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My paper! It's due in three hours!

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And that's how we learned the hard way to never trust a fart.

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And print.

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Wait a minute. It's present year.

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I don't even own a printer. And I'm not alone.

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Since 2008, the printer market has been steadily shrinking.

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But while we don't need them, nearly as often as our ancestors did,

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they are still legitimately useful when they work properly.

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You can cut down on screen time and eye fatigue by printing out documents for markup.

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You can make notes and cue cards that work without a battery.

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And you can even use them for classic pranks.

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AMD is going to announce a new chip.

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And this chip, trust me, this chip is good.

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But the question is, has the printer industry finally figured out how to be less terrible?

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Or are they still treating ink like it's Chanel number five infused with scorpion venom?

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What about the units themselves? Do you need to spend $400 to get reasonable quality?

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What if you bought something secondhand for $4 or $40?

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Could it still print out this segue to our sponsor?

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These days, sealed ink cartridges are out and refillable tanks are in,

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especially if you print a lot. And that's for something like the Epson EcoTank ET4850 comes in.

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It's about $400 brand new packed with features and sips ink straight from the bottle,

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saving on both cost and on plastic waste.

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Now, this was my first time using a tank style printer.

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So I wasn't really sure what to expect in terms of setup,

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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.

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As for refills, it seems like the industry has yielded somewhat to customer demands

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and 20 bucks is going to get you a big old bottle of genuine black Epson ink.

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Drop for drop, it is still roughly a tenth the price of Chanel number five,

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but that still puts the cost per sheet down to around a quarter of a cent.

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We're going to have it linked down below. Of course, you also don't need to buy the stuff.

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Unlike HP, who has recently as a couple of months ago

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was trying to force you to buy a subscription to print more than a few pages a month,

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Epson does no genuine ink checks.

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The print quality is crisp, vibrant, and reasonably quick.

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We averaged around seven pages per minute in our 600 DPI test run,

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and you can connect to it however you want, including asking Alexa to print off a sheet of graph paper.

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It even includes a scanner with fax functionality.

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So at this point, you can build yourself a DIY continuous ink system,

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but if your budget allows, a system like this is pretty much end game for most people's needs.

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As for the competition, Canon has some really nice options as well,

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even though we didn't get them for this video. And brother, they have their ink vestment tank line,

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but seem to have lost the plot a little bit. It's kind of convoluted.

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Now with that said, even a non-convoluted tank system is not for everyone.

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A big caveat here is that ink tanks are full of, well, liquid ink,

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and liquid has a tendency to dry out. So if you only print one document every few months, there's a solid chance

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that you'll go to use it only to find out that one or more of your colors won't print

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because Inky Goo has gummed up the print head.

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If this happens and the printer's self-cleaning cycle doesn't unstick everything,

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you're going to have to either do the dirty job of manually cleaning it,

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or you'll have to replace the print head or ink dampers altogether.

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While Epson has made spare parts available,

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they only have four distributors throughout America with very limited stock,

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meaning once the thing hits end of life, it could be challenging to find those parts again.

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The other issue with these systems is the upfront price of $400.

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So without further ado, may I introduce my $40 model, the Pantum P2500W.

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We found this monochrome laser printer on Craigslist,

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but we could have picked up a similar open box model for a pretty similar price

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from our local reliable supplier, Facebook marketplace, or wherever the case may be.

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In terms of features, it's a printer.

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No scan, no fax, manual duplexing only, and it will not listen when you talk to it.

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It does have Wi-Fi, but only using 2.4 GHz,

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and at the back you'll find power, USB Type-B, and a little cutout

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suggesting that they were thinking of adding networking, but never did.

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Initial setup was a little tougher this time.

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Windows 11 recognized it, but could only print out a garbled page.

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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.

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Why? We're not quite sure, but it works now.

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And while the print quality isn't perfect, it's a little streaky,

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for text documents it is perfectly serviceable,

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and it still shines when it comes to the big advantages of laser, like shelf stability.

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Because toner is a dry powder, there's no urgency to keep the ink flowing.

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It can sit idly for months, sometimes even years,

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without degrading to the point of becoming unusable.

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And when you do eventually decide to use your printer, you will almost certainly appreciate the speed.

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In spite of being on the, uh, older side,

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it advertises 22 pages per minute

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and hit that number almost dead on during our longer print run.

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This thing is so fast, it practically smokes by the 10th page.

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Wait, wait, that actually does look like smoke.

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But as it turns out, it's steamed. Laser printers work through heat,

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and paper usually contains small amounts of moisture,

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and, well, heat plus moisture makes steam. Add in a bit of toner or dust, and it can look a bit like smoke,

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but don't worry about it. Now this is far from the only option.

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As I alluded to before, there are plenty of budget second-hand laser printers out there

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from the likes of Samsung slash HP or from Brother.

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And as long as you verify that there's driver support for your operating system,

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they tend to be extremely long-lasting machines.

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I think my old Samsung unit has been in service for over 10 years,

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and, like, still works like the day we got it. The reason we chose to highlight a Phantom model, though,

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was because we thought it was a little more interesting than those other brands.

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Despite this printer being released over a decade ago,

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most North Americans probably wouldn't recognize the brand.

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But their history is extremely interesting. Phantom's parent company, NineStar,

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originally specialized in making bootleg lockout chips

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for third-party ink and toner refills. In 2010, they launched the first Phantom product,

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China's first domestic laser printer, followed by a global rollout over the next months.

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Then in 2016, they bought Lexmark,

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and in 2023, they were added to the Band Imports list

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by the US government on accusations of using forced labor.

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But that ban is on paper only.

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No pun intended. Because pantom printers go by many, many different names

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that don't seem to be on the ban list.

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There's pantom Lexmark, G&G Image, Xerox, Great Wall,

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Fuji Film, and Mustache.

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The only real difference between most of these printers, though, is the chip used for toner or ink validation.

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Or, well, rather, they're the same chips, but they have different data written to them

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in order to prevent you from brand-swapping.

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After all, you can't just toss Lexmark ink in a Xerox printer,

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that would be illegal. And I'm sure pantom would never dream of suggesting

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that anybody refill their printer with third-party ink.

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We would, though. At $50, the official toner refills would cost us

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more than the printer did. Third-party, on the other hand, can be had for around $18.

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That puts this printer at about $0.03 and $0.01 per page, respectively.

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Now, that might sound more expensive than Epson's 1.25 pages, and it is.

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But the cost of ownership doesn't even out until you've printed 7,000 sheets on that tank system.

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So if you've got $60 to your name and you absolutely need to print some documents,

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this is gonna get the job done. But wait, what if you don't have $60?

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Enter the Canon S200.

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Listed on Craig's list for 10 Canadian shillings,

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we talked them down to the Maple Leaf equivalent of four freedom bucks.

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It wasn't our first pick,

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but buying a used printer comes with some risks,

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and having your time wasted is definitely one of them.

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We had dozens of other listings, either ghost us, sell the printer from under us,

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or otherwise just refuse to sell us their printer.

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But hey, Canon released this bubblejet printer in February of 2002,

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and apparently they didn't have much love for this particular model because two months later,

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they released the PowerShot S200 digital camera.

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And I know I've said a lot about other brands' naming schemes,

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but at least they mostly bother to use different letters

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and numbers for their different products.

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Despite the slight from Canon though, they did make several other printers

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that used the same form factor, software, and even ink.

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So finding compatible cartridges all these years later

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is still pretty easy. From our local reliable supplier,

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a third-party combo pack of black and color ink was actually less than the price we paid for this printer,

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even today. Unfortunately, bubblejets were notorious for clogging,

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and as far as we can tell, this printer may have been sitting unused since as early as 2004.

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Even after buying new ink and making a quick attempt

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to clean the printer, it's still just printing blank pages.

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Something we got in common, buddy.

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There may be hope though. It just so happened that when we were starting this project

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a few months ago, LGR posted a half-hour-long saga

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trying to get a compatible printer working properly.

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How'd that go, Clint? Never buy an old inkjet printer.

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This is all a complete waste of time,

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and everything is stupid.

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Oh, well, too late.

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So we ordered a replacement printhead, and oh, wait, is this the one?

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Oh, the script says it didn't arrive yet, because it hadn't when we reviewed this,

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but I guess it has now. Are we just going to try it now?

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Let's do it.

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The troubles are just never going to work. Hey, this could be the first time.

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How long have you been doing this? Give feedback on the trash.

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It was a crash.

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Damn it!

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All right, we'll have to find the conclusion tomorrow.

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Hey, you got it!

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Wow! And all it took was installing the new printhead,

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spending several hours trying to force some truly ancient drivers

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onto Windows 11 and macOS, showing up late for the company softball game,

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getting in solid six hours of sleep, and then first thing in the morning,

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putting together a Linux test bench, adding the gluten print drivers,

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connecting the printer, tracking down a random printer test page website.

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Hey, voila. Not bad, actually.

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I mean, not great, but not bad. Taking some of the joy out of this is the fact

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that we are now at $34, including that new printhead,

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plus the new ink that we bought earlier, plus paying people to do the troubleshooting

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and whatever the test bench hardware cost, but I have this now.

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In fact, compared to our Epson, the colors are more vibrant,

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and our text is more legible. There are a few additional drawbacks, though.

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It leaves big streaks in the print occasionally.

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The yellow seems to pick up lots of tiny specks of cyan

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and magenta for some reason, and the ink cartridges, while costing mere pocket change,

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only hold enough ink for up to 170 pages of text,

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so be prepared to swap them out frequently. Also, it's slow.

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The manual claims that in a text-only best-case scenario,

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it can do five pages per minute.

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And for full color, you could be looking at several minutes per page.

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So if you're printing off a high-quality photo, make sure to bring some reading materials with you

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to pass the time. What you could also do to pass the time is

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check out this message from our sponsor. If you guys liked this video,

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maybe you'll also enjoy the time we looked at a $95 3D printer.

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How bad was it? Ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha!

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Well, you just watch it.