my paper it's due in 3
hours and that's how he learned the hard way to never trust a fart and
print wait a minute it's present year I
don't even own a printer and I'm not alone since 2008 the printer Market has
been steadily shrinking but while we don't need them nearly as often as our
ancestors did they are still legitimately useful when they work
properly you can cut down on screen time and eye fatigue by printing out
documents for markup you can make notes and Q cards that work without a battery
and you can even use them for classic pranks AMD is going to announce a new
chip and this chip trust me this chip is good what what the what what's that what
but the question is has the printer industry finally figured out how to be
less terrible or are they still treating ink like it's Chanel Number Five infused
with scorpion venom what about the units themselves do you need to spend $400 to
get reasonable quality what if you bought something secondhand for $4 or 40
could it still print out this segue to
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video These Days sealed ink cartridges are out and refillable tanks are in
especially if you print a lot and that's where something like the Epson ecotank
ET 4850 comes in it's about $400 brand
new packed with features and sips ink straight from the bottle saving on both
cost and on plastic waste now this was my first time using a tank style printer
so I wasn't really sure what to expect in terms of setup but it ended up being
very simple squeeze the ink into the tanks plug it into whatever type of
computer you've got and print as for refills it seems like the industry has
yielded somewhat to customer demands and 20 bucks is going to get you a big old
bottle of genuine black Epson ink drop from drop it is still roughly a tenth
the price of Chanel Number 5 but that still puts the cost per sheet down to
around a qu of a cent we're going to have it linked down below of course you
also don't need to buy this stuff unlike HP who as recently as a couple of months
ago was trying to force you to buy a subscription to print more than a few
pages a month Epson does no genuine ink
checks the print quality is crisp vibrant and reasonably quick we averaged
around seven pages per minute in our 600 DPI test run and you can connect to it
however you want including asking Alexa to print off a sheet of graph paper it
even includes a scanner with fax functionality so at this point you can
build yourself a DIY continuous ink system but if your budget allows a
system like this is pretty much endgame for most people's needs as for the
competition Canon has some really nice options as well even though we didn't
get them for this video and brother they have their ink vestment tank line but
seem to have lost the plot a little bit it's kind of convoluted now with that
said even a non-con convoluted tank system is not for everyone a big caveat
here is that ink tanks are full of well Liquid Ink and liquid has a tendency to
dry up so if you only print one document every few months there's a solid
chance that you'll that you'll go to use it only to
find out that one or more of your colors won't print because Inky goo is gummed
up the print head if this happens and the printer selfcleaning cycle doesn't
unstick everything you're going to have to either do the dirty job of manually
cleaning it or you'll have to replace the print head or ink dampers all
together while Epson has made spare parts available they only have four
distributors throughout America with very limited stock meaning once the
thing hits end of life it could be challenging to find those parts again
the other issue with these systems is The Upfront price of $400 so without
further Ado may I introduce my $40 model
haha the the pantom p2500w we found this monochrome laser
printer on Craigslist but we could have picked up a similar openbox model for a
pretty similar price from our local reliable supplier Facebook Marketplace
or wherever the case may be in terms of features it's a printer no scan no facts
manual duplexing only and it will not listen when you talk to it it does have
Wi-Fi but only using 2.4 GHz and at the
back you'll find power USB type B and a little cutout suggesting that they were
thinking of adding networking but never did initial setup was a little tougher
this time Windows 11 recognized it but could only print out a garbled page but
then when we tried it on Linux it worked fine and then after that we plugged it
into our Windows 11 machine and it suddenly worked why we're not quite sure
but it works now and while the print quality isn't perfect it's a little
streaky for text documents it is perfectly serviceable and it still
shines when it comes to the big advantages of laser like shelf stability
because toner is a dry powder there's no urgency to keep the ink flowing it can
sit idly for months sometimes even years without degrading to the point of
becoming unusable and when you do eventually decide to use your printer
you will almost certainly appreciate the speed in spite of being on the uh older
side it advertises 22 pages per minute
and hit that number almost dead on during our longer print run this thing
is so fast f it practically smokes by the 10th page wait wait that actually
does look like smoke but as it turns out
it steamed Laser Printers work through heat and paper usually contains small
amounts of moisture and well heat plus moisture makes steam add in a bit of
toner or dust and it can look a bit like smoke but don't worry about it now this
is far from the only option as I alluded to before there are plenty of budget
secondhand Laser Printers out there from the likes of Samsung SLP or from brother
and as long as you verify that there's driver support for your operating system
they tend to be extremely longlasting machines I think my old Samsung unit has
been in service for over 10 years and like still works like the day we got it
the reason we chose to highlight a pantom model though was because we
thought it was a little more interesting than those other brands despite this
printer being released over a decade ago most North Americans probably wouldn't
recognize the brand but their history is extremely interesting Phantom's parent
company ninestar originally specialized in making bootleg lockout chips for
third-party ink and toner refills in 2010 they launched the first pantom
product China's first domestic laser printer followed by a global rollout
over the next months then in 2016 they bought lexark and in 2023 they were
added to the banned Imports list by the US government on accusations of using
forced labor at $50 the official toner
refills would cost us more than the printer did third party on the other hand can be had
for around $18 that puts this printer at
about 3 cents and 1 cent per page respectively now that might sound more
expensive than epson's quarter Cent pages and it is but the cost of
ownership doesn't even out until you've printed 7,000 sheets on that tank system
so if you've got 60 bucks to your name and you absolutely need to print some
documents this is going to get the job done but wait what if you don't have 6 $
enter the Canon
s200 listed on Craigslist for 10 Canadian Shillings we talked them down
to the maple leaf equivalent of four Freedom bucks it wasn't our first pick
but buying a used printer comes with some risks and having your time wasted
is definitely one of them we had dozens of other listings either ghost Us sell
the printer from under us or otherwise just refuse to sell us their printer but
hey can released this bubble jet printer in February of 2002 and apparently they
didn't have much love for this particular model because 2 months later
they released the PowerShot s200 digital camera and I know I've said a lot about
other brands naming schemes but at least they mostly bother to use different
letters and numbers for their different products despite the slight from Canon
though they did make several other printers that used the same form factor
software and even ink so finding compatible cartridges all the these
years later is still pretty easy from our local reliable supplier a thirdparty
combo pack of black and color ink was actually less than the price we paid for
this printer even today unfortunately
bubble Jets were notorious for clogging and as far as we can tell this printer
may have been sitting unused since as early as
2004 even after buying new ink and making a quick attempt to clean the
printer it's still just printing blank pages something we got in common buddy
there may be hope though it just so happened that when we were starting this
project a few months ago lgr posted a half hourong Saga trying to get a
compatible printer working properly how'd that go Clint never buy an old
inkjet printer this is all a complete
waste of time and everything is
stupid oh well too late so we ordered a
replacement print head and oh wait is this the one oh the script says it
didn't arrive yet cuz it hadn't when we reviewed this but I guess it has now are
we just going to try it now let's do
it the troubles Sho is never going to work hey this this could be the first
time how long have you been doing this give feedback on the trou trou to
crash ah
ah
it all right we'll have to fil the
tomorrow hey you got it yep wow and all
it took was installing the new print head spending several hours trying to
force some truly ancient drivers onto Windows 11 and macOS showing up late
for the company softball game getting in a solid 6 hours of sleep and then first
thing in the morning putting together a Linux test bench adding the guten print
drivers connecting the printer tracking down a random printer test page website
he voila not bad actually I mean not
great but not bad taking some of the joy out of this is the fact that we are now
at $34 including that new print head
plus the new ink that we bought earlier plus paying people to do the troubleshooting and whatever the test
bench Hardware cost but I have this now in fact compared to our Epson the colors
are more vibrant and our text is more legible there are a few additional
drawbacks though it leaves big streaks in the print occasionally the yellow
seems to pick up lots of tiny specks of cyan and magenta for some reason and the
ink cartridges while costing mere Pocket Change only hold enough ink for up to
170 pages of text so be prepared to swap
them out frequently also it's slow the
manual claims that in a text only best case scenario it can do five pages per
minute and for full color you could be looking at several minutes per page so
if you're printing off a high quality photo make sure to bring some reading materials with you to pass the time uh
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like this video maybe you'll also enjoy the time we looked at a $95 3D printer
how bad was it
well not you just watch it