Hopeless Geek

There’s a lot of reasons as to why I’ve only recently bought a printer after having been without one for several years. Mainly it’s because I had an inkjet and was really, really tired of how flimsy it was and how ridiculously often I had to buy more ink for it. If I used it constantly, it would dry up in a month. If I used it very little, it would dry up in a month. If I used it moderately, it would dry up in a month. No winning that one.

Then you try to get around the wallet assault of the $30-$60 ink cartridges with off-brands or refills, and not only do many of them suck, but you get crap like this:

Epson has won a series of victories in its quest to cut down on the importation and manufacture of aftermarket inkjet cartridges for its products. The company just announced that it has signed settlement agreements with multiple defendants, all of whom acknowledge that they were in violation of Epson patents.
Ars Technica

So several months ago I asked myself a simple question: how often do I really print in color? The answer is “never” and so I looked into home laser printers. When I worked in AppleCare, we’d occasionally get little Tech Talk days where third-party reps would come by and raise awareness of their products or talk about them a little to keep us up to date (or give us information to sell them to customers). During those days, I kept remarking to myself how nice Brother’s printer offerings were, so I looked them up for myself. Lo, behold, they had exactly what I needed. Ye olde standard multifunction center with a laser printer, scanner, copier, and fax for $250 ERP with toner that runs about $60 and handles 2,500 pages. Yes, that’s five reams of paper per cartridge, and they’re only twice as much as the ink cartridge that I put in my old Lexmark Z35 or the Epson 777, when with either of which I was lucky to get 200 pages out of with a normal 5% text spread. Making it even sweeter, Office Depot had it for $50 off.

Here’s the fun part about this: here I am two months later and we’ve burned about 200 pages out of it (the wife’s the major printer here, not I) and the cartridge it comes with is good for 1,500 pages. I’m still on the demo cartridge.

With laser printers, you do have to pay a little more attention. You have to replace the drum every 12K pages or so and ensure certain parts are clean, like the corona wires. Still, a little effort to maintain an investment is much preferred to repeated, near-constant financial forceable entry for the privilege of having color available. And, honestly, having a scanner/copier unit at home is just so amazingly useful when it’s attached to a really fast printer.

I honestly never would have thought, using laser printers all through school and work for the past 15-20 years, that I would have a laser printer at home as my personal printer. But I’ll tell ya something, it’s lightweight (mostly), inexpensive (but not “cheap”), and is extremely fast for everything I’ve thrown at it (unlike the early HPs that would sit there “processing” for an hour on a large page). It worked out of the box with no drivers and only got better with the drivers. I love it. I absolutely love it.

I love even more that it’s not an Epson. If I want to print photos, I’ll just pay Kodak within iPhoto. So, Epson (and Lexmark, and HP)? Bite me. Your shoddy business practices just gave Brother a customer.