My paper! It's due in three hours!
And that's how we 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 cue 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.
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 our sponsor?
These days, sealed ink cartridges are out and refillable tanks are in,
especially if you print a lot. And that's for something like the Epson EcoTank ET4850 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 for drop, it is still roughly a tenth the price of Chanel number five,
but that still puts the cost per sheet down to around a quarter of a cent.
We're going to have it linked down below. Of course, you also don't need to buy the stuff.
Unlike HP, who has 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 end game 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-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 out. So if you only print one document every few months, there's a solid chance
that you'll go to use it only to find out that one or more of your colors won't print
because Inky Goo has gummed up the print head.
If this happens and the printer's self-cleaning 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 altogether.
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, the Pantum P2500W.
We found this monochrome laser printer on Craigslist,
but we could have picked up a similar open box 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 fax, 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, it practically smokes by the 10th page.
Wait, wait, that actually does look like smoke.
But as it turns out, it's 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 second-hand laser printers out there
from the likes of Samsung slash HP or from Brother.
And as long as you verify that there's driver support for your operating system,
they tend to be extremely long-lasting 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 Phantom 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 Phantom product,
China's first domestic laser printer, followed by a global rollout over the next months.
Then in 2016, they bought Lexmark,
and in 2023, they were added to the Band Imports list
by the US government on accusations of using forced labor.
But that ban is on paper only.
No pun intended. Because pantom printers go by many, many different names
that don't seem to be on the ban list.
There's pantom Lexmark, G&G Image, Xerox, Great Wall,
Fuji Film, and Mustache.
The only real difference between most of these printers, though, is the chip used for toner or ink validation.
Or, well, rather, they're the same chips, but they have different data written to them
in order to prevent you from brand-swapping.
After all, you can't just toss Lexmark ink in a Xerox printer,
that would be illegal. And I'm sure pantom would never dream of suggesting
that anybody refill their printer with third-party ink.
We would, though. 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 $0.03 and $0.01 per page, respectively.
Now, that might sound more expensive than Epson's 1.25 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 to your name and you absolutely need to print some documents,
this is gonna get the job done. But wait, what if you don't have $60?
Enter the Canon S200.
Listed on Craig's list 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, Canon released this bubblejet printer in February of 2002,
and apparently they didn't have much love for this particular model because two 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 these years later
is still pretty easy. From our local reliable supplier,
a third-party combo pack of black and color ink was actually less than the price we paid for this printer,
even today. Unfortunately, bubblejets 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-hour-long 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 printhead, and oh, wait, is this the one?
Oh, the script says it didn't arrive yet, because 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 are just never going to work. Hey, this could be the first time.
How long have you been doing this? Give feedback on the trash.
It was a crash.
Damn it!
All right, we'll have to find the conclusion tomorrow.
Hey, you got it!
Wow! And all it took was installing the new printhead,
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 solid six hours of sleep, and then first thing in the morning,
putting together a Linux test bench, adding the gluten print drivers,
connecting the printer, tracking down a random printer test page website.
Hey, 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 printhead,
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. What you could also do to pass the time is
check out this message from our sponsor. If you guys liked this video,
maybe you'll also enjoy the time we looked at a $95 3D printer.
How bad was it? Ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha!
Well, you just watch it.