The seeming paradox reminds me of a simlar flavor one: the fact that if you accidentally knock a hole in your drywall, it's cheaper to cover it with a flat screen TV than to pay someone to fix the hole.
The floor on refurbished laser printers is about $100 on Amazon and remanufactured toner cartridges are dirt cheap often times less than $15 for 2000-6000 pages.
This is the way. There is no reason to buy ink based anymore.
The wild part is that this isn’t really a pricing mistake, it’s the business model. That $65 Canon isn’t “a printer”, it’s a subsidized acquisition channel for a customer who will buy OEM ink at a huge margin or sign up for some kind of recurring refill program later. Accounting is fine eating some or all of the printer cost if the average buyer turns into years of cartridge revenue.
If you buy a new printer every time you run low on ink, you’re basically arbitraging that CAC line item. On paper it can be a “life hack” as long as only a few people do it and you ignore the e-waste and friction. If it ever became common, the easy knobs for the manufacturer are obvious: even smaller starter carts, more lock-in, more activation hoops, and less of the subsidy that makes this trick work in the first place.
If you don't need color I recommend going with a laser printer. Not only for lower consumable costs, but better software support too. In 2009 I bought a Lexmark laser printer new for $120 at Frys. It has native postscript support, so it will work with anything without having to load software from the manufacturer. I systems ranging from an old Macintosh Quadra running System 7 to new Mac running MacOS Tahoe, a PC running Windows 11 and everything in between. It even works in Linux too.
The consumables are cheap too. I have just replaced the toner cartridge once and a new OEM one was about $80 on Amazon.
There is probably a lot less ink in the included cartridges. They always get you. Don't print.
Ink tank printers ftw. They are much more expensive than these cheap printers bundled with small cartridges, but from my limited experience they are somewhat decent, and the ink is quite cheap too. They don't like not being used for long periods of time, but I run one page through it once a month or so and it seems quite content to just sit there the rest of the time and do nothing.
Inkjets are a no go if you're printing any significant amount of pages or if you're only printing sporadically. That's like 99% of their use case. The other 1% is photo printing, which I see a bit pointless when you can get a real photographic, not ink, print for a few cents.
Anyone remember the good old days where computer manufacturers would throw in a free printer with the purchase of a desktop computer? I ended up with 6 or 7 printers stacked in the closet. Instead of changing cartridges we changed printers. :)
This calculation does not apply to modern ,"inktank" printers, which are replenished by buying ink bottles and pouring the liquid ink into the reservoir in the printer. They print considerably more than cartridge based inkjets.
I also thought of binning it and buy another. But I found that Chinese made cartridges are much cheaper on amazon. You get 3 sets (12 pieces) in one pack and they last fairly longer.
I have used the same printer since 2019 and haven't changed the toner once. HP Neverstop.
Isn't that a pack of 5? So divide the ink price by 5. Much lower than the printer.
Better yet break the printer and send it for a full refund.
Still waiting for that paperless society.
Return it to Costco once a month.
That's a Canon Pixma. They very deliberately don't work with Linux, and they suck. Terrible printers.
I started my career in tech as helpdesk. I recall the office printer was always broken or throwing a fit, and we’d be called in to troubleshoot. Or someone’s PC for whatever reason would not be able to connect to the printer. Almost felt like a conspiracy that printers were so unreliable.
Fast forward to today and my retired dad still insists he needs to print out paper documents to read even though he can perfectly see his 30” monitor or his iPad. His printer is always broken for some reason or another and every time I visit my parents’ home I’m troubleshooting his printer again.
I despise printers.
FYI, the included cartridges in a new printer are typically a 'low capacity' type. This has been true for 20+ years. You may find yourself both spending a large amount of money, and generating a significant amount of e-waste if you pursue this strategy.
It is important to check consumable cost when buying a printer. They aren't all the same in this regard.