad ass for the 90s scene...)
Also, products like Irrigreen (https://irrigreen.com/) which uses inkjet technology to “print” an exact pattern of water onto a lawn, avoiding sprinkler overlap.
Thank you! I'm on Step 3. KILL THE SHIT OUT OF YOUR LAWN
8 truckloads of free wood chips, free cardboard from Costco and Craigslist. Free coffee grounds, roasting chaff and burlap bags from a local coffee roaster.
The few states with high cost of water, like California or Texas, can be enough of a market.
BTW since they have basically a positioned spray technology, they could literally "print" things with grass, giving it different nutrients or even dispersing different seeds. Anything from a decorative striped pattern to signs of affiliation and slogans.
I expected a much higher price. While $190000 is steep it doesn't seem that much for such printer.
For example: Nexa3D ships SLS printers for over $500000
Before someone thinks it costs just $190 for a color 3d printer, its ~ $190K.
TIL that some countries use comma and a period for separating numbers and decimals respectively and some other countries use them the other way around.
I bought some HP printer last year for $75. A couple bucks on popular auction site got me a coupon code that gave me like 16 months of free ink. Several reams of free paper.
The printer experience itself is horrible. I’m constantly having to reboot it, it cannot maintain a WiFi connection, they have crippled usb on it, etc. Reviews back me up, it’s a common experience.
However, it makes beautiful prints. I have printed literally hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pages of full color. And HP dutifully sends me another cartridge without prompting.
Just a couple weeks left on that trial. And the plan? Chunk it in the trash and start over again.
Readit News
If you don't print frequently, the ink nozzles clog up (and you inevitably use a bunch of ink trying to fix them). For infrequent document printing, a laser printer will Just Print whether it's been sitting unused for an hour or a month. If you occasionally need some photos printed, using one of the myriad services will be better than replacing the inevitably gunked up ink cartridges.
If you print a lot of documents, the laser printer easily outstrips the speed of an inkjet. You'll also run up huge ink fees since the cost per page of ink tends to be higher than toner.
Therefore, the only reason you should get an inkjet printer is if you often need high quality colour prints (photos).
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/epson-workforce-pro-wf-7840-wir...
1) Surprisingly, the running costs, with generic ink, are the same as a laser.
2) The text quality is fine. The image quality is better than a laser. Photos are great.
3) It can do larger formats (up to 13x19), copies, duplex, etc. The cost is literally a fraction of a similar laser. A large format laser is $$$. This one is $250 right now.
4) The speed is similar to a basic laser, but slower than a nice laser. It's rated at 12PPM color and 25PPM mono. It's slower, but it's fast enough.
I used to share your opinion, but ink has come a long ways. Something like this is super-versatile, since it does literally everything for $250.
Just don't get HP.
The real pro-tips are always in the comments.
The CEO of HP said there is a risk of viruses being transmitted in the ink cartridges:
https://www.wired.com/story/hp-ceo-ink-cartridge-hackers-dyn...
He says you should always buy their special guaranteed virus free ink, but in my opinion it's much easier and safer to avoid the printers completely. You never know when you buy ink online if it's genuine - you could "catch a virus" at any time. It's almost certainly nonsense, but you can't be too careful.
I have also noticed lots of government offices that print a bunch of stuff all put an inkjet on almost every (rather than shared laser printers I'd been expecting to see), and I wondered why. Your explanation may be the key to that too.
????
Photos is the last thing I’d buy an inkjet printer for. I’d be using a home inkjet to make circuit boards, temporary shirts, screen printing masks, transparencies, stickers, etc.
"Agilent developed a way to print strands of DNA from the four nucleic acid bases—cytosine (C), guanine (G), adenine (A), and thymine (T)."
"Inkjet systems are particularly suited for printing drugs in the form of thin films, such as transdermal patches to be applied to the skin and buccal films to be held in the cheek, where drugs can pass directly to the bloodstream without first going through the digestive system."
These applications are from dedicated machines, not available at BestBuy. Though I would like to see a supplier selling conductive inks for circuit board prototyping, and just maybe a home system could be filled with DNA or medicines??
The article also gave an interesting overview of the micro-dosing technology using for example piezo-electrics.
I've heard of using Laser printers for this but not InkJet
Huh. Printing photos is one of the main areas where inkjets still blow lasers out of the water.
As a single data point, I used a Canon i9990 for many years. It had a very irregular use -- I would print a few 13x19 photos or a tiled panorama, or an occasional school picture of kids for the relatives. Then it would sit unused for days to months until the next job. And even with this supposedly abusive cycle it ran like new until it completely died one day.
I personally had worse luck with image printing services. Maybe the machines are off, maybe the fellow who runs it does not care, but more often than not there is something subtly wrong: either the color is off, or there is a smudge at the edge or some minor artifact. My 2c.
There is also the significantly lower price. Although,if you print a lot, you'll eventually make up the price difference in toner. If, like me, you only need to print rarely, it's probably better just to print at a library or FedEx or UPS store when needed. But there is probably somewhere in the middle where a decent inkjet is more economical, especially if you can get one that works with third party ink cartridges.
Not sure about other printers, but I use HP InkJet for a decade, never clogged up, sometimes sits unused for a month or more.
This was true before, but my 10 year old Deskjet 4515 doesn't do that, even if you don't print for a couple of months.
Being an InkAdvantage(TM) printer, cartridges are not expensive either, and while its color inks are dye based (not pigmented), the colors hold up very well even when they are not stored properly (frame the photo up and leave it there).
B&W laser printers are nice, and they're cheap on the long run, but color laser printers polish the paper a lot (4 drums + baking), and reading long papers on that shiny copy is not very comfortable. Pens' handling on that paper also changes after that much heat and processing. Inkjets and B&W lasers doesn't have that problem.
I use my B&W laser for more disposable documents, but for code and papers which contains graphics, I prefer my Inkjet very much.
Lastly, people think that ink is just colored water. It's not. Same is true for toner. They're complex technologies. Yes, cartridges sent for some markup, but ink and toner quality varies. Esp. if you want archival prints.
Deleted Comment
It just runs and runs and runs.
I've bought a couple more for around the office and recommend them every time the subject of printers comes up.
If you don't want GBs of bullshit malware pretending at being drivers, you're sick of the color ink shenanigans, and you want a printer that wakes up and prints every single time, get a Brother Laser printer. They're amazing.
No affiliation, just a super grateful customer.
I have a beautiful HP Color LaserJet MFP 4301dfw that constantly loses connection to the WiFi access point and requires a reboot and/or logging into the incredibly shitty HP Smart software. I really wish HP had enterprise-grade or at least prosumer software instead of this fucking awful consumer shit. A $599 printer should have a solid software stack, and HP even markets it to small office consumers.
The machine has a beautifully designed exterior and solid internals that are plagued with an absolute shit software stack. Bill Hewlett and David Packard are probably rolling over in their grave at how fucking far their laser printer division has fallen.
HP was once a great company that innovated and made incredible technology.
It was taken over by financial types in the late nineties. They sold off the test equipment core business and leaned into cost cutting. They excised any vestiges of integrity or quality wherever it could be found.
With regard to software, I've long since accepted that HP, Brother, Canon et al can't write drivers to save their lives - and shouldn't have to - in a world where AirPrint, Chrome OS Printing, Windows IPP, or Direct IP printing exist.
It's long past time for printing to be treated as an OS service, where 3rd parties write the smallest possible shim to plug into available devices.
I haven’t had an inkjet for 30 years - only black and white lasers. Starting with HL LaserJet 5L in 2000, then Samsung and now Brother (yay for their nice platform independence so they work on Linux).
My Prusa 3D is also arguably spewing a material into a surface so I guess yeah, maybe I should count it as an inkjet as well, though ;-)
For example continuous inkjet printers are used to label packages of many items you buy every day. There's also research about inkjet printing wearable electronics etc. None of which has a lot to do with HP.
A lot of the comments here read like a hobbyist programmer saying “C++ is dead, I haven’t written any C++ in my projects for years and since I’ve switched to Rust, I’ve never looked back”.
Yes, I stand by this analogy because inkjet is that important. The market is doing great and technology is improving at an impressive rate.
To build on your example of continuous IJ presses: more and more applications have lately been switching to drop-on-demand, as those printheads continue to get better (especially piezo IJ) and cheaper (especially thermal IJ).
“Inkjet 3D printing” exists, but it’s something quite different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powder_bed_and_inkjet_head_3D_...
Dead Comment
I always wondered if anyone ever tried to make a fuel injector out of one. (the finer the mist you can make your gasoline, the better it combusts).
Source: I looked at thousands of these things under a microscope at a company that makes lots of them. 0/10 would not recommend.
An RC/drone I think that would be neat would be a 'diesel electric' (not diesel) - but a motor utilizing this for injecting into a generator for a gas-electric helicopter. Like a Chinook where the interior is the gas-electric generator, but the overall design modeled after the Chinook given that its the Heavy Lifter of Helos with a payload lift capacity of ~20 tons.?
--
In the late 1990s I worked at a company who manufactured a lot of the physical media for various software/games/OS (Intuit/Everquest/SunOS for example)
We manufatered the CDs, copy, manuals, boxes, etc - boxed and shipped it...
All the CDs were printed using Brother inkjets.
My buddy was a fairly famous DJ in the rave scene in the 90s - so in my off hours we would make and print his CDs...
dj morgan...
I designed and printed these logos onto CDs in the 90s
https://i.imgur.com/6VUWeQN.png
(I actually designed the Decepticon Logo in circuitry when I worked at Intel - but we lost the artwork, and that was the cover - the CD was printed with the logo as drawn in circuit traces and was pretty bad ass for the 90s scene...)
(Note: am investor)
But does it really use "inkjet" technology? It looks like an adjustable rate pump with a timing or orientation chip, mapped with an app.
BTW since they have basically a positioned spray technology, they could literally "print" things with grass, giving it different nutrients or even dispersing different seeds. Anything from a decorative striped pattern to signs of affiliation and slogans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_ink#Advantages
https://www.mimakiusa.com/products/3d/3duj-553/
3D Printing with 10,000,000 colors
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IkvzMJihuY
TIL that some countries use comma and a period for separating numbers and decimals respectively and some other countries use them the other way around.
The printer experience itself is horrible. I’m constantly having to reboot it, it cannot maintain a WiFi connection, they have crippled usb on it, etc. Reviews back me up, it’s a common experience.
However, it makes beautiful prints. I have printed literally hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pages of full color. And HP dutifully sends me another cartridge without prompting.
Just a couple weeks left on that trial. And the plan? Chunk it in the trash and start over again.
Weird times, friends. :)