alt Hacker NewsHow well do these work when infrequently used?
I can go months between needing to print, maybe even over a year. It is infrequent enough that the Brother laser printer I bought a little over 7 years is still on the toner cartridge that came with it and has maybe 1/4th or 1/5th left and still works perfectly.
Before that I had several inkjet printers (one I bought, and at least 3 that came bundled when I bought computers), and on every one I got maybe 5 pages per cartridge.
One particularly annoying time I went to print and the cartridge was dried out, I bought a new cartridge which the store only had in a two pack, and printed what I needed to print. Next time I needed to print that cartridge was dead, and the unopened one I had bought at the same was also dead.
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After having a few built-in printheads get messed up from non-use, aftermarket ink, planned obsolescence (or who knows what else), I regressed to a 20+ year old Deskjet 1220C which has the printheads in the ink cartridges themselves. It has been working fine with aftermarket cartridges, sometimes only printing a few times per year. But I know that if it does start having problems due to ink drying out, I won't have to mess with trying to clean built-in printheads and that getting a new cartridge will fix the problem completely.
No inkjet printers work well when they are infrequently used. Every inkjet printer will spray ink into absorbent padding inside the printer when it goes a few days without printing in order to stop dried ink from clogging the print heads. On high end inkjets the padding is user replaceable (printer manufacturers refer to it as a “maintenance box”), and on low end models it’s sealed inside the printer and you have to throw the whole printer out when it becomes saturated with ink. This is why people who print infrequently will only get a few pages out of a cartridge. There’s a baseline consumption of ink that happens whether or not you use the printer. The smarter move for people who print infrequently is doing what you do, having a B&W laser printer (which doesn’t suffer from this problem) and getting color prints done at Kinko’s or something when you need them.