Inkjet Printers Are Trash
Why your next printer should be a laser printer
Alex Cranz

Alex Cranz

6 days ago·5 min read
Canon ink cartridges in a printer.
Canon ink cartridges in a printer.
Photo: Gavin Roberts/PhotoPlus Magazine/Future via Getty Images

The inkjet printer has no place in a home.

Yet most people who buy a printer for their home buy an inkjet. They find the low cost, small footprint, and relatively stylish design of the inkjet printer appealing, so they buy it instead of a bulkier and more expensive laser printer.

But the inkjet printer isn’t meant for a home where it’s used sporadically and usually only for text documents. Ink dries out. The jets clog. You find yourself replacing cartridges as often as you’re adding paper. You end up miserable and anxious and unsure of when you’ll actually be able to print. That’s because the inkjet printer is designed to sell ink first and print things second.

Inkjet printers are like the batteries in a phone. When you’re using your phone daily, its battery feels like a dependable, if finite, resource. You know when you need to charge it, and you might even know for how long. But if you only used your phone once or twice a day, you wouldn’t be as aware of the battery life. You might find yourself charging it less often. Then one day you go to text a friend and find your phone shutting down. This is how I feel when I try to print after not using my inkjet for months. Both inkjet printers and phones are designed with the understanding that you’re using them daily.

Inkjet printers operate on the razor and blades business model. Starting in the 1920s, disposable razor blades were sold at a premium while the handles to hold them were sold cheaply. This gave the razor blade makers a continuous stream of revenue. Video games are also often designed this way now — with “microtransactions” providing a continuous stream of revenue after the initial low cost of the game itself. Arguably Apple’s App Store and the iPhone use this model, too.

The Tango X is still an inkjet printer and like every other one it’s a ticking time bomb waiting to fail me at the most crucial hour.

But no one has perfected it to the obnoxious degree inkjet printer makers have. “These are infectious grifts,” EFF’s Cory Doctorow said in a blog post last year. They charge exorbitant prices for DRM-laden cartridges that make it difficult for inkjet owners to use cheaper third-party cartridges. In 2016 HP released a firmware update that effectively disabled third-party cartridges and Epson followed suit with a “security update” that disabled third-party cartridges too. Even first-party cartridges aren’t safe. In 2020 one unlucky HP printer owner found he couldn’t print after he disabled his subscription to HP’s Instant Ink service. In early 2020, HP, the leading seller of inkjet printers, was rumored to be abandoning the razor and blade model. Then the pandemic took the home printer from rarity to necessity and sales jumped. “HP is reporting double-digit growth in its Instant Ink subscriptions,” Geoffrey Wilbur, a research manager specializing in the print industry at IDC, tells Debugger. “I think that’s part of the printer manufacturers’ ongoing business decision-making.”

The clear rip-off of the inkjet printer has led to plenty of memes, and if you’re like me it’s also led to a great deal of anxiety. In 2018, HP launched a new inkjet printer, the HP Tango X, that was ostensibly designed for the modern home. It has a nifty cloth case that doesn’t look terrible when the printer’s left forgotten on my desk for two weeks, but it’s built so I can quickly pack it up and tuck it away. Which I do often. The Tango X was designed to appeal to younger people who don’t always have an ugly home office festooned in Staples’ finest office supply couture. The problem is the Tango X is still an inkjet printer and like every other one, it’s a ticking time bomb waiting to fail me at the most crucial hour. I can never print without the very real concern that the printer will tell me my ink cartridges are all dried up. When it initially launched I asked HP how long the ink cartridges included with the Tango X were meant to last and the company said realistically seven to nine months, but expressed optimism the cartridges could last even longer.

I’ll give HP credit — the optimism was well warranted. In three years I’ve used three black ink cartridges and three color ink cartridges. That averages out to a year of use per cartridge! Yet in practice, I have a beef with HP. I’ve only printed maybe 100 pages total in three years and it feels like I shouldn’t have to scrounge around for an unused cartridge every time I haul the printer out of the cabinet. Nor should I have to pay for those cartridges. Cartridges start at $18.99 for black and $24.99 for color. So just to print maybe a hundred pages in the last three years I have spent a minimum of $131.94. That’s more than a dollar a page.
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Wilbur did suggest I could be an outlier. “One way I realize I print a lot more pages than I think I do is when I think of how often I go through a ream of paper. It’s not very often, but that’s 500 pages,” he said. He pointed out that while I might only go through 100 pages in three years most people had a “very different answer.” In 2019 homes and offices printed 3.2 trillion pages, according to an IDC report. That number likely dropped in 2020 (IDC anticipated an approximate drop of 13.7%) but as Wilbur pointed out if you divide the global population by the number of pages printed “it’s probably more than you’d guess.”

But if you’re not going through a ream of paper as often as Wilbur, inkjet printers don’t make quite as much sense. This is why my next printer will be a laser printer. It will likely cost me a little more up front, and won’t be nearly as attractive. But a laser printer costs about the same per page printed and uses toner, which won’t dry out after not being used for three months. A page printed on day one will look the same as a page printed on day 120. And that’s what I want! The razor and blade model inkjet printers use feels like a scam that I don’t have to participate in. Instead of being anxious about whether the printer will actually print when I need to, I can worry about other stuff — like when I can finally go back into the office and forget needing a home printer at all.
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