I wish printers could have a mode like this to print random images from an album, or a calendar, rather than wastefully draining ink into a sponge every few days.

If nothing else, maybe it could be some kid's high school science fair project idea.

Dad had an Deskjet 720 or something like that.

It sat unused and powered off for a couple of years after he passed, until I needed a color print.

Didn't do anything but hook it up to power and print. Took about 1/5 of a page until all colors were back in action, after that it printed about 20 pages flawlessly.

I used to do something similar with an old Samsung ML-2010 back when I was in college the first time around.

I think it was software and not hardware, but for some reason when I had that printer hooked up to my computer and idle for more than a week, it would simply stop printing. I probably could have dug through logs and figured it out, but I instead set up a cron job to print a test page every Monday and Thursday. The test pages would just have something on the top that said something like LOL PRINTER WORKS.

This wasn't actually as wasteful as it sounds; I was taking a boatload of math courses and needed tons of scratch paper in order to do my problems. Since it was scratch paper and would eventually end up in the trash anyway, I would usually prioritize doing my problems on failed prints and/or test prints, and I would usually exhaust those and then use blank paper afterwards.

Laser printers are your friend. The savings on consumables alone will make it pay for itself.

I was about to recommend a cheap OKI LED color printer (I think C322dn); alas they withdrew from consumer market :/ The colors are super nice and uniform, even if the maximum resolution is only 600 dpi - and the toner won't dry out, which was my brother's crucial purchase criterion; we had HP inkjet clogged more than once.